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Postal Services Bill [HL]

The noble Lord is right to point out the dangers of a predator. No doubt we will be dealing with that when we move on to the next amendment. My view is that it will be difficult to restrict the ownership in future. It is an inhibition that I do not favour, but I readily recognise the motivation behind what he has pointed out. I refer back to the Minister’s telling phrase, "Better late than never". Now that we are dealing with the prospect of a deal, my question to him is, "Deal or no deal?". The impact assessment states clearly that, ""Doing nothing is not a viable option"." He owes it to the Committee and to Parliament to tell us what is going on. Of course, it may be that he is unable to go into any detail because of commercial in-confidence negotiations. However, it might be helpful if he could give us some sort of timeline within which he is operating. A lot of us are troubled by the fact that there is no evidence of any deal at all, at present or in prospect. We need clarification of exactly what is going on. There were some indications at Second Reading. Where are we today? Where will we be when we get to May or June? Is the Secretary of State still working towards having a deal this summer? I do not think it is enough for the noble Lord to say that he will look at employee share ownership some time in the future. It needs to be considered now. Indeed, the private partnership will no doubt impact heavily on ColleagueShare, for example. While we are talking about a possible equity-based scheme, I should be glad to have clarification of how the current phantom scheme is likely to operate, for it still has several years to run. If it continues, will the nominal value of the shares be tied to the real value that any private partner pays for its shares? How will the dividends be set against the profits paid to the minority partner? I have no wish to take up any more time in putting all these questions, and there are many more. I hope that the amendments will give the Secretary of State the opportunity of answering some of those fundamental questions and giving us an idea of what lies in the future. I beg to move.