Postal Services Bill

My Lords, first, I extend my welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Empey. I knew him well. We worked closely together when I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Judging by his maiden speech this afternoon, I believe he will make a very distinctive contribution to this House. I am also looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. I was just talking to him outside the Chamber when a colleague of his came up and hailed us both as ““the men of fiction””. I am not quite sure what he meant by that. Some things never change. This Bill is a bit like the repeat of a bad dream with its unhappy ending. The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, who is not in his place, referred to the scars that I bear. I can assure the House that I bear them fairly lightly, but it is noteworthy that the scars, such as they are, were inflicted not by this House but by another. Yet again we are debating the Royal Mail and the structure and regulation needed to secure the universal postal service which the public demand but which—this is the crucial factor—we all depend on much less because of digitalisation. We are debating the same, broadly unchanged, Royal Mail which can and should perform like a modern logistics company but which retains too many of the characteristics of a government department. There is nothing wrong with government departments—I miss them greatly—but they are not commercial organisations, which the Royal Mail needs to be. The Royal Mail needs a settled existence, which is why I cannot go along with my noble friend Lord Christopher in suggesting that we should drag our feet for a longer indefinite time. To create such uncertainty for the Royal Mail would be a tremendous disservice to it as an organisation and to its customers. No, it needs a settled existence, but one different from the structure and the regulatory framework in which it is currently operating. That is why the previous Labour Government introduced their legislation, which shared the same aims and objectives as the Bill—indeed, I notice that many of the clauses are similar—albeit with one significant difference: we proposed to keep the Royal Mail in overall public ownership. Others before me have described how digital communications have transformed the Royal Mail's world and its market. That does not need further elaboration from me. That means that the Royal Mail has to reinvent itself. It must rationalise and modernise, as almost every other postal service among developed countries has done. It must harness all the new technology available to it to adjust its cost base and show real enterprise and innovation in the services it provides. The Royal Mail has started to do that, but is it really capable in its present form of changing in the way, to the extent and at the speed that is needed? My answer to that is no; the answer of the coalition Government is no; and the answer of the previous Labour Government was also no. It is just too unprepared, too unfit. It does not have the right commercial structure to operate it. It has a single company union, which is, frankly, too remote from the wider world. It has relations between management and workforce that must be further substantially improved to enable change to take place at a faster pace. The company has a single client regulator that is not only overly constraining, in my view—I will come back to that—but insufficiently versed in the wider digital world. It is dependent on state aid, which is, frankly, slow and inadequate for what it needs to do. For all those reasons, the Government have no alternative—just as we found when we were in office—but to bring forward a Bill that enables a fresh start to be made. I am very sorry that Labour MPs came under considerable union pressure to derail the previous Bill. The CWU succeeded in its aim, which was regrettable for this reason above all. In defeating our Bill, the CWU paved the way for the Bill that we are debating today. Quite literally, the CWU has, through its actions, become the midwife of the Royal Mail's privatisation.