Postal Services Bill

My Lords, I want to come in now on this conversation. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, talked about an elephant in the room and then dismissed the EU state aid issue. Many Members of this House have been following the debate from the beginning—some have come in perhaps a little later, but many have been engaged from the beginning—and have heard directly from Moya Greene, the current chief executive of Royal Mail, that she would wish for the longest possible agreement that she could achieve within the law for an inter-business relationship with the Post Office. Many will also have heard the same from Paula Vennells, the managing director of the Post Office part of the current Royal Mail Group whom I think we may regard as the chief executive presumptive of the Post Office when it becomes a completely separate entity. They have also heard the Government say, on many occasions, that they would wish for, and would try to achieve, the longest possible agreement that could be done legally. The issue of European state aid rules is absolutely critical. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, will have looked at the financial condition of Royal Mail Group and will understand that it is urgent that new investment comes in, in a very timely manner, if the group is to be preserved. The Post Office side also needs the injection of £1.34 billion that the Government are committed to putting into it, which would come through this legislation and the new structures. That is what will guarantee its future. However, all of that would be jeopardised when—one could say ““if””, but I suspect that if we go back to the lawyers and ask the Government it would be ““when””—the state aid rules were tripped by one of these two amendments. I am rather under the impression that the Government have done everything they can to find language that would not trigger European state aid rules and cannot find it. The language proposed today by the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Rogan, trips the European state aid rules. That would mean 24 months of constant wrangling, in which it is impossible to go out and bring in a new investor. All investors require some degree of certainty about what is happening to the organisation they are meant to examine and on which they are meant then to make an offer. It would also mean 24 months of uncertainty for the public. If this was two or three years ago, the luxury of including a clause like this and being resigned to spending two years fighting through state aid issues might have been possible. I suggest that we do not have that luxury at the moment. We have two key organisations which matter to all our communities. We have people who work for Royal Mail—the regular staff who do incredibly hard work and need certainty about their jobs—and we have communities that rely on the Post Office. If we inject something like 24 months of further uncertainty, and who knows what comes out of the state aid negotiations, we jeopardise everything we have been trying to achieve—for weeks now in this House and in the other place—which is to make sure there is a secure future for the Royal Mail Group and that both the Royal Mail and Post Office parts of it can thrive. I understand that people have suspicions and concerns and will not take government assurances because they do not like to take them and perhaps do not quite believe Moya Greene or do not quite take the word of Paula Vennells. I understand all that, but there is an overriding issue and it has not been addressed by those who moved this amendment. The language triggers state aid provisions—we cannot afford the consequences of having that in the Bill.