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Postal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, I find myself in agreement with a lot of what my noble friend has just said, but I want to take us back to the opening speech by the Minister. He drew attention to the history of this subject. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said that there has been a long history of being uncertain about how we approach the reform of postal services in the United Kingdom. I have great respect for my noble friend Lord Clarke, who is intensely passionate about this, but we did not do him, the workers in the industry or the union any favours when we tried so hard in around 1999 to meet the concerns of employees about the reform that we were talking about bringing in. It was not really about delay and uncertainty but about trying to meet those concerns. We created a structure that helped things forward, as my noble friend Lord Clarke said, but crucially did not enable us to have postal services that confronted the new means of communication and operated on an equal playing field with continental Europe. This particularly worried me at the time and I made my views known. At that time, continental Europe was investing massively in modern postal services. We were not. We created a situation that met many of the concerns of the workforce—not just of the CWU, but of management as well—but in doing that with the best intentions we did not free the service sufficiently to allow it to take the actions that it needed to take to stay ahead. Enough has been said already about the internet and so on for me not to have to repeat it, but there is a plus side as well. The Post Office could operate some services in electronic form and it has gained immeasurably from the parcel service. Many people now buy online and the deliveries come as parcels. My kids order online and a day or two later along comes a vehicle to deliver a packet. We can expect the parcel service to go on doing well and it is important that we enable it to do so. With the changes that we have seen in communication in the past decade or so, we have not given ourselves a postal service that is allowed to make the maximum of that potential. My concerns of some 10 years ago that we were not going to place the Post Office on a level playing field with European competitors have come true. That is rather sad. We need to make improvements. My next point goes back to what the Minister said in his opening speech. It is impossible to portray the Bill as a privatisation issue. Private sector money goes into the Royal Mail but, if we look at Clause 4 and the associated clauses, we cannot say that that is privatisation. It is clearly not. The Bill enshrines in statute that the Royal Mail stays in public hands. Attempts to describe it in any other way are mistaken. I know where the CWU comes from on this; it is saying that, by allowing a percentage of private money to come in, the Bill opens the door for a future Conservative Government—which may or may not happen—to go all the way down the road of privatisation. However, the danger of privatisation does not come from the possibility of another Government bringing in another Act; it comes from not having a service that is good enough to win the support of the public. If a service wins the support of the public, Governments will tend to leave it alone. If it does not, Governments will interfere and intervene, sometimes well and sometimes badly, but they will do so because that is what Governments have to do. Concerns over a universal service at an affordable price are answered in Clauses 28 to 30. Indeed, what my noble friend has done very well with the additional clauses, Clauses 27 to 40, is to enable powers to be brought in to ensure that anyone else who comes in as a provider is expected to operate on a fair basis. The powers are there if needed to ensure that they must pay part of the cost if there is an additional cost to the universal provider to carry that service through. That is long overdue but very good. Then there is the pensions issue. To some extent, that takes me back to my opening comments. If we had had this Bill back in 1999 or 2000, we would not have the pensions problem that we have and Post Office workers would not be faced, as they have been for some years, with acute concern for their pensions, as my noble friend Lord Clarke described with such passion. We should have introduced the Bill many years ago. That was not because of delay for the sake of it. It was one of those things that happen often in politics where you try to meet the concerns of people who will feel the effects of legislation and, in making the compromises necessary to achieve that, you endup with something that is less effective than it could have been. I noticed that my noble friend said that he was warm to the idea of having a people’s bank. I would like him to raise the temperature and become a bit hotter about it. The people’s bank approach has something very strong going for it. Again, for some years, I have wondered whether we could not have done more. It would have done a lot to help post offices around the country if they had been able to provide banking services, in a way that they are more than capable of doing. If you link that with the online services available, there is real potential. I speak as a supporter in the sense that, when I go to draw some cash from the post office in the House of Commons, I use my card and the Post Office benefits. There are many ways in which that service is already available but could be expanded. The key to the Bill, as was commented on by my noble friend Lord O’Neill, whose remarks I agree with to a large extent, is that it brings in new capital and additional ideas and management, which can really place the postal services where they can compete with what is happening in continental Europe. If they cannot compete and if we leave them in their present situation, in the long run we will lose the service about which my noble friend Lord Clarke feels so passionately. We will not do anyone any favours if we do that. The Bill is necessary. Yes, we should look at some of the detail, as I am sure my noble friend would agree, but the Bill is right. We need to do this; in many ways, we should have done it many years ago. If we had, the postal services in the UK would be in a far better position vis-à-vis their European and other competitors both here and overseas.