Performance of Royal Mail
Chris Curtis Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)
Like many others, I will start by paying tribute to our fantastic posties, particularly the one who delivers my mail to Richmond House—constantly reminding me, through letters from constituents, just how dreadful the service that they are experiencing from Royal Mail has become. I will not spend too long listing the many examples of atrocious service that Royal Mail has been delivering in my constituency, but let me give one example. A letter dated 7 July arrived on 4 August, five days after the recipient was supposed to have had an operation. Just in case that was not bad enough, Royal Mail also messed up on follow-up letters from the NHS about cancer checks. We have heard that Royal Mail is planning to get this service fixed by Christmas. I should like to know which Christmas, because in August one of my constituents managed to receive a very, very late Christmas card. I am not sure that we have got last Christmas fixed, let alone Christmas this year.
No one is going to argue that this is acceptable but, like many Members, I find it particularly frustrating that every couple of months or so I go to the delivery office and we have that conversation in which the people running it tell me that, yes, they have been facing challenges, but don’t worry, they are on track now. I go back two months later and it is just like groundhog day: we have exactly the same conversation. I am told, “Yes, there were problems when we last told you that we would fix them, but don’t worry, they are being fixed now.”
We have heard all the statistics showing that Royal Mail is completely failing to meet the targets that it has set, although those targets have been lowered. We have also heard that prices have been rising at the same time. I think people appreciate the challenges that Royal Mail is facing—there has been a dramatic drop in the number of letters, from the 20 billion that we saw years ago to just 6.5 billion today—but there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea that every time Royal Mail fails to meet the standards required of it, our response should be to lower those standards until they become achievable.
When investors bought shares in Royal Mail, they knew that they were buying into a business with certain regulatory obligations attached. Those obligations were part of the deal. While circumstances change and regulations sometimes need to catch up with them, we cannot have a system in which shareholders get to enjoy the potential rewards of private ownership while the public are expected to accept an ever-diminishing service.
Even if this is a difficult problem to solve, solving it should start with an acknowledgment that the decision by the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition to privatise Royal Mail was a mistake. The argument for privatisation is normally that the discipline of the market will drive improvements in efficiency and service. If a company does a bad job, customers can go somewhere else, and the threat of losing those customers gives the business an incentive to improve. But, as should have been obvious at the time, that mechanism does not work with Royal Mail. If my constituents do not receive their hospital appointment letters, they cannot just decide to have them delivered by somebody else. They do not get to choose which postal network the NHS uses to reach them. We have lost the accountability that comes with public ownership, without securing the competitive pressure that is supposed to make private ownership work.
There is a much bigger problem with the way in which we regulate many of these privatised monopolies. In the short time that I have left, let me build on the argument advanced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) about the options for renationalisation, which is certainly something that I believe we should look into. However, this challenge goes way beyond Royal Mail. We now have a problem across our economy with unaccountable, regulated monopolies that simply do not work. If you speak to Ofcom—I may be the only person here who has some sympathy with Ofcom’s position—it will tell you that Royal Mail, like so many other regulated monopolies, such as the water companies, is in financial distress. We cannot use fines as a way to stop those companies being in financial distress, but we still need to produce an incentive for them to improve their behaviour. I urge the Government to consider more innovative ways than just using the fines and the regulatory model to incentivise better behaviour. For example, they should be looking at using—
UK-US Trade and Tariffs
Chris Curtis Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Jonathan Reynolds
The right hon. Gentleman knows that I do not comment on the detail of talks, but I can tell him that there have been no discussions in relation to the NHS or anything that would concern him in that regard. This is about goods and services and how we recognise each other’s standards. There is nothing relating to the health sector that I have been able to talk about with US counterparts. I hope he finds that reassuring.
Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)
The automotive industry is incredibly important for workers in Milton Keynes, with many headquarters based there, such as Volkswagen’s. I realise that these tariffs will be incredibly difficult for the automotive sector, and it is good to hear what the Secretary of State said about looking for a pragmatic approach to the ZEV mandate. What else will he be doing to support the automotive industry here in the UK?
Jonathan Reynolds
I thank my hon. Friend for his support. He has some tremendous businesses based in his area, and it is great having him here as a champion for them. In terms of the automotive sector, it is about the regulatory environment, which we have discussed, and it is about the funding that we make available for co-investment with the private sector, which is always a priority, and £2 billion was allocated for that in the Budget. We have to accelerate and improve our electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and there was £300 million for that in the Budget. The pressures on the automotive sector across Europe are fierce—that is widely recognised—with changes in consumer demand and much more competition from China coming into the market. We have to be serious about making sure that the UK is the place to be a producer of automotive vehicles. My personal commitment to that is very strong.