Postal Services Bill

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, and I thank my noble friend Lady Turner for reminding us how modest this amendment is in providing for only ““at least one representative””. As so often happens, the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, probably lighted upon the essence of the debate, which is the extent to which such a provision should be on the face of the Bill. It is about whether there is uncertainty for the new owner or not. We disagree on that point. We want the new owner to know that there is going to be at least one employee representative on the board—I have to admit that we want to discourage an owner who would have difficulty with that. We want to take away the uncertainty so that, when Government are negotiating for either a trade sale or some other form of disposal, the new owner cannot resile from this provision. We believe that any owner who would have difficulty with it would not be good for the interests of the Royal Mail in the long term. My noble friend Lady Donaghy, whose chairmanship of ACAS was so important to a period of change in that direction, pointed out that, while the European structures are different, nevertheless the acceptance of significant board-level presence is part of their legal structure. There is significant employee representation, and large, successful European companies manage with that. Under the structure of our company law, the only way we can sensibly introduce such a requirement into the new structure is by including a provision about who should be on the board. It is a change of attitude, but we are living in a changing world. I concur with my noble friend Lord Clarke of Hampstead that there was an important initiative in the 1970s on moving towards industrial democracy. I was involved in that on one side of the fence, many of my noble friends were on the other side, and we were starting to make some progress. In many ways I wish we had built on this so that we might not be having this debate now. We would probably be taking the involvement of the workforce for granted in the management of major companies, whether in the private or public sector, because we would have had years of experience of it working. I think that this is the time to set this down. When I was on the government Benches, I always got a sense from my civil servants that, when they had run out of ideas, they scribbled on a piece of paper ““Not appropriate””. Another one that they would come up with was, ““It is unprecedented””. Of course, all law is about setting precedents, and we think that this is an occasion when this chance should be seized. Clearly, I am not going to press the amendment today. We will read the Minister’s words with great care, but we may come back to the issue because I think it is an important marker of the style and the character of company that we hope Royal Mail will become. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 20 withdrawn. Amendment 21 Moved by