Postal Services Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, with whom, more than 25 years ago, I negotiated across a table in the Treasury on the pay and conditions at the Inland Revenue. Likewise, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead.

This is my first participation in the proceedings on the Bill, so I should declare a coincidental interest. When I was a temporary part-time undergraduate postman in Hampstead, nearly 60 years ago, I was assigned to a delivery round in Hampstead, later served so remarkably by the noble Lord. When I told him that I had delivered Christmas mail to the late Sir Ralph Richardson, who used to open the door to me in a silk dressing gown, the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, could give me the particulars not only of that address but of the whole round. When later I lived on the south face of Highgate West Hill, immediately overlooking the garden of the noble Lord, Lord Healey, on the Holly Lodge Estate, our regency terrace abutted that shrine of philatelists, the grave of Sir Rowland Hill, the inventor of the penny stamp, in the northern element of Highgate Cemetery. I would not want whoever lives in my house today to be troubled at night because Sir Rowland was turning in his grave at the treatment of his remarkable inheritance by either Her Majesty’s Government or your Lordships’ House.

It is also a pleasure to serve as a foot soldier in the gallant band assembled under the command of the two noble Lords opposite, whose concern, inter alia, is to ensure the maintenance of our postal heritage, which is the subject of the amendment. I would be misleading your Lordships’ House if I implied that either my signature or, I suspect, that of my noble friend Lord Boswell beside me, was written in invisible ink between the particular words in all three amendments in the group. Certainly, in my case and, I suspect, that of my noble friend Lord Boswell, my heart is loyal to the general calls of the noble Lords opposite. The whole House is in their debt for providing the hook on which to hang an exploration of how far Her Majesty's Government constructively concur with that concern.

Given the interest shown in the archive beside Mount Pleasant, not only by Back-Benchers but by Ministers—I know that my noble friend Lady Wilcox has paid a visit to it, and I hope that she was as impressed as I was when the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group had an enthralling visitation—I am reasonably clear that Her Majesty's Government are seized of the issue. At the end of this debate, we shall all have a clearer idea of how seized they are of a solution.

Of course I can see the problems that this inheritance confers on HMG but, at this time, those problems should be a spur to an imaginative and constructive solution rather than a response of despair and inertia. When I was at the Harvard Business School more than half a century ago, an engaging professor reminded us that if you did not know where you were trying to get to, any road would get you there. Conversely, in this instance, the scale of the inheritance and the United Kingdom’s pivotal role in postal history provide the knowledge of whence we have come. The existing collection, as the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, said, is designated in the “outstanding” category, which makes it the equal of the National Archives at Kew, and no one in your Lordships’ House would suggest that we should not seek to preserve those.

I should warn my noble friend that this is a battlefield over which I have fought previously. My favourite-ever Committee stage was that of the Greater London Authority Bill in the other place, where 27 of the Committee’s 29 Members sat for London seats. The only outsiders were the Minister’s PPS, who was from Aberdeen, and the Official Opposition’s Whip. The latter had, in his day, been the leader of another metropolitan authority. Much of the initial Bill, which grew by more than 50 per cent in the number of its clauses by the end of its progress, was devoted to strategies that the Mayor had to prepare. However, there was to be no strategy for archives. I moved a small amendment in a short speech saying that there should be such an archival strategy, but warned the Minister, the right honourable Nick Raynsford MP, that if his response showed no sympathy for the idea, I had a much longer speech up my sleeve for my response. He showed me no sympathy. I delivered my gargantuan but pertinent oration. The amendment was not carried, but the debate was the foundation for a similar amendment that was carried in your Lordships’ House.

I reassure the Minister that I am not uttering that threat today because I have every confidence that her heart is in the right place on this issue. However, I will listen closely to what Her Majesty's Government propose. Since I have not put down an amendment, I would be abusing the procedures of your Lordships' House—as some may feel I have already—if I aired my views, except to say that if the Government are, almost certainly sensibly, reluctant to load burdens on to the private sector for heritage maintenance. I suspect that transferring this task to Post Office Ltd would contain what an American advertising executive once described in my hearing as “the mucus of a good idea”. To mislay or disperse four centuries of postal history would be a stain on the escutcheon of any Administration, and especially on that of the coalition.