Royal Mail and the Post Office

I am delighted to take part in this important debate, particularly as it comes on the back of the issuing last week of the report, ““The challenges and opportunities facing UK postal services””, by Richard Hooper, Dame Deirdre Hutton and Ian Smith. I shall refer to it, because it is an important report that shows the seriousness of the problems that we face. Clearly, we know the background. It is good to see the Minister in his regular seat. He must have spent more time in this Chamber over the past few months than any other Minister, and I am sure that we will eventually give him the seat if he sits in it much longer. We have been through the political pain and community anger caused by the closures, some of which are still to come in parts of the country. Now—dare I say it?— there is an increasing likelihood of legal challenges, as individual post offices and communities look at how the consultations were held and see them as having been unfair. However, we are looking at the big picture today, and that is what I mainly want to do. I have some responsibility and interest: as I have said previously in this Chamber and in the House, I served on the Committee that considered the Bill that became the Postal Services Act 2000. It was largely a consensual operation all those years ago and was about trying to save the Post Office and Royal Mail. It is fair to say, as I will say again later, that the legislation has not been an unalloyed success. We are in a mess at the moment, even if the report that has just been published is taken as the benchmark. The purpose of the legislation that we introduced five or so years ago was twofold. First, there was an idea that liberalisation would make the British Post Office more efficient and competitive. It would be able to see off its main competitors in the British market but also become strong enough to work in France, Germany, Italy and everywhere else in Europe. Its reputation and prowess would be such that it would succeed. Clearly, on those measures, we have a complete disaster. We have no imprint on Europe, and our competitors—the Dutch, Germans and French—in one guise or another, are rampant in our homeland.