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Postal Services Bill [HL]

I am learning, and I appreciate the guidance from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that a poker face, or perhaps a poker jaw, is perhaps a better way to deliver answers to specific questions. I had the good fortune to bump into my noble friend the Secretary of State during the break, and I was reassured that he shared my view that a response to the Select Committee’s report that was speedier than two months would be the order of the day, in part for the reasons that the noble Lord raised earlier. Other noble Lords can take it in good faith that the Government will seek to get that response into the public domain as soon as possible. The amendment seeks to provide the Secretary of State with the power to amend the minimum requirements of the universal service by affirmative order. That, as the noble Lord suggests, reflects one of the suggestions made in the BERR Select Committee’s recent report on the Bill. Although the committee suggested otherwise, no power in fact currently exists to change the specification of the universal service by affirmative order. Instead, there is a power in Section 8 of the Postal Services Act 2000 to change the exemptions provided by the Act. The power suggested by this amendment would therefore be an entirely new one, and, as we have discussed today and will return to throughout this debate, the Government’s first priority is to secure a strong universal postal service. We believe that it is right that the minimum requirements of the universal service should be able to be changed only by primary legislation, as that will have the effect of providing full scrutiny and agreement by Parliament. Of course, it is more appropriate for Ofcom, as the proposed guardian of the universal postal service, to decide not what the minimum requirements of the universal service should be but which specific detailed products should be provided to those minimum requirements. That is an appropriate distinction between the role of Parliament and that of the regulator. As an aside, in real time, as we are having this debate, a similar debate is taking place on the definition of universal service in the telecommunications market, where the requirement is a function of primary legislation but the specification is a matter for regulatory consultation. Ofcom will, therefore, be able to make a robust, evidence-based decision on the universal service after a full and comprehensive market evaluation and consultation has been carried out, focusing on the needs of users. As the noble Lord rightly points out, this is an ever changing market, which is one of the reasons why the Government wish to put in the Bill a requirement for Ofcom to engage in the first instance in a strategic review to ascertain the specification of the products. We believe that this strikes the right balance and, as we discussed earlier, much of the Bill is about rebalancing. We believe that our provision does that, and I hope that the noble Lord is content to withdraw the amendment.