It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing this important and timely debate.
As many hon. Members have said, we have to look at the current situation with Royal Mail regarding the USO and at the Royal Mail going forward. Not only have I been on the picket lines, but I have visited people in the workplace, and it is a fact that those individuals are more determined to take the Royal Mail forward as a viable, modern organisation than the people who are actually managing it. The people managing the company at the moment are taking fortunes from the business, and I will mention Simon Thompson personally. The fact that the salary of the chief executive is 23 times more than the median wage of a Royal Mail worker is scandalous, and nobody here would agree with paying him that amount.
Simon Thompson’s objective is to destroy the Royal Mail and sell it off to Vesa Equity, which now owns 23% or 24% of Royal Mail. That fact was unearthed by
the CWU during early discussions about the pay award. Behind the scenes the management is trying to destroy Royal Mail in order to sell it off and to make fortunes, and then those people will move on to other industries in order to do the same. On the other side, we have people who are losing wages and who are prepared to fight for a viable, modern Royal Mail service, looking after the public in the future. That is the difference.
There are 115,000 posties on strike: the key workers we all clapped during the pandemic for the wonderful job they had done; the men and women who trundled the streets with the covid packs, day in, day out; the only individuals lots of people saw on a daily basis, in the morning—always with a smile, always with a whistle. These are the individuals who are fighting for what we all need, which is a modern Royal Mail, not a gig economy, courier-type service where we hive off the letters and use self-employed white van drivers, who themselves work extremely hard. We do not want to replace what we have with that type of employment; I would have thought those days had gone.
The profits been mentioned a number of times. What organisation could make £750 million-odd in profit, give £570 million-odd to shareholders and then not have any money to pay the people who provide the service, and then, just months after, say it is losing £1 million a day? It is ludicrous. There needs to be an inquiry into how the management are deliberately destroying Royal Mail, both financially and structurally. Until we get that, we have to support Royal Mail and the workers on the picket line to make sure we get a fair resolution and a decent, modern Royal Mail service into the future.
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