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Postal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, other noble Lords have said that today’s debate has been interesting; I have found it both interesting and revealing about some people who I thought had a little more experience in dealing with the internal matters of the Labour Party. But I shall put that to one side. Several noble Lords have referred to romantic and nostalgic visions of the past and of a Post Office that once was. Anticipating such remarks, I took the trouble to write to every Labour Peer explaining that I was not looking at this subject through tinted glasses—that I have a genuine desire to save what I think is a very important part of the British social structure. I also reminded my colleagues of the manifesto which, believe it or not, was introduced four years ago, as someone mentioned today. Warwick 2 has been described as the Warwick tablets, which I find fairly offensive when one considers the democratic process that we fought to get within the Labour Party to do away with conference decisions by block votes and to go through a policy forum, strata by strata, until it reached the National Policy Forum. We were talking about having a wholly publicly owned, integrated, public service Post Office in July 2008 and it is revealing to discover how some people approach these matters. I cannot possibly deal with every noble Lord who has spoken in the debate. To those I do not mention, I offer my sincere thanks for having taken part in the debate and for showing an interest in the Post Office and its problem. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his kind remarks. He posed a very good question which every Labour Party Peer, MP, activist and member should ask: when is privatisation not privatisation? I am grateful to the noble Lord for posing that question. I understand why he said that he would go shoulder to shoulder through the Lobbies with the Secretary of State. Of course he will: this is Conservative Party policy. In the final sentence of the notes of a meeting last week, Labour Peers were told that they should be clear that the Tories see this measure as an interim measure on the road to privatising Royal Mail. When is privatisation not privatisation? I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, for reminding me of something I left out of my opening speech. He and I have discussed Post Office matters before over the past few years. When I mentioned the Post Office pension holiday, I omitted to say, as the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, reminded us, that the Treasury clawed back over £1 billion during that period. There are two schemes in the Post Office: scheme A is an old style contributory scheme and scheme B is a shared costs scheme. If anyone wants to know what the benefit to the Post Office was based on scheme A during the holiday that the Post Office was allowed to take from 1 April 1990 to 31 March 2003—13 years—expert estimates show that it averaged out at £100 million a year. I was a negotiating officer and I remember asking the Post Office if it had put some away for a rainy day. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, for waking me up to some of the views of my past. As I said, I am not going to go through the whole debate because it will not be fair. I was very touched by the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Neill, and I hope that we will at some stage receive answers to the questions he put. My noble friend Lord Haskel referred to uncertainty in the future. He said there was no monopoly in the textile industry. Of course there was not; it was protected by other means at the time. The textile industry was always sheltered by other Acts of Parliament, and good luck to the workers in that industry because they needed them. Circumstances have changed. I agree with my noble friend Lord Sawyer. I pay tribute to the way in which he tried, very nobly—that is a good word in this place—to get understandings between the trade unions and management. His report was a model for other industries faced with similar situations so when he says that we have to work together and build trust, I say amen to that because that has been missing. When someone takes me to task for praising Royal Mail’s management as though I am some latter day convert to a sycophantic approach to management, I know where I stand. But when management turns the business round in the past few years from losing £1 million a day to making £1 million a day, it deserves credit. It should not be rubbished as though it has no idea of how to run a fish shop; it does a very good job. We cannot say that we have not got people in this country of ours who are able to do the job of managing the Post Office. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, was kind enough to suggest that, had John Major suggested this to the Labour Party in years gone by, we would have been out in the streets. We were already on the streets opposing privatisation; a current member of the Cabinet led the fight to "protect the post", although some noble Lords might have forgotten that. We fought against privatisation and won, mainly on the basis of our experience with Girobank and BT. I say "we" in the context that I used to be a union official. I do not speak here for my union; in fact, I will probably have some problems with it for some of the things I say. Twenty years too late, an honest approach is likely to appear, said the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. I thank him for that. We want an honest approach; we do not want any more of this smoke and mirrors. Let us have it out in the open, sit around a table, work out the modernisation programme and get the sequencing machines in. If people here, especially on this side, question my integrity regarding modernisation, I have made a few notes: I was in post when the Post Office Research Station pioneered and developed optical character recognition, first in Dollis Hill, NW2, and later in Martlesham. It was a Post Office development, and the new machines are an enhancement of that called intelligent character recognition. Do not tell me about modernisation. I was one of those who got the modified postal services in. I supported the concentration of mechanised sorting offices and the concentration of sub-district offices in London when I was London secretary. I saw the automatic letter facing and cancelling tables brought in. I saw the postal sorting machines brought in. Please do not question my integrity about modernisation. The union of which I was a part, and am still a retired member, has done its fair share. Some of the management in the past did not like the idea of worker participation. In fact, it was a Conservative Government who abolished the industrial democracy experiment that was running very well, where we had people on the board at national, regional and local level involved in decision-making. In those days we used to talk about the wonderful German model of worker participation, the workers’ councils. They all went. This war of attrition that people talk about—they have not used that word but it has been going on, head-to-head—could have been stopped at any time if there had been some sensible sitting around a table. In 1969 the Post Office pension scheme was created. By 1973 it was already around £1 billion in deficit but that was resolved by discussion, planning and getting investment into that scheme. It was so good that it led to 13 years of pension holiday. I am sorry if I go on too long. My noble friend Lord Stoddart is my noble friend in the same sense that he said I was his. He thought the Bill unnecessary; that makes two of us. I do not know how many more there are in this House, but I think it is unnecessary for the reasons I gave when I moved the amendment. All these things we have heard about could be achieved if we took one element out of the Bill—the sale of the shares in the Post Office to private capital. That could be done. As I said earlier, we should look at ways of raising money and give the Post Office the chance to do so in other ways. If only we could have a scheme like the one put forward by my dear friend, my noble friend Lord Rooker, where you put a letterbox at the end of your garden. Unlike in America, though, in this country it would not last five minutes. If you put a letterbox at the end of someone’s drive, someone would be stealing the mail before you can say "Jack Robinson". And what would we do? We would probably give them two hours’ community service looking after someone else’s problems. That is what is going on. We cannot talk about using those methods until we have a society that can defend people’s mail, such as America, where it is a federal offence to interfere with it. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, talked about the restrictive practices of a bygone age. He did not say what those restrictive practices were. That is something else that could get bandied around. We are not talking about Jack Dash and the dockers; we are talking about decent people who get up at half-past four in the morning and go to work. It is not a restrictive practice to sign the book at about quarter to six and then go out into the snow and the rain. The men and women who do that job should not be accused of restrictive practices; they should be commended for the job that they do. I turn to this business about profitability. If Royal Mail has issued false information about the four legs of its organisation, someone had better tell it because it is saying that all four of those businesses are in profit. Who do you believe? I am tempted to believe that the people running the Post Office have a better idea of its accounts. I am accused of saying that the Bill is full of embroidery. It is. It is embroidered to supply a little comfort around the central thought that someone has had that we must sell off 30 per cent of Royal Mail. The public do not want it, the staff do not want it, 140-odd Labour MPs down the other end do not want it, but we are going to make them have it. Well, here is one person who will fight to the last to see that we keep faith with our manifesto commitment, because that is what Labour people are supposed to do. We are not here to kick over the traces; we are here to support Labour Party policy as far as we can. I understand that some people have a problem with that. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has been able to say that the USO is covered in the 2000 Act, because it is. There is a section—I do not know the number—protecting the universal service. I am tempted to get excited. I will try very hard to deal with one or two points that were raised. My noble friend Lord Giddens compared Royal Mail with the National Health Service. With respect, how can you compare sticking private money into Royal Mail with the link between the pharmaceutical companies and the NHS? There are no shareholders on the boards of pharmaceutical companies. He argued that the Bill will produce a service that the public will approve of. I want the best service possible within the financial constraints that we have. I am ashamed when people deliver mail at half-past three in the afternoon. I do not believe that that is what a modern postal service should be providing for its people. All right, they cannot all get the post delivered by half-past nine in the morning in London—that is a romantic gloss from the past. We cannot do that, but we can improve the service so it is a damn sight better than it is at the moment. We can do that only when we have a method of operation that allows us to get the mail in, get it sorted—there is no question that that will be done by sequential machines; they will come—and then get it out. If I am right, some people will be like the postmen in Washington—letter carriers who walk around all day with their bags, getting topped up from time to time with their feeder system. I thank my noble friends Lady Turner, Lord Hoyle, and others who might have supported me if I had pushed this amendment to a vote. But I have been in politics too long to think that I can possibly win a vote in this House tonight. However, I intend to go down to the other end whenever I can, attend every public meeting I can and give every public pronouncement I can. People who know me know that I have never dealt with the media, but I will from now on. The British public need to know the truth. We have to defend our postal service, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment withdrawn. Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.