Royal Mail and the Universal Service Obligation

Debate between Rushanara Ali and Clive Efford

Thursday 12th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Ms Ali, after 26 years of being in the House, it is a great pleasure to speak in a debate with you in the Chair for the first time. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing this important debate.

I will start by doing something I did not expect to do, which is to agree with the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), who gave an excellent speech, including his complimentary comments about the people who work in the postal service. What I find sad about the Government is that whenever they talk about public sector workers, they always talk about them as if they are the enemy, but when I talk to public sector workers, I hear that they are concerned about their conditions making it difficult for them to be able to provide the service they are providing. That is true of the postal workers, when I talk to them about their industrial action and defending the universal service obligation.

The situation we are in right now was predicted at the time of privatisation—incidentally, Royal Mail has been in private hands for 10 years, and here we are with this standard of service. What a disgrace! It was predicted that sooner or later, its management would want to cherry-pick the service. The more profitable bits would be hived off, and the universal service obligation would come under threat.

Post covid, many more people are working from home. I recently led a debate in this Chamber regarding my local train service, because the Government are saying, “We are cutting the local train service because more people are working from home.” Well, if more people are working from home, it follows that more people will be reliant on their post; they will want those important documents that cannot be emailed, which other Members have described, to come through the post. If the Government’s argument for cutting trains applies to the postal service as well, it will be more important to defend the universal service obligation, not less.

I have raised the issue of casualisation in the past. We had casual labour employed to deliver the local post a number of years ago, and we found undelivered bags of mail in the Quaggy river, which runs through my constituency. More importantly, the employers could not identify the workers they had employed to deliver those bags of mail. They had no identification—no way of following up who they were. Those people had rifled through the post, and what they did not have time to open they just dumped in the river—no come back, no follow-up. Is that the sort of casualisation that we want to see—people being hired to deliver the post for Royal Mail because they have a van? It is a service that people rely on and we should not be dumbing it down.

I have one or two questions for the Minister. Royal Mail announced record profits last May of £758 million. It paid out £567 million to shareholders and buy-back schemes. Within six months of International Distributions Services becoming Royal Mail’s parent company, it announced it was losing £1 million a day and was going to cut 10,000 workers. What questions did the Government ask of IDS when it announced it was losing £1 million a day so soon after it had made record profits of £758 million? Given that the losses were within just six months, surely that should have raised some alarm bells within the Government.

What attitude do the Government take to the dumbing down of the workforce, the introduction of the laws of the gig economy—rather than relying on the dedicated workforce that we have—and Royal Mail’s undermining of the workforce? IDS, the parent company, says it is making losses, but apparently boasts to potential investors—this was reported in The Telegraph—that it has a £1.7 million investment war chest to put into the company. How can it be saying one thing to one audience and another to the other?

I know the Minister will sympathise with my final point. Apparently, Mr Daniel Křetínský has links to the gas operator Gazprom. What assurances do we have that we are not supporting Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by the back door? Is there a national security risk from his involvement with Royal Mail?

[Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)]

Order. Can the hon. Member tell the House whether he has informed the Member he mentioned that he would refer to him in this debate?

[Clive Efford]

I am not talking about a Member of the House. Daniel Křetínský is the owner of Vesa Equity Investment.

[Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)]

Fine; it is a similar name.

[Clive Efford]

Finally, will the Minister undertake to defend the universal service obligation and not dumb it down in any way?

Jobs and Business

Debate between Rushanara Ali and Clive Efford

Friday 10th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

The hon. Gentleman’s Government should apologise for their failure to reverse the increase. Child poverty in my constituency has gone up consecutively in the past three years. He ought to apologise for that and he ought to act. He should have lobbied his Government to propose measures in this Queen’s Speech to tackle child poverty. He ought to apologise and I give him the opportunity to do so today.

[Clive Efford]

I am reading the conclusion of the Institute for Fiscal Studies report into child poverty, and it states that relative child poverty is projected to be 6% higher, reversing the fall in relative poverty between 2000 and 2010-11.

[Rushanara Ali]

What can I say to my hon. Friend but, “Well said”? I wish the Minister would take these issues more seriously. Instead of tackling the substantive problem of child poverty, his colleagues in the Treasury have decided to redefine it. As with many things the Government are doing, they find it is easier to meddle with the figures and interfere with the statistics—rewrite them, even. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is not in his place. He has just had his wrists slapped once again by the Office for National Statistics for meddling with the statistics.

The Government should rebuild trust with the British people by coming clean on these issues. They should not try to rewrite the figures, but actually do something about child poverty, an issue that is of great concern to families and to all people. Doing so would address the point, made by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), that the Conservative party is not just in the business of pretending to change on these substantial issues. We live in hope, although there is not much of that left.

The Government’s approach to child poverty and the response of the Minister highlight how out of touch they are. If he and his colleagues cannot understand the seriousness of falling living standards and rising levels of child poverty—to name but two issues—and what they mean for ordinary people’s lives, I cannot understand how we are to trust them to get us out of the economic mess that they have put us in over the past three years. It is their mess: they need to clean it up and they have categorically failed to do so.