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Postal Services Bill

My Lords, we can only admire the way in which the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, put forward her amendments. She has carried out a lot of due diligence and her speech was wholly admirable. However, my problem with it is—noble Lords will guess that I have a problem with it—that I do not see any way of removing uncertainty now or in the medium term or, as she suggested, in three or four years. I hope that that pessimistic estimate turns out to be wrong and that this matter is resolved in a lot less time than four years. The uncertainty arises primarily from the behaviour of the market. We have talked a bit about other privatisations. The steel industry was mentioned. That industry was in decline when it was privatised. However, the opposite was the case with British Telecom. A lot of our experience of privatisations is highly coloured by the market conditions prevailing at the time. If what I have picked up turns out to be true, one of the issues which faces a mail operator is to find new streams of business and not to rely just on the mail and the universal obligation to deliver it at the same price to every household in the country. That brings me to one of the uncertainties about any deal that might be proposed by the Royal Mail to the Secretary of State as being a deal that he or she might wish to approve. I think that I have mentioned this before. There could be two bidders—there might even be three—with very different solutions. It is not a question of there being one deal. In a negotiation you may well find that not only is there more than one bidder but their bids are so different that you have to have two completely separate sets of due diligence to make sense of them and to make a recommendation to the Secretary of State. As I see it, that is the way that this matter will go forward. In those circumstances I am very doubtful about the role of Parliament except in an ex-post involvement through the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, as my noble friend on the Front Bench said earlier. Then Parliament will have its opportunity to say whether it thinks that the Secretary of State made a good or bad decision in backing one of the recommendations made to him or her. Parliament will have to be satisfied with an ex-post role. As regards the super-affirmative procedure and the 60 day period, 60 days is a long time for a bid to remain open without being reneged on or altered. In my opinion it simply is not practical to think that any bidder will be willing to go through this process. Given my past experience of buying and selling businesses, if I was faced with these amendments in the Bill, I think that I would say, ““Please will you assure me that this part of the Bill is not going to be triggered because if it is my bid is withdrawn?”” or I would not enter the negotiation in the first place. The intentions behind these amendments are absolutely clear to all of us and if the circumstances of the Royal Mail and the mail market were entirely different we might be able to live with such a procedure. However, I do not think that we can live with it in these circumstances.