Postal Services Bill

I would like to press the Minister on Lords amendments 16 to 19, to clause 28. He has rightly spoken of the need for the Royal Mail to continue to modernise, and I hope to give a simple example of why this is so important. The House will recall the severe snow that affected large parts of Scotland last winter, including West Fife in my constituency. Fife was particularly badly hit because of the incompetence of Fife council, which failed to clear the roads and keep traffic moving. That had a huge knock-on effect for the Royal Mail. If residents are struck in villages or large parts of Dunfermline and cannot get out, it would quite obviously be unreasonable to expect the Royal Mail to be able to deliver a regular service, because for genuine health and safety reasons it is vital that posties are not exposed to unnecessary risk. However, the Royal Mail failed to provide a robust contingency programme to deal with the huge backlog that quickly built up. It will probably not surprise the House to know that mid-December is a particularly busy time for the Royal Mail, as there is a substantial increase in the volume of packages and cards. Unfortunately, business continues in the build-up to Christmas for many of my constituents. I was approached by a number of small businesses and local law firms that were waiting desperately for important documents—in some cases legal documents—and that were simply unable to get them delivered by the Royal Mail. Many of my constituents showed some initiative and went to the Dunfermline sorting office to see whether they could simply collect their post. However, the Royal Mail had no plan in place even to allow local businesses or my constituents to do so, which is a sign of poor planning by Royal Mail management. I would be grateful if the Minister outlined what discussions he has had with the Royal Mail about that lack of strategic or, some might argue, tactical thinking, which should be happening at the local and regional levels. The backlog was such that many of my constituents did not receive the parcels and cards that friends and relatives had sent them until the middle of January, which is clearly a most unsatisfactory circumstance. To be fair, after I met the Royal Mail in the build-up to the new year, it took a number of steps, including putting on Sunday deliveries, drafting in additional staff from other sorting offices and putting on extra deliveries. But, with the best will in the world, I hope that the Minister will agree that it should not have been necessary for us to reach a state of chaos before Royal Mail took proactive steps to tackle the problem. I would be grateful if the Minister outlined the specific issues he has raised with Royal Mail relating to the modernisation of its procedures. Has he discussed how its policies might become more robust? Has it given him any indication of whether it has learned the lessons, not only from Fife but from across Scotland, in time for next winter? I fear that we might otherwise face a rather challenging set of conditions.