Post Office Network Subsidy Scheme (Amendment) Order 2010

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her introduction, which was helpful. I support the order and think that those who originated the network subsidy scheme deserve high praise. It is heartening to hear of a continued determination to keep what is left of the Post Office network. Support for the network of 11,500 branches is good news and I think that it will be acclaimed across the nation.

From my work in another place over many years, it quickly became obvious that any community worthy of the name needed a post office and a school, and this order may well hold the line in terms of our communities. These are big amounts of money and they must be welcomed.

One always speaks from experience, so I instance the sub-post office of Llanfynydd in Flintshire. It is tiny, it is valued and it is the village centre. Nothing is too much trouble for the family who run it. Situated on a Welsh hillside at 800 feet, adjacent to a church and a school, it is the centre of a far-flung, Welsh-speaking community. I do not think that any praise is too high for this particular sub-post office, and I make that statement in the knowledge that there are many hundreds of such sub-post offices across the nation. Long may they remain open, giving our communities the service that they need.

I hope that this order will guarantee the survival of post offices such as the one in Llanfynydd in Flintshire. I think that Wales will benefit from what is being proposed and I welcome the order very much.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I could not help smiling when the Minister defined the Royal Mail and the Post Office because I remember when it was called the GPO, which dates me slightly. I was also an employee and, as I recall, the postmaster-general at the time was Anthony Wedgwood Benn. How time passes when you are enjoying yourself.

We welcome the increased subsidy. However, as the Merits Committee helpfully issued a health warning and said that the Order should be considered in conjunction with the Postal Services Bill, it is only appropriate that we register our concern about the impact of the Postal Services Bill. Of course we welcome the increased subsidy, but we would like to see enshrined in legislation the principle that the Post Office network should be used as the access points for Royal Mail.

We believe that the Secretary of State should have the power to specify exactly how many access points there should be. The reason for that is that it has been suggested that a privatised Royal Mail company might think that its needs could be served by a network of some 4,000 outlets. Currently, we have 11,900 post offices. I certainly endorse the comments of my noble friend Lord Jones about the vital importance of these post offices to the local community. Of that number, some 7,000 or so could be adequate to meet the access criteria that were introduced by the last Labour Government and have been accepted by this Government and spelt out again in their recent document on the future of the Post Office network in the digital age.

The criteria spell out that the access criteria introduced by Labour meant that, as the Minister said, 99 per cent are to be within three miles of their nearest outlet and 90 per cent should be within one mile. The access criteria continue with a more detailed definition in relation to urban and rural areas. The purpose of the criteria is to ensure reasonable access to post offices in both urban and rural areas. Without them, there would be no control of the overall shape of the Post Office network. We believe that a viable sustainable Post Office network is a critical part of the social infrastructure for many communities, which I was pleased to hear the Minister seemed to endorse. That is why we introduced the access criteria: to ensure that communities would continue to be fairly served by a national Post Office network. As I said, these access criteria could be met with something like 7,000 post offices, but we put in an additional investment so that we could keep the number at 11,900.

If the Government are serious about wanting to keep that number of post offices open and keep the network as we know it now, there should be a mechanism that the Government can use. The Secretary of State should have the power to specify the number of post offices to be used as access points for the services of the provider of the universal postal service. I am talking about that in the context of a privatised Royal Mail.

The Minister might argue that it is up to the privatised business what it decides to do, how many access points it uses and where those access point are located. That is precisely our concern. The nature of the relationship between Royal Mail and the Post Office in a privatised environment would be different. Will there be the current inter-business agreement that safeguards that relationship? We are talking about a national network and a universal service that we all agree we want to be easily accessible to everyone in the UK. Given that all parties on both sides of the House now agree on the access criteria of post offices, we cannot see any good argument for the Secretary of State not having the power to specify not only that the provider of the universal service should use post offices as access points but how many post offices that should be. If the Government are serious about protecting the Post Office network, the straightforward solution would be to enshrine in the Postal Services Bill that the Secretary of State should have that power.

We are talking about using large amounts of taxpayers’ money to subsidise the Post Office network. Therefore we want to make sure that that money is used to preserve that as part of the universal postal service. It seems that other countries have no problem about not letting the Government have a say in this. Elsewhere, where there has been privatisation of the mail service—we make it clear that we are opposed to complete privatisation—there has also been legislation to protect the post office network and specify its use as access points for the universal postal service.