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Postal Services Bill [HL]

In moving Amendment 89N, I shall also speak to Amendments 89P and 93B. Amendment 89N is straightforward. It would delete the words, ""may from time to time"," in line 8 on page 22. Amendment 89P would add, at the end of line 10, the words in the Marshalled List. I shall come to Amendment 93B later. In May 2008, Richard Hooper’s team produced its interim report, The Challenges and Opportunities Facing UK Postal Services. I remember reading it for the first time and thinking that Richard Hooper, whom I had met only a couple of times, had produced a pretty good report. However, it is a pity that it was ignored, or not developed, in the final report, which was published in December. Somewhere between the interim report and the final report, something must have affected the thoughts of Richard Hooper’s team. Most notable of these changes or omissions was the critique of the results of Postcomm’s botched introduction of competition, which was absent in the final report. Equally, the final report failed to add anything much on the universal service. The interim report noted of the universal service obligation: ""It helps social cohesion by linking rural communities with more densely populated areas of the country, and ensures that older people and those with disabilities have an accessible, reliable means of communication and the capacity to send and receive"," mail. This was not developed in the final report or in the Bill. After all, the Bill removes the protection that these groups currently have under the Postal Services Act. Be that as it may, the failure of Hooper’s final report to develop the debate on the future of the universal service is notable because the inquiry took submissions specifically on this question. However, the final report did not come to a conclusion on whether the universal service represents a burden for Royal Mail. Probably the biggest indicator that the universal service involves a burden is the failure of the competition to make any moves towards competing for the universal service obligation. The obligation involves the creation of a network of capital, as we discussed on previous amendments, and workers capable of delivering the service. The competition has drawn the conclusion that it is not worth while challenging for the obligation. The only explanation is that this is a burden that the competition will not shoulder and that Royal Mail is too efficient in the delivery of this service for the competition to defeat. Such a conclusion would obviously be against Hooper’s findings, but many of those findings are beginning to look faulty anyway, so perhaps the truth is both that the universal service is a burden and that it is delivered too effectively by Royal Mail for anyone else to consider shouldering that burden. For the purposes of regulatory clarity and cost-efficiency, the amendments would direct Ofcom to analyse and come to a decision on the universal service costs. Postcomm failed to do this throughout its entire history, which was a pivotal point of its general failure. We must direct Ofcom towards a better policy. It may be argued that this would impose on Ofcom a very difficult task from the outset. Well, there is already a mass of material on methodologies that could be used. The most important issue, though, is that we have already suffered eight years of regulatory drift on this. It must be brought to a conclusion. If Ofcom is the body to do this, it should do so with some urgency. Amendment 93B proposes that examination be brought to a conclusion by the end of the financial year, with any necessary regulatory changes being implemented in the next financial year. I do not believe that this urgency is in any way inappropriate. The Government have suggested that defence of the universal service is at the heart of its concern in the Postal Services Bill. If that is so, it should not be too difficult to accept these amendments. I beg to move.