Royal Mail and the Universal Service Obligation

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ali. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing this important debate. £567 million: that is the amount Royal Mail bosses paid to shareholders in 2021, and it came from record-breaking profits that totalled £758 million. But just a few months after the company recorded these eye-watering figures, its bosses claimed that the business was bleeding money and went on to threaten the jobs of up to 10,000 posties.

That is the background to this dispute on Royal Mail: bosses on million-pound salaries taking what they can get, ransacking a 500-year-old part of our national infrastructure while seeking to cut jobs, shred workers’ terms and conditions, and worsen a service that our communities rely on. I stand in full solidarity with members of the Communication Workers Union at Royal Mail in Coventry and across the country who have been on strike to protect their jobs and rights, and for a fair pay rise. I also want to put on record my disgust at the union-busting tactics that Royal Mail management have engaged in, with about 100 spurious allegations levelled against CWU reps, whose only crime in the bosses’ eyes is standing up for themselves and their colleagues by going on strike.

I want to address the point about strikes head on, because they impact all our constituents. Of course they do; it is in their nature. Strikes are disruptive, just as they are on the railways or in the NHS. But when living costs soar, when everything is going up except wages, and when asking nicely does not get results, workers simply have no choice but to go on strike. The real problem is not workers going on strike; it is the rigged economy that the Tories have built that forces workers to go on strike, and I think that point is catching on. We only have to look at the polls across the board. The public back the strikers, from posties and nurses to teachers and rail workers. Even if they are not taking industrial action, people know that striking workers want what they want for themselves: fair pay, decent jobs and affordable bills. They want basic rights. They are not asking for much, and they have had enough of losing out while people at the top have got richer and richer.

This is not new in the Royal Mail. Since the Tory-Lib Dem coalition privatised the service in 2013, going beyond what even Thatcher attempted, shareholders have been paid more than £2 billion in dividends and buy-backs, and bosses’ salaries have skyrocketed, but services have declined and workers’ wages have stagnated. Even the privatisation was a total rip-off, with big banks undervaluing the company to a tune of billions and letting big shareholders make huge fortunes as they watched the value of their shares rocket, only to sell up once share prices stabilised. Now, after nearly a decade of privatisation, Royal Mail bosses want to end the universal service obligation, risking a service that caters to 32 million households and that has existed for more than 500 years, and replacing it with yet another gig economy company.

I want to end with a message to the Government: do not let Royal Mail be broken up; do not let mismanagement and greed destroy a service that our communities rely on, nor watch from the sidelines as our posties are made redundant, and their terms and conditions shredded. Ultimately, my message to the Minister and the Government is: end the failed experiment of privatisation and bring Royal Mail back into public ownership.