Postal Services Bill

I thank the Minister very much for his comments. He came up to us at the end of day three of the Committee stage, with a more mournful expression than he sometimes has on his face, saying that we had cheated him of his moment of glory because we had withdrawn our amendment at quite short notice. It was the only amendment that he was down to speak to that day, and we took it away from him. Now here he is, irresistibly back in the Box, popping up all the time. So it does come back; it goes in rounds. Quite a lot of what we have talked about today are what could be described as mop-up provisions and backstops—things that are very unlikely to occur. The Minister argued that, as a result, we did not really need to put them in the Bill, because they were so unlikely that it would be a waste of our time to spend our precious moments on them. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book that I am sure all noble Lords have read, or listened to the programmes, there is a vehicle driven by a thing called the improbability drive, which has the result of making the space travellers turn up in the least likely situation that can be imagined at the time of their arriving. In a situation where they are being threatened by giants and attacked from all sides, they think of something completely unlikely and are immediately transported there. I simply say this because sometimes the impossible and the improbable does happen; we should not be deluded into thinking that it is so remote that we should not have provisions for it. That was what inspired us to put forward these proposals, some of which the Minister looked at sympathetically and some of which he did not. It is important to have contingency provisions, and we are not arguing against that, but if we are going to do that we should be consistent. I hope that on reflection the Minister might accept that there were one or two points in what we said that might be worthy of a little bit more consideration. The principle on which we have been working is that if the aim is continuity, the going-concern process would be the least disruptive. That is why our amendments are framed as they are. I do not think that anything the Minister said is against what we are trying to achieve. My sense is that the whole process of going into administration would be such a major issue that making sure that there was greater concern than currently expressed in the statute for going concern would be helpful. But we would not push that at this stage. As we reach the end of our discussions here, I wanted to say that, particularly today but as mentioned on a number of occasions in Committee, we have been a little unkind about Postcomm. We had a quotation from the noble Viscount that expressed in its own terms what it felt about itself. Even so, I am sure that the people at Postcomm have done what they could with possibly difficult ammunition to achieve what Parliament wanted them to do, and no personal criticism should be implied by what we or anybody else has said. On the other hand, the Minister kindly pointed out what the framework was for the new regulatory structure and expressed various options and hopes for that, but he did not say that Ofcom would not be an unsympathetic regulator in the same way as Postcomm was. We should bear that in mind. Having said that, we register our support for government Amendment 26.