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Postal Services Bill [HL]

I listened carefully to the Secretary of State. He described the Hooper report as well researched. If you look at how it has researched the cost of the final mile, which is the expensive part of delivery, you might find it wanting. A number of people who are far superior to me in intelligence and their academic ability to analyse things find that the Hooper review is not as solid as some people would pretend. I know why the Government snapped it up: they wanted that embracing comment, which we have just heard, about putting all the things together. The Secretary of State made a sly remark about a pensions bail-out giving the wrong impression—it might have been meant for me; if I am wrong, I am sorry. In the final analysis, Post Office pensioners are, or were, employed by the Crown. The reason that the long holiday to which my noble friend Lord Hoyle referred took place is clear. Besides being a trustee of the pension fund, I was the negotiating officer for pensions. When it was announced that the 6 per cent paid by the staff would continue but that the management would put nothing into the scheme at first, you could live with it for a year or so. I took the matter to the legal profession and asked how right their action was. The reason that the holiday was enjoyed by the management and, in turn, the Government was that the trustee explicitly said that as the fund—thereby, the Government—had responsibility for deficiencies, it had the right to deal with surpluses. It was game, set and match to the lawyers; I folded up my tent and went home. I could not do anything about it; it was there in black and white. We are told about modernisation. Would somebody in government say what they are talking about? A fortnight ago, staff and management had two days of very constructive talks. They have agreement on the things that need to be done. There are slippages in a couple of areas which are being addressed. But when someone says "modernisation", would they please say what they are talking about? Everything that postmen used to do—primary sorting and regional sorting throughout the British Isles and the foreign section—has gone. Postcodes took away that skill of sorting and working out where mail should be directed to. We in the unions have co-operated with the postal-coding of this country. It is another wonderful victory for Britain: we perfected it and got no money for it when other people copied it—the same could be said of Giro and optical character recognition. But that is all in the past, which I have been told off before for living in. If the Government have got their sums right as they bail out banks and building societies, they expect the tide eventually to turn and the value of the scheme to go up accordingly. It is based on the current values of equity and shares. If they are right, more money is likely to come in, because the pension fund deficit is being addressed with the amounts of money that I have mentioned previously. It has been said that European postal administrations have done this, that and the other. There was a conference last Saturday in Amsterdam. The Dutch model, crowed about by some people, was condemned by the Germans, the Danes, the French and the Belgians. People are having second thoughts about the way in which the Netherlands postal authority—