Postal Services Bill

The comments of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, arouse some questions in my mind, and this seems the appropriate time to raise them with the House. In an earlier Committee debate, several Members of the House talked about how important it is that the Minister’s report comes as soon as reasonably possible after he has made his decision—which, of course, is well ahead of the disposal itself. I am concerned that proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, today does exactly the opposite. They militate in the direction of forcing the report to be delayed until much later. An asset register—so that we know which assets will go to the Post Office and which to Royal Mail—is obviously desirable, but we can be reasonably sure that for about 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the assets, that will be obvious. There will be others where it is exceedingly complex and where it may take years to unravel who is the legal owner. There will have to be some sort of agreement between the parties on how that process is to be managed. I would expect that to come in the detailed negotiations between the various parties, not immediately after the Minister's decision. There could be a very long delay if we place that requirement on the report. On the inter-business agreement, again, general terms have already been laid out in the Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to make sure that the inter-business agreement is for as long as is legally possible, but we work with the knowledge that the arrangements will have to be sorted out in detailed negotiations between the parties. That, too, would substantially delay the report to this House. I stress a point at which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, perhaps hinted: that this is not a simple matter of saying that we should keep the inter-business agreement in place for the next decade or so; I have heard many complaints, from various parts of the Post Office, at how restrictive is the current agreement and how it prohibits them entering into various kinds of business which are necessary to make them sustainable. There are highly complex aspects to all this. While we can expect general principles to be discussed in any report, if we start putting into it great commercial and negotiating detail, we delay it and it becomes something that we see after, rather than before, the fact of the disposal. I believe that it is the preference of this House to see the report before the disposal and not after it.