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Postal Services Bill

My Lords, I do not understand what has just been said. However it is done, someone somewhere in Government has to decide whether the Royal Mail is worth X. The issue in front of us is how to arrive at X. I am very sceptical about whether Royal Mail knows what it owns. To take a trite example, there are some valuable stamp collections in this country: Her Majesty has one, the Board of Inland Revenue has another and, I understand, the Post Office has one. The Revenue’s collection used to be displayed in cases as you walked into Somerset House. A representative of Stanley Gibbons walked in to ask the chairman, ““Do you know what you have in those glass cases?””—there were three big ones. The answer was that it was worth well over £1 million. I think that the Post Office has a stamp collection, but I am pretty sure that no one there knows what it is worth. The outfit could well be sold lock, stock and barrel and then someone opens a safe one day and finds all those stamps. There should be a proper valuation of all the assets of Royal Mail and the Post Office, because it will be divided up. Until that is done, we cannot satisfy the British people that we are asking a fair price. I do not complain about a modest discount, but we should have a clear idea of what assets we have. I will use my mythical Oxford sorting office as an example. What is it worth? An acre of land in most parts of the country is worth £5,000. With planning permission, it is worth nearly £1 million. Unless we explore the assets and ensure that we have an objective valuation of what is there, we will never feel that we have sold the Royal Mail properly. Others have mentioned previous experiences. There have been two relatively recent ones, one by us of a company whose name I can never get my tongue around— QinetiQ—where people have walked away with millions. I have talked to many Members opposite who would never have privatised our railways in the way they did. Over the first two or three years, people walked away with very large sums of money. We have to avoid that. We cannot value the company in the way that companies are generally valued. Price/earnings ratios and so on have no relevance in that context. We must be sure that when we say to the British company, ““We are trying to sell this for X””, that X is a reasonable, accurate figure.