Postal Services Bill

My Lords, I was not going to intervene in this debate because I agree with much of what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Rogan, and my colleague on the Front Bench and I have intervened in this area at earlier stages in the debate. Parliament has a huge responsibility here as two great parts of the nation’s infrastructure are in trouble and both require a new start. The Government have concluded that, in respect of the Royal Mail part, the new start shall be under private ownership. As the noble Baroness knows, I do not entirely agree with that, but nevertheless that is where we are. Everybody who has contributed agrees that there has to be some sort of stable relationship between the two parts, as we move into this new world. The Government’s difficulty is that they have to find a buyer for Royal Mail, the logistics part of the operation. Nobody is saying, and indeed my noble friend Lord Stevenson explicitly said, that Parliament should lay down the terms of that relationship, but Parliament has a right to know that that relationship will exist because it will determine the nature of both sides of that organisation—in terms of this amendment for the next 10 years. Clearly both sides may have an interest in ensuring that such an agreement is established prior to this Bill being implemented and the privatisation going through. If I can be a little rude, I want to talk about the elephant in the room. The suspicion on this side is that if an amendment of this nature is not passed then the issue will not be the nature of the negotiations between Royal Mail and the post office network but the nature of the discussions between the Government and a potential investor. The Government will not find it easy to find an investor. The last Government did not find it easy to find an investor for a rather smaller proportion of Royal Mail and, if the interests of Post Office Ltd were sacrificed by untying some of the responsibilities of Royal Mail towards its Post Office Ltd partner as part of the deal, the interests of both sides and particularly those of the post office network will have been sacrificed. I hate to put it this way, but I have a degree of suspicion not of Royal Mail or the post office network but of the Government’s need to induce an investor in Royal Mail in the first place. If one of the terms of that inducement were to prejudice the future relationship with the post office network then the suspicions could be justified.