Postal Services (Rural Areas)

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am delighted to speak in this important debate on the future of postal services in rural areas, and it is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie). I congratulate all hon. Members who proposed this excellent motion, especially my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark), who gave this debate a lucid and thoughtful opening.

The fact that the motion is supported so widely is hugely important and will, I hope, provide a clarion call to the Government that those who represent rural and semi-rural seats will not stand for anything less than a genuinely universal service as regards Royal Mail and the Post Office. My postbag of postcards, letters and e-mails from people from across my constituency’s 240 square miles bears a clear message: keep the Royal Mail public, with a genuine universal obligation, and protect our post offices. My constituents are absolutely right to say that. Some who have written to me tell me openly that they are supporters of the Countryside Alliance, whereas others will be members of the Communication Workers Union or Unite. The majority are probably not aligned with any of those groups, but everyone speaks with one voice on this issue, which is so critical to all rural and semi-rural communities, such as those in my constituency. At least one commentator has described the campaign to save Royal Mail and the universal service obligation as

“an unholy alliance of left and right”.

People coming together across the normal political divides might be “unholy” in the tawdry little world of dog-whistle politics, but for most of us it is a sign of strength.

I hope that hon. Members will now forgive me a moment of lyricism. Is this situation not a case of an Aesop’s fable being enacted all over again? Is it not the Notting Hill town mice, free-market rodents to every last whisker, scoffing at their little country cousins, saying, “Come on, let’s get rid of the old-fashioned structure. We’ll do something more modern, more sophisticated—more free market. In short, things will be so much better”? We all know what happened in the end: whether because of the couple of dogs in Aesop’s version or the vacuum cleaner in the 1970s one—it is odd what one remembers—the metropolitan order got its come-uppance and the country mouse gladly returned to the security of a system that worked.

I suspect that things are not quite as easy in this case as they were in Aesop’s fable, because if the Government go ahead with their plans for Royal Mail, the security of the old system in rural areas simply will not be in place. If Royal Mail as we know it is destroyed, it will not just wait around some imaginary corner. It was put beautifully in an article in The Daily Telegraph last summer written by Vicki Woods, stating that

“twisting lanes and long driveways may be a step too far for the privatised Royal Mail.”

We still have not heard why the Government intend to privatise such a profitable institution as Royal Mail or why they appear to have ruled out the mutual option of ownership. We still have no guarantees that the cost of sending parcels to different parts of the country will be the same and we have no guarantees, shamefully—because there are no guarantees—that Royal Mail will stay where it belongs, in British hands.

We often speak in this place of the importance of a revival in private sector fortunes for economic growth and we are absolutely right to do so, but in our rural communities that highlights the importance of people being able to work at home from those communities. Whatever line of business they are in, the chances are that that will mean parcels and mail. Imagine the disincentive to those communities if every single delivery ends up costing more—perhaps vastly more—than in an urban area. That would be even more the case if the daily delivery ended. The impact on rural staff and companies—and ultimately on the rural economy—would be immense.

Let me move on to the post office. We cannot forget that in many rural centres post offices can be a hub for the local community. We should invest in that and support it. I want to pay tribute at this point to the post office diversification fund of the Labour Welsh Government, which last year made a grant to Pontfadog post office in the beautiful Ceiriog valley to fund new lighting and signage, a new chiller for fruit and veg, sandwiches, pies and cakes for tourists, a photocopier and a notice board. The post office, like many in the smaller villages, manages to combine being a village centre with being a place of hospitality, a tourist information centre and so much more. We must support such initiatives and commit ourselves to them and those like them in our rural areas.

We must think, too, about how we can support postal services in two other scenarios that are, I think, almost exclusively rural. The first is when there is no longer a full post office but the Post Office is willing to retain a counter. How can we give more support to other retail outlets, where they exist, or to other organisations? We must be more flexible in that regard and urgently need to do more to promote partnership working and to get post office counters running. As long as there is the relevant security, we can and should be very imaginative about where to place those counters.

In the second scenario, the Post Office will want to keep a post office open but no willing party will take on the post of postmaster, which means that we see temporary or, in some cases, long-term closures. We should be open to different patterns of employment so that services never have to close for the lack of one post holder. More must be done to ensure that those post offices stay open. Post Office Ltd should not be let off the hook in this regard: we would not say that it did not matter if a school or health service provider closed for six months.

Postal services—Royal Mail and the Post Office—are undoubtedly vital to our rural communities, so I urge the Government to do more to support them. I urge them to listen to the country mice in this place and reconsider their flawed and unpopular plans to privatise Royal Mail.