Postal Services Bill

Robert Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Bob Russell]

The hon. Gentleman may well be right. I might come on to the point about pressing down prices in the future.

I am not a fan of privatisation, either of Royal Mail and the Post Office or of any other aspect of a public utility. My record is proof of that. I did not agree with the proposals that came out under the Labour Government to privatise or part-privatise Royal Mail and the Post Office. Although my heart is against the Bill, my head tells me that it will happen. We must be pragmatic and we must accept the inevitable. I am still hoping that a mutualised company will emerge, as many of our sub-post offices are already run by mutuals through the co-operative movement. That is one way. Another way would be if shares were issued to the work force.

[Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)]

On the issue of downstream access that my hon. Friend has been addressing, one thing that the Bill does is to give the regulation to a regulator with more robust experience of regulating markets. The most important thing that the regulator will have to do is to ensure that the access arrangements are fair and balanced so that Royal Mail can survive to deliver that crucial universal service.

[Bob Russell]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes an important and valid point. Those who inherit this Bill, when it becomes an Act, will need to take that on board.

I think I am one of the few people in the House who was once employed by the Post Office. I joined the company in 1973, when it was Post Office Telecommunications. It then became British Telecommunications—that was the first significant split—and it was then privatised. The rest is history, as they say. Many people still refer to that great British institution as the General Post Office, even though it must be 40 or 50 years since the GPO ceased to exist—I am not sure exactly when it was—in the same way as they still refer to the boy scouts, even though they have not been boy scouts for decades.

Returning to the point that the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) made, I am grateful for this trip down memory lane because when the previous Postal Services Bill came before the House, the shadow Chancellor was the responsible Minister and he had some harsh words to say about the previous Administration. He said:

“If I was being kind, I would call their stewardship maladroit. If I was being unkind, I would say that Postman Pat’s black and white cat would have provided better stewardship of the Post Office over the term of the previous Government.”—[Official Report, 15 February 2000; Vol. 344, c. 868.]

It is fair to say that we are now back to the modern Postman Pat and the Specsavers advert.

There are 11,905 post offices in the UK, the vast majority of which are sub-post offices run as franchises by sub-postmasters.