Postal Services Bill
Debate between Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe and Lord Razzall
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 21ZB. They are tabled in the name of my noble friend Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, who regrettably and unavoidably cannot be here today. She sends her apologies. My noble friend is currently a partnership director of National Air Traffic Services. Had she been here, she would have been able to give us the benefit of her current experience and no doubt update us on the prospects facing NATS employees, who may be moving towards 100 per cent privatisation in due course. As many noble Lords know, I was previously a partnership director of NATS, so both of us have some experience of a reasonably successfully scheme for handling employee share ownership.
There are a variety of ways in which shares can end up in the hands of employees when privatisations take place. Since the first in 1982, when 90 per cent of the shares in British Aerospace eventually went to employees, there has been a range of offerings—nine or 10 privatisations. The majority were done through institutional public offerings in which employees picked up individual shares and as owners of shares were no different from people in the market. In 2001, when the public/private partnership for NATS was formed, we saw a novel approach adopted. It involved only 5 per cent of the shares. As is often the case when we come to legislation, there is an untold story. It is that had the unions been more willing to participate in planning for the change in 2001, they would have ended up with 10 per cent of the shares rather than the 5 per cent that was eventually the case. When reference is made to the Labour Government not offering shares in the Bill introduced by my noble friend Lord Mandelson, I suspect that had it had a different reception in the other place there is a distinct possibility that shares would have been on offer to the employees, probably in excess of the 10 per cent currently being considered by the Government. I hope that when we look at the 10 per cent and the way the offering is structured we use those untold stories usefully.
These amendments are, to a degree, based on the experience that the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, and I have had in running the trust scheme within NATS. A direct offering to employees could happen with an IPO, so that the shares disappear all over the place afterwards. It is difficult to conclude that employees have been greatly motivated by what has happened with previous share offerings, although I would not deny that entirely. This amendment seeks to engage the employees more with the company. Paragraph (a) proposes that all shares should be held for the benefit of employees in a trust. I know that this may not be entirely acceptable to all the employees. Some of them might want to get their hands on the shares and to dispose of them at the appropriate point. However, I believe that in the best interests of the company and its employees it would be far better if they are retained in a trust holding, so that while employees are working with Royal Mail they get a return on the investment of those shares during the period they hold them.
Paragraph (b) states that,
“a dividend of equal amount shall be paid in respect of each share held by or for the benefit of any employee”.
The argument behind this is that all employees should be treated the same whether they are a postman or the CEO. There should not be differentiation in the way that shares are allocated. An equal dividend should be paid out in equal shares on an equal footing.
We then move on to Paragraph (d). In the NATS scheme, the shares are evaluated each year by an independent company because they are not on the market. The shares have changed in value over the years while they are being held by an individual. When employees then come up to retirement, they know what the value of their share is at the end point, and they then get the money in lieu of their shares, which then go back into the trust. The 5 per cent stake that the employees have within NATS is maintained at 5 per cent on a continuing basis, and the employees maintain their continuing interest in the company. Similarly, this amendment is seeking to establish an arrangement whereby they would not cash them in and sell them to other people but the shares would be retained within the company. When they left the company, the shares would then go back into the trust and be reallocated to new employees who would be joining the company in subsequent years.
The Government already have plenty of experience with such a model in the light of what has happened since 2001 with NATS. I hope, as I mentioned earlier, that we might reach a better arrangement, whereby a representative or representatives of those employees with the shares would find their way to have more influence in the company than they might under the present arrangement with NATS, but that is not covered in this part of the amendment. I hope that the Government are going to be prepared—in the light of the experience with NATS—to look at this very favourably indeed. The amendments are intended to be constructive, not destructive. I hope we might find ways in which we could put more in the Bill than we did when we dealt with the NATS PPP float, where it would have given greater confidence to the employees about the way in which it was going. I believe it would be helpful to anybody who is prospectively looking to purchase the company.
As an aside, for those people concerned—and I am one of them—that Royal Mail may eventually end up in foreign ownership, in the way that so many of our privatised utilities have over the years, this in a sense could be seen as a form of a golden share in retaining a significant British interest in it too, as the employees would be based in Britain. I see the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, is going to respond—he responded with great comforts on Amendments 18 and 19, although a little less so on Amendment 20. I hope when he comes to respond to Amendments 21ZA and 21ZB he will revert back to what he did previously and be very comforting.
Lord Razzall
My Lords, the amendment is extremely constructive. However, I have a concern, which is the one echoed by my noble friend Lady Kramer. For those of us who argued long and hard during the last Bill for an employee share structure—which was resisted by the then Government—I am worried that we should be too prescriptive at present as to the form that the employee share scheme should take. Those of us who have had experience in the private sector in employee share schemes know that there are a lot of ways to skin that particular cat—this may well be one of them, but, having fought and won the battle to get at least 10 per cent held by an employee share scheme, I am worried that we will overcomplicate the Bill.