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Postal Services Bill [HL]

My noble friend, as always, has put his finger on the pulse. He has described in some detail the difficulties that Postcomm created for Royal Mail. Indeed, I must join him in saying that I welcome the demise of Royal Mail, even if my noble friend who speaks from the Front Bench has not. He mentioned that it is difficult to estimate the costs. In fact, when the Business and Enterprise Select Committee interviewed Mr Crozier, he said that the loss per item was about 2p. The chairman of the committee went on to ask, "You said you lost 2p per item. For the record, how many items are we talking about?". Mr Crozier replied, "About 5 billion". At 2p per item, they are losing roughly £100 million. It seems absolutely ridiculous that people whom I would term predators are cherry-picking the items they want and taking business away from the Post Office. The Post Office will then have to subsidise that to the tune of £100 million. That does not make any commercial sense whatever. It is no wonder that one can get into problems. That is why this amendment is very important. We hope that Ofcom will adopt a different policy. It is important that the phrase "on commercial terms", which my noble friend suggests, is included in the Bill. A public service should not subsidise the people to whom I have referred. Repeated interviews with Postcomm and its appearances before the Select Committee in the other place have always indicated that it seemed to be more interested in competition than in the provision of a universal service; in other words, it had its priorities the wrong way round. Therefore, we should not allow Ofcom to make the same mistake that Postcomm did. I am not suggesting for one moment that Ofcom is the same animal as Postcomm. A lesson has been learnt in that regard. As we have discussed on many occasions, we opened up this market far earlier than others did. Indeed, my noble friend has asked on many occasions when the French intend to open up their market. Some of the competitors that are mooted to take a 30 per cent stake, such as TNT, had their markets liberalised only in March this year. Another competitor reported to have shown an interest in taking up a shareholding, Deutsche Post, is now losing money. That just proves that we were too far ahead of the game. However, it was not just a matter of being ahead of the game but of putting conditions on Royal Mail that should not have been imposed on it. It was absurd to impose on it losses running into billions of pounds. We shall listen to the Minister’s reply, but we should press the amendment at some stage. I hope that his mind is not completely on Chelsea at the moment. I am sorry that I cannot give him any good news in that regard.