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Postal Services Bill [HL]

I will intervene in the debate with a word of advice to the Government. If they want to avoid some of the mistrust to which my noble friend referred, which relates not only to the pension scheme but to the total package before us in the Bill, the full details of which are not yet clear, they would be as well, either by adopting my noble friend’s amendment or in some other way, to indicate that the Government do not have any intention of altering the terms of the pension scheme by Secretary of State decree. I am not sufficiently informed to know whether my noble friend’s wording is the correct way to do this, but it seems to me that in Clause 19 we have made it clear that transfer would not immediately adversely affect any person in the scheme. However, the suspicion remains that the Secretary of State may have a power to change subsequently the entitlement of a member of the scheme and that therefore the guarantee in Clause 19 is not sufficient for the members of the scheme to feel safe that things would not be changed subsequently. As my noble friend Lord Clarke has said, the normal way of changing the terms of a scheme remains, which would have to involve consultation and eventually consent and agreement at the trustee level with the employer or, in this case, the Government. I am not sure that the Government would lose anything by accepting the amendment, but they would remove a suspicion that the intention is to dilute or adversely alter the nature of the scheme some way down the line and thereby avoid expenditure by the Government. We should not avoid putting this in a broader context. We know that the Government and the Opposition have made some rumbling noises about public sector schemes in general. This is about to become a public sector scheme more explicitly than previously and it would be appropriate for the Government to give some reassurance to postal workers on this front, which may help them in their general dealings with the postal workers and their unions over the total package.