Postal Services Bill

Debate between Lord Mandelson and Lord Brookman

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mandelson]

My Lords, first, I extend my welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Empey. I knew him well. We worked closely together when I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Judging by his maiden speech this afternoon, I believe he will make a very distinctive contribution to this House. I am also looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. I was just talking to him outside the Chamber when a colleague of his came up and hailed us both as “the men of fiction”. I am not quite sure what he meant by that.

Some things never change. This Bill is a bit like the repeat of a bad dream with its unhappy ending. The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, who is not in his place, referred to the scars that I bear. I can assure the House that I bear them fairly lightly, but it is noteworthy that the scars, such as they are, were inflicted not by this House but by another.

Yet again we are debating the Royal Mail and the structure and regulation needed to secure the universal postal service which the public demand but which—this is the crucial factor—we all depend on much less because of digitalisation. We are debating the same, broadly unchanged, Royal Mail which can and should perform like a modern logistics company but which retains too many of the characteristics of a government department. There is nothing wrong with government departments—I miss them greatly—but they are not commercial organisations, which the Royal Mail needs to be.

The Royal Mail needs a settled existence, which is why I cannot go along with my noble friend Lord Christopher in suggesting that we should drag our feet for a longer indefinite time. To create such uncertainty for the Royal Mail would be a tremendous disservice to it as an organisation and to its customers. No, it needs a settled existence, but one different from the structure and the regulatory framework in which it is currently operating. That is why the previous Labour Government introduced their legislation, which shared the same aims and objectives as the Bill—indeed, I notice that many of the clauses are similar—albeit with one significant difference: we proposed to keep the Royal Mail in overall public ownership.

Others before me have described how digital communications have transformed the Royal Mail's world and its market. That does not need further elaboration from me. That means that the Royal Mail has to reinvent itself. It must rationalise and modernise, as almost every other postal service among developed countries has done. It must harness all the new technology available to it to adjust its cost base and show real enterprise and innovation in the services it provides.

The Royal Mail has started to do that, but is it really capable in its present form of changing in the way, to the extent and at the speed that is needed? My answer to that is no; the answer of the coalition Government is no; and the answer of the previous Labour Government was also no. It is just too unprepared, too unfit. It does not have the right commercial structure to operate it. It has a single company union, which is, frankly, too remote from the wider world. It has relations between management and workforce that must be further substantially improved to enable change to take place at a faster pace. The company has a single client regulator that is not only overly constraining, in my view—I will come back to that—but insufficiently versed in the wider digital world. It is dependent on state aid, which is, frankly, slow and inadequate for what it needs to do.

For all those reasons, the Government have no alternative—just as we found when we were in office—but to bring forward a Bill that enables a fresh start to be made. I am very sorry that Labour MPs came under considerable union pressure to derail the previous Bill. The CWU succeeded in its aim, which was regrettable for this reason above all. In defeating our Bill, the CWU paved the way for the Bill that we are debating today. Quite literally, the CWU has, through its actions, become the midwife of the Royal Mail's privatisation.

[Lord Brookman]

I thank the noble Lord for allowing me to make a comment. I know the leadership of the post office workers’ union—I have worked with them at the TUC for many years—and I do not acknowledge the picture that the noble Lord has painted of the Luddite trade unionists who work on behalf of Post Office and Royal Mail workers. They are good people doing their best for ordinary working people.

[Lord Mandelson]

I rather regret that my noble friend used the word Luddite in relation to the employees of the Royal Mail. I did not use that term, and I very much regret that it should be so misapplied, as he has misapplied it, to the overwhelming mass of employees of the Royal Mail who know that they need to embrace change but, I fear, did not and do not have the leadership of the union to enable them to do so in the way that they need and wish to.

The task now is to make sure that the new Bill secures the Royal Mail's future and the viability of its business model, underpins the universal letter delivery service that the public require and rely on and sustains the relationship between the Royal Mail and the nationwide post office network. This needs to be got right in this Bill. These goals are chiefly dependent not on the Royal Mail's ownership but on the new legislative framework of regulation which the company will operate within. I have no doubt this needs extensive rethinking. I say this frankly: Labour did not get the Royal Mail's regulatory regime right early on when we introduced legislation, and that is why we proposed extensive reform in our Bill.

In my view, the priority for debate and amendment in this House should concern chiefly the clauses of the new Bill concerning future regulation. This is the nub of the issue and where the greatest and most detailed examination needs to take place because we need regulation that enables Royal Mail to compete without both hands tied behind its back. This means regulation which recognises the unique role of the Royal Mail as the universal service provider and its need to be profitable in delivering the service. It must also provide the basis for attracting much-needed new capital to the company and experienced management who can provide skill and expertise.

I accept that it is at least arguable that under Labour's original legislative proposal for a strategic partner in a minority position in the company, it might have been hard to attract the required capital and management strength, and that, from this minority position, it might have been too difficult to bring about the necessary change to turn round the company. In any case, this is history. What I cannot accept, though, is that a so-called foreign presence in the ownership of the Royal Mail is somehow treacherous or bound to lead to disaster, as we have heard expressed again and again in the other House. Deutsche Post and TNT in the Netherlands have shareholders from across the world, including Britain, and international alliances between Europe's postal operators will be widespread in the future. We do not have a nationality test for investment in Britain. The previous Labour Government were implacably opposed to such a thing, notwithstanding the wider review of takeover rules that I initiated. We are successful in Britain at attracting inward investment. In former utilities, we now have EDF, RWE and E.On, for example, and many people's jobs in Britain depend on that investment and that ownership. So let us not have false, little-Englander sentiments injected into the debate.

Our examination of the Bill should focus instead on the detail of the new system of regulation, on which I hope the Government will be open to argument and persuasion. However, we cannot let this moment, an opportunity for reform, end in failure again. Royal Mail, once reformed, will then need stability and to be allowed to get on with its job, and in that context I welcome the fact that from Labour's Front Bench we have not heard a commitment to renationalise the Royal Mail should it pass out of state ownership. This is sensible. As with gas, water and electricity in the 1980s and 1990s, Labour moved from a position of flat-out opposition to change, to a decision not to renationalise, to an embrace of these utilities performing well in the commercial sector. I suspect that history will repeat itself should privatisation be achieved.

My last observation is only that there is probably a wider moral to the Royal Mail saga: that when difficult issues come along, we cannot just run away from them. There is a Labour way to change things, and for us that meant bringing in a new partner but in minority ownership. When that Labour way does not happen or is stopped, the issue does not go away. It comes back, sometimes with a solution in a less palatable form than we originally wanted. That is exactly what has happened here, just as the then Prime Minister and I warned would happen if our reform and our Bill did not go ahead. I am only sorry that our warnings fell on deaf ears at the time.