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Postal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, as your Lordships will be aware, this is a critical amendment for the Liberal Democrat Benches and for our view of the Bill. We have long argued that one reform essential for Royal Mail Group Ltd is to introduce a significant element of employee ownership. We have talked about that as a John Lewis-type trust ownership, or co-operative organisation, and we are suggesting that at least 25.5 per cent of ownership of Royal Mail should be held by the employees. Since we started arguing this, three or four years ago, the decline in the success of the traditional capitalist structure demonstrates even more readily why this model of ownership would be good for the Royal Mail group. The arguments that have been used against us, in no particular order, are, first, that the union does not want it—well, they wouldn’t, would they? The second argument is that there is no evidence that the employees of Royal Mail Group Ltd want it, which is a dubious argument. The third is that were 25.5 per cent to be put into the shared ownership trust, leaving up to 49 per cent held by the private sector—TNT, or whichever partner is brought in—and only 25 per cent in the hands of the Treasury, then the organisation would no longer qualify as a public sector one. We do not accept that argument, because it would be easy to amend the legislation to ensure that that would not be the case. We have argued this long before the Bill came to your Lordships’ House; we argued it in Committee, and I do not wish to argue it again at length. I beg to move.