It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali. As the MP for the largest constituency in the UK outside the highlands of Scotland, I very much welcome this debate, secured by the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne). As others have said, the Royal Mail and the universal service obligation are vital in rural areas such as mine. Rural areas also tend to have a higher age demographic and still suffer from poor broadband services. I have constituents who are still on dial-up—that is often not recognised. I also have constituents who live in notspots who cannot use mobile phones. It is still vital that they have an opportunity to receive postal communications, and that should be six days a week, so I welcome what the Minister has said on that and I very much hope that there will be no pushing back.
I pay huge tribute to the posties in my constituency for the job they do. If any Members present have tried to deliver addressed mail to constituents, they will know what a challenge it is. Having met many posties on visits to delivery offices, I did not find them to be a group of militant trade unionists; I found them to be people who took great pride in the job they did. In fact, they often feel embarrassed or ashamed about the way the service is currently being delivered. One person at the Lockerbie postal delivery office told me that they were really disappointed when they did not meet their targets for the first time. They were not out to cause disruption; they want to deliver a first-class service. For them to do that, we need to see the same commitment from the management of Royal Mail.
The market is changing, but the example I would cite is that of Amazon, which recently chose to bring a delivery vehicle into parts of my constituency where deliveries would have previously been made by Royal Mail. That was a commercial decision; as we saw with the recent closure of the Amazon facility near Greenock, the company makes commercial decisions, so it might well decide tomorrow that it is not going to provide a van service into Dumfriesshire. If we allow Royal Mail to be diminished, what kind of service will be provided to constituents? That is something I have concerns about, along with all the issues that Members have raised about private delivery firms. When the House of Commons used a private delivery firm, it managed to deliver my parliamentary mail on more than one occasion to residential addresses, rather than to my office.
I know that the Minister is concerned about the nature of the Post Office, because although it recently declared that it was entirely separate from Royal Mail, that is not really the case. The two are interconnected, and when CJ Lang and Son—the operator of the SPAR convenience store network in Scotland—pulled out of a number of post offices, it cited parcel issues and the return of parcels to post offices.
In concluding, I want to make the further point that I am concerned about the sustainability of the post office network and Royal Mail across my constituency and others. These two assets are incredibly valuable to constituents, and the Government should be doing everything they can to sustain them.
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