Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 40: 40: Clause 29 , page 16, line 40, leave out subsection (2) and insert— ““(2) The Secretary of State shall bring forward an Order subject to an affirmative resolution in both Houses of Parliament to abolish the Consumer Council for Postal Services. (2A) The Order set out in subsection (2) shall not be made before 2010.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the purpose of the amendment is very clear. We propose that the merger of the Consumer Council for Postal Services should be postponed until at least 2010. We are specific about the reasons why we are moving this amendment. Nobody who has listened to the debates in your Lordships' House and another place and paid attention to the consultation that has gone on across the country can doubt that both the Post Office network and the Royal Mail are in disarray. Four thousand post office branches have closed since Labour came to power in 1997, on top of the 3,500 post offices and sub-post offices closed during the period of the last Conservative Government. On14 December, the Government announced plans for Post Office restructuring, which they expect to lead to the closure of a further 2,500 branches by 2009.The consultation on those proposals goes on until8 March. We are aware that one difficulty that the Post Office network has suffered is the phasing out of the Post Office card account, on which many pensioners rely to receive their state pension and on which thousands of branches depended to keep them in business. On 14 December, in the face of a huge outcry, the Government backed down and announced a replacement for the card account. It is a matter of knowledge for your Lordships that in recent years the Government have directly or indirectly overseen the Post Office network losing TV licences, vehicle excise duty and passport authentication work. I do not need to go on, as this is not a debate about the decline of the Post Office network, but that decline is highly relevant to the amendment that stands in my name and that of my noble friend. As for the Royal Mail, noble Lords will be aware that a significant loss of business occurs almost every week, now that it has lost its monopoly in a number of areas in the delivery of postal services. We have the benefit through the pages of the financial press of seeing the dispute going on between Allan Leighton, chairman of the Royal Mail network, and the Government about whether they will permit proposals for any form of share issue to Post Office workers or any form of shares sell-off in the Royal Mail network. Against that background my noble friend Lady Miller and I believe that this is not the time to interfere with the very effective method of consumer consultation which is in place as we speak. We wonder what is the point of transferring en bloc the expertise in the Consumer Council for Postal Services to the new consumer council. If the people with the skills necessary to perform the very effective job done by that organisation over the past few years are to be made redundant, there will be a significant loss of effectiveness over the next three years—which in the public’s eye will be an absolutely crucial period for the future of the Post Office network and Royal Mail. I beg to move.