Postal Services Bill

I am looking forward to doing that, Madam Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Llanelli welcomed Lords amendment 1 but felt that it did not go far enough. Despite all the arguments we have had in this place, she still believes that an inter-business agreement should be in the Bill, as do a number of her party's members. I do not wish to rehearse the long speeches that were made on Report, when our debate on this particular point lasted for about three hours, but let me repeat that putting provisions in the Bill in the way in which the hon. Lady suggests would create a significant risk of legal challenge owing to incompatibility with competition law. In addition, such an approach would almost certainly face a state aid challenge. I would have thought that she would have realised that, because it has been accepted by many who have examined the situation in detail. The hon. Lady says that the absence of such provisions means that there is no protection for post offices, but the whole point is that the detail set out in our policy statement will enable them to be more profitable. It is real business that will save the post office network, not legal provisions in the Bill, so I disagree with her point. The hon. Lady spent some time talking about employee shares. The Lords amendments will require the Secretary of State's report to Parliament at the time of first sale of shares to include details about the employee share scheme. I would have thought that she would have supported that welcome development. We would certainly want to report on such things as the terms by which shares would transfer to the employee share scheme and the design of the scheme. Such detail might include questions of whether there would be a trust model or individual shares, or a mixture of the two. There would also be consideration of the percentages to be transferred and the governance arrangements. The hon. Lady asked how the shares will be allocated, but clearly that is a point for later discussion. Such a point might be addressed in the report. We can imagine allocating shares to employees on many bases, such as length of service, grade and salary. The Government would certainly not object to a proposal that shares and their benefits should be allocated evenly across employees to ensure that there is equal entitlement regardless of grade, salary or length of service. We have been clear that the scheme is for all employees of Royal Mail, not just the management, so I hope that people will not run away with the wrong idea. Several Opposition Members asked what would stop employees from selling shares immediately. Again, we are not making premature decisions about the scheme's design, but we have always said, as I have repeated several times, that we are designing the scheme with longevity in mind—there are many attractions to a trust model for that very reason. However, it is not true that individual employees' shares are always sold off by those employees. People arguing that point try to pray in aid the BT example, but the Public Bill Committee heard evidence that 66% of BT employees held on to their shares after the share plan had matured, so there is longevity in share ownership, even with the individual model. A lot of myths are cited by those who oppose employee share ownership, which was no doubt why the Labour party did not include employee shares in its 2009 Bill.