Postal Services Bill

My Lords, Amendment 67 deals with the potential indebtedness of a universal service provider. It is an issue that we aired in the latter stages of Committee at the beginning of April—a long time ago. In that debate, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, very kindly said that he would go back and look at the matter. Subsequently, he kindly wrote to me to try to give me some assurances. Unfortunately, his letter did not give me the assurances that I was seeking because he referred to conditions under Clauses 38 and 53. He referred to the fact that Ofcom ““could”” indeed include conditions or that it ““could impose”” a similar condition. Later in his letter, he said that Ofcom would be ““able to impose”” any conditions. On the previous amendment, the Minister referred to the importance of the universal service provision requiring modernisation, but clearly you are not going to be able to invest in modernisation if you do not have the capital to do it. This goes to the heart of my concerns. It is not my intention to press this amendment to a Division but, as the Bill stands, I am perplexed as to why the Government will not agree either to make a commitment or to put something in the Bill in this regard—there are government amendments before us this evening—requiring Ofcom either to monitor or perhaps to intervene, rather than leave it entirely up to Ofcom. That, in itself, raises the question: how do you trigger Ofcom carrying out work that will deal with this issue? Will the trigger be a complaint from a member of the public or from a government department? Who would pull the trigger that would make such a review take place? My concern is genuine and I wonder whether it can be dealt with in the Bill. There is so much else in the Bill. It deals with charges and costs and a whole range of financial issues but it does not appear to deal with financial help for the universal service provider. We are now at a late stage of the Bill and it is not my intention to detain your Lordships. However, I do not think that the House would be carrying out its function of scrutinising and improving legislation if we let the Bill go from this Chamber without some kind of reference to this matter—if not in the Bill itself then perhaps in the form of an assurance from the Minister at the Dispatch Box that the chosen universal service provider would have the financial health and well-being to be able to carry out the modernisation programme that across the House we agree is absolutely essential.