Postal Services (Rural Areas)

Debate between Lady Hermon and Michael McCann

Monday 2nd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr McCann]

Yes, but under Royal Mail, we maintain the concept of universal delivery. As the hon. Gentleman has made clear, Royal Mail is profitable—it is earning the country money—which is why, instead of a having a one-off pre-election bonus through the sale of services, the UK should enjoy a regular income from post office services throughout the country.

If privatisation is the trend, will there be other royal privatisations? Can we look forward to the McDonald’s civil list, the Starbucks Duchess of Cambridge, or the Mitchells and Butlers Windsor castle? After all, the latter company already has hundreds of Windsor Castles, so it would only be a consolidation of the brand.

I have said those things in jest, but there is a serious point. A line must be drawn on how far privatisation is allowed to go. Everyone, including the Government, agrees that some things simply cannot be put up for sale. Honours such as peerages fall into that category. Parliamentary seats are legally immune from sale. The Prime Minister’s dinner table ought also to be exempt, although there are reports that donations to one Government party can get people through that front door. The argument is about whether or not postal services are a proper candidate for selling off. I and many other right hon. and hon. Members do not believe that the case has been made. Perhaps it is worth looking at the debate from the other side.

Recent complaints from the head of Royal Mail, Moya Greene, about remuneration for higher executives in the service, suggest that one priority for a privatised postal service will be significantly better pay for those in senior management positions. I am sure that Moya is still smarting from having to agree to hand back the £250,000 she received to get on the UK housing ladder, on top of the £127,000 she receives annually in relocation payments. Marie Antoinette’s riposte, “Let them eat cake” comes to mind. Are those sorts of increases really what the country wants to see—and pay for—at a time when most families have suffered a drop in income as a result of the economic climate?

The evidence does not back up the case for selling off postal services, so what is the real reason behind the Government’s enthusiasm for these projects?

[Lady Hermon]

I preface my remarks by saying that I do not want the hon. Gentleman to breach confidentiality, but it would provide a helpful contrast to the pay, salary and bonus of the chief executive if he could give us some idea of the income of the sub-postmasters in the post offices in his constituency.

[Mr McCann]

I am grateful for that intervention, but unlike our salaries, which are publicly available, I do not know the salaries of individual sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses in my constituency. However, I think we can say that their salaries will be a fraction of the money paid to the chief executive, who appears to be willing to increase the salaries of higher executives under Royal Mail privatisation plans.

The evidence does not back up the case for selling off postal services, so we must ask what is the real reason for this project. For most of those on the Government Benches it is surely a dogmatic belief that, whatever the evidence, private is good and public is bad. I anticipate that the argument that postal services do not really have the same status in this technological age as they may have had in the past may come up. We will be told that people have the alternative of going online or using e-mail, and so do not have to rely on postal services. However, my recent experiences in Blackwood, Kirkmuir Hill and other rural areas in my constituency suggest that that is a rash assumption. British Telecom and the Scottish Government, supported by the UK Government, are rolling out programmes for so-called superfast broadband. In rural Blackwood and Kirkmuir Hill, however, a part of the community—a new development—has been left out due to the rather bizarre claim that they could not be sure of demand. Those constituents may get new broadband speeds in three, four, five or six years’ time, so they cannot rely on the internet and e-mail to conduct their business now. They have to resort to more traditional means.

That clearly demonstrates that communities in rural areas, where it is most expensive and difficult to upgrade online services, are the most likely to have to rely on postal services for the longest time. Yet if postal services are deemed to be too expensive, it will be in those areas that services are most likely to be jettisoned by private sector companies as uneconomical. That has certainly been the experience in New Zealand. In the UK, the number of rural post offices has been cut by 2,765 since 2000. I acknowledge that that cut is less than the cut to the number of urban post offices in the same period, but the accessibility criteria I mentioned earlier mean it is more significant, as rural offices are much further apart. Rural areas suffer in the provision of traditional Royal Mail and Post Office services and in the technological revolution from which urbanised areas will be able to benefit more or less immediately.

There are, of course, questions about access to services for those who do not own cars and have to get to urban centres, where postal services are more profitable and more likely to remain. A recent Library note shows that the accessibility criteria already differ between urban and rural areas, with urban post offices expected to be within 1 mile of the customer, but up to 3 miles away in rural areas. There are bus services from rural areas—my constituency is no different in that respect—but they are by no means as frequent as those that urban users are familiar with. That self-evidently reduces access, compared with being able to walk up the road to a local post office facility in one’s own village.

Then there is the question of whether the public want postal services to be sold off. The evidence from my postbag is that many people are deeply concerned about the proposals and have shown support for the Communication Workers Union campaign. I, too, would like to mention Hugh Gaffney, who has been a regular correspondent and has worked tirelessly on behalf of his union members in my constituency. However, nobody has written to me to say that the sell-off is a good thing and should go ahead. I cannot find any reference to a Royal Mail sell-off in the 2010 Conservative or Lib Dem manifestos, so there can be no claim of an electoral mandate for the proposal.

In the face of public hostility to the idea and the lack of a clear mandate, surely the Government should reconsider their proposals and withdraw them. At the very least, they should defer the issue until after the 2015 election and put it in their parties’ manifestos to ensure that, before any decision is taken, there is a clear and proper mandate for such a potentially far-reaching act, because once services in rural areas have gone, there will be little chance of their returning and our country will be a poorer place for it.