Performance of Royal Mail
Debate between Chris Bloore and Simon Opher(1 week, 3 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Bloore
I agree.
The Government’s response to the Business and Trade Committee makes the point well: a lack of capacity that forces a company to prioritise some items over others is no justification for failing to deliver the expected service. Royal Mail must deliver 90% of its first-class letters the next working day. It is managing 85%. Against the target of completing 99.9% of delivery routes each day, it is completing just 70%. Those targets have been missed for five years running, while the price of a first-class stamp has risen by 137% to £1.80 and the price of a first-class medium parcel, where Royal Mail competes, has fallen by half. Where there is competition, prices fall; where there is monopoly, prices rise and services continue to fall.
What has the regulator done, really? Since 2015, Ofcom has investigated Royal Mail seven times and fined it four times. Last year, Ofcom lowered the very targets Royal Mail was missing and cut second-class delivery days, saving the company up to £425 million—“rewarding failure”, as Citizens Advice put it. More fines will not fix this, yet Ofcom has never come to this House seeking the powers it needs to hold Royal Mail to account. A regulator that can punish failure but cannot compel improvement must answer a fundamental question: what is it for? If Ofcom cannot do its job, a new regulator, with real teeth, must be considered.
Dr Simon Opher (Stroud) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is being so generous with his time. I echo what he said about my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson), who has led this campaign so strongly in Parliament. In Stroud, our Cotswold Vale Talking Newspaper puts news and music on USB sticks and sends them out to blind and print-disabled listeners in Dursley; the chairman says that those now take six weeks to arrive and that many subscriptions are being cancelled. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to take Royal Mail back into public ownership?
Chris Bloore
That is a cheeky question, and I might get back to it.
In May, the Business and Trade Committee called the service unacceptable and called Ofcom’s regulation into question. It demanded a road map to improvement. We are still waiting. Meanwhile, last Christmas, 16 million people experienced delayed letters, 5.7 million missed a vital letter and 19 million received bundled deliveries. Behind every statistic is someone let down by a service they have paid for and have every right to expect.
Royal Mail points to £500 million of investment and a promise to meet targets by April 2027. I welcome the investment, but a voluntary plan and relaxed targets are no substitute for accountability. No future promise can undo a missed hospital appointment or restore the time lost fighting for a loved one. That is why I joined my hon. Friends the Members for Lichfield and for Corby and East Northamptonshire (Lee Barron) in writing to Royal Mail’s chief executive, Alistair Cochrane, asking him to meet affected MPs in Parliament. Our constituents deserve more than a briefing from a distance.
However, we must also confront uncomfortable questions. When Royal Mail was privatised, we were promised flexibility, investment and competition. Instead, the taxpayer lost hundreds of millions of pounds through an undervalued sale, and performance levels fell. If privatisation was supposed to secure Royal Mail’s future, why are we now facing these challenges, and what needs to change to put the service back on a sustainable footing?
NHS Dentistry: South-west
Debate between Chris Bloore and Simon Opher(1 year, 11 months ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Dr Opher
Yes, but that is even more shocking, is it not?
There are also disincentives in the contract for dentists to take on new NHS patients. When we look into it, there are all sorts of other things. For example, a dentist cannot provide urgent NHS dentistry unless they have used up their quota of UDAs, which are issued to dentists at the start of the year. The whole system is crazy, which is why there has been such a massive saving. As we have heard, dentists are leaving the profession, and it is clear that we are not training enough. I accept what the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) said about how dentists are trained and where they are likely to end up working, because that is incredibly important.
As to solutions, we must have prevention. Dentistry is exceptional because dental treatment is preventive in its own right, so as soon as NHS dentistry is stripped away, there are immediately problems. We also have to make sure that young people’s diet is better. Dentist Cerri Mellish and I have developed a project in our area. Cerri sees young pre-school children who are under five. She has a quick look in their gobs and if there are signs of decay, they are whipped out and the children are given treatment. If there are any other signs of problems, she can give them fluoride enamel. These types of innovative solutions are really important.
One thing that happened with the pandemic was that NHS dentists stopped registering new patients. The pandemic started in 2020, so almost all pre-school children are likely not to be registered with a dentist, which is a real disaster. We should remember that two thirds of general anaesthetics used for children are used for dental reasons, and a general anaesthetic is not without risk.
Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) on securing this important debate. I apologise for being an interloper from the west midlands, but it such an important debate that I want to add some thoughts.
My hon. Friend has hit on an important point. As the father of a toddler, I struggle every day to ensure that he brushes his teeth. The gap in the number of registrations since covid is creating a generation of children who are not used to going to the dentist. We have to reverse that trend; otherwise, we will have huge problems as a society, having to treat teenagers and adults with severe dental problems who have never been to the dentist.
Dr Opher
That is absolutely true. Simple things such as dental brushing schemes, which we introduced in the Stroud area before the election, are essential. Those sorts of things are often laughed at, but they are probably the most important thing we do as a Government.
One other quick win relates to urgent care. The Gloucestershire ICB, particularly in the Stroud area, was able to pay more for the units of dental activity and allowed all NHS dentists to do urgent care. In that way, some of the £86 million that the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) talked about was spent. We were able to quadruple the number of urgent appointments.
We can do that kind of work on a smaller scale, but I suggest that we need to do things step-wise. We must get the prevention in place and start doing urgent dental care, and when we have enough money we can do more. It is all very well talking about fantastic NHS dentistry, but we need the funding for it and we need the taxes to pay for it. As a Government, we are responsible for that. In the long term, we need to look to universal NHS dentistry in this country.