Royal Mail Delivery Office Closures

Debate between Susan Elan Jones and Helen Hayes

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman’s point is well made. I will come on to data that clearly prove that it is the overwhelming preference of customers to have parcels delivered to their home and not to any other location.

The much longer journeys will clearly be even more challenging for older people, disabled residents and those with very small children. As one of my constituents —a 77-year-old pensioner who cares full-time for her disabled adult daughter—has described in a letter to Moya Greene,

“this journey would be exhausting but since I do not drive and I am unable to afford a taxi, there would be no alternative to it.”

Royal Mail has argued that a need for modernisation is driving the changes, but when I visited the West Norwood delivery office during the very busy Christmas peak period it was clear that it is a modern, efficient working environment. The staff are dedicated and hard-working, and they provide an excellent service to their customers.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. She speaks of distance. Does she agree that there will be a massive problem across rural Britain if this goes ahead? Royal Mail is supposed to be here to serve us, but on this it is not doing so.

[Helen Hayes]

I thank my hon. Friend very much for that intervention. The issue of distance applies in rural areas, but in urban areas congestion and journey time rather than distance are the impediment to accessibility. Her point is well made.

The issue is far from unique to my constituency. Between the privatisation of Royal Mail in October 2013 and May 2017, 142 delivery offices—10% of the network—have been closed, and more offices are at risk of closure. Royal Mail has sold more than £200 million-worth of property and it is expected to receive at least a further £500 million of receipts shortly. At the same time, it has paid out more than £800 million in dividends, with an annual dividend now running at more than £220 million. Its chief executive is paid an annual package worth £1.9 million.

Concerns were raised time and time again by Labour MPs during the passage of the Postal Services Act 2011 under the coalition Government that privatisation would place the motive of delivering profits for shareholders at the heart of the organisation and that that would drive down the quality of service for Royal Mail customers and compromise terms and conditions for staff. The Government argued that that would not happen, because the investment funds Royal Mail would be able to access as a consequence of privatisation would be significant, but that is exactly what has happened.

There is no doubt that the postal delivery market is extremely competitive and that Royal Mail is operating in a difficult context, but it is far from clear that Royal Mail’s approach makes good business sense. In addition to providing facilities for mail collection, delivery offices are the depots from which postal workers begin their rounds. Fewer delivery offices mean that postal workers will have further to travel from their base to their rounds, resulting in mail deliveries taking place later in the day.

Among Royal Mail’s customers there is demand for high-quality delivery services, in part fuelled by the continued growth in online shopping, which means that while the number of letters delivered has reduced, the number of parcels delivered is still growing every year. A recent Ofcom survey found that 70% of people still prefer their parcels to be delivered to their home, rather than to work or a click and collect facility. While many competitors offer increasingly short delivery time slots, Royal Mail services in many areas are becoming later, less predictable and therefore less convenient.

Royal Mail was privatised in a shambolic fashion. The coalition Government rushed through the privatisation, with the then Chancellor desperate for funds to prop up his failing austerity agenda. In their rush to sell, the Government grossly underestimated the value of Royal Mail, with its shares jumping 38% on the first day of trading and the taxpayer losing out to the tune of an estimated £1 billion, according to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. The Committee also set out how the Government failed to reap the benefits of the sale of Royal Mail assets included in the privatisation package. The Government ignored National Audit Office advice to remove those assets, notably the network of delivery offices, from the privatisation deal or to add clawback provisions on the future sale of properties. The Government valued three London sites at around £200 million, when the NAO thought they could be worth anywhere between £330 million and £830 million.

Royal Mail continues to sell sites across London at eye-watering prices, to no taxpayer benefit and with no reinvestment in its services to customers. I should be clear, however, that Royal Mail is mistaken if it believes that its site in West Norwood is a potentially lucrative housing site. The site is situated in Lambeth Council’s key industrial and business area, or KIBA, which provides strong protection to employment land uses. There is no possibility that Royal Mail will be able to sell that site for housing.

The Government also failed to define the universal service obligation beyond mail delivery, to secure an appropriate geographical distribution of delivery offices and the time and frequency of deliveries for the future. As a consequence, the social contract at the heart of Royal Mail’s relationship with the communities it serves has been broken. The organisation is orientated only toward profits, while at the same time alienating its workforce with a damaging attack on staff pensions and other terms and conditions. It is not acceptable that pensioners and disabled people in my constituency should have to travel an hour each way to collect their mail while £800 million is distributed to shareholders and the chief executive of Royal Mail is paid almost £2 million a year.

I call on the Government to recognise the scale of the problem, the aggressive approach that Royal Mail is taking to the disposal of its land assets and the total disregard that the organisation is showing for the customers and communities it was created to serve. If no action is taken, our postal delivery service will continue to be decimated and vulnerable residents, disabled people, parents with small children and small business owners will lose out the most. Privatisation is not working for Royal Mail’s customers or for postal workers, and it is time for the Government to take action. A Labour Government would take Royal Mail back into public sector ownership and replace profit with public service at the heart of the organisation.

Will the Minister commit to take action to safeguard delivery offices and the services that communities across the country rely on, and intervene to regulate Royal Mail? Will the Minister also support my urgent call on Royal Mail to scrap its closure plans in West Norwood and East Dulwich, and ensure that its vital services remain accessible to my constituents in SE27 and SE22, and across the country?

Homelessness Reduction Bill

Debate between Susan Elan Jones and Helen Hayes

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 28th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

As a sponsor of this vital Bill, I am proud to support it. It is the first major reform of homelessness legislation for 40 years, and it is an opportunity to make a fundamental difference to the lives of thousands of people in England. I thank Members on both sides of the House who have taken time away from their constituencies to support the Bill. We are engaged in a very special process, which I hope will lead to genuine reform.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for choosing to progress this private Member’s Bill, and for his commitment to it. He heard the same evidence as the other members of the Communities and Local Government Committee, and it is entirely to his credit that, as a member of the governing party, he chose not to turn a blind eye and defend the status quo, but to champion vigorously the need for change. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who, as Chair of the Committee, led the inquiry. I also pay tribute to the Committee Clerks and specialists, whose work contributed to an inquiry that was innovative and rigorous, and that was directly and extensively informed by the experience of those who are, or have been, homeless, and those who seek to support them.

Finally, I pay tribute to Crisis, Shelter, St Mungo’s and Homeless Link for the work they do every day to support growing numbers of homeless people, and for the research and evidence that they have provided to underpin this Bill. I mention Crisis in particular, whose mystery shopper research and No One Turned Away campaign helped to expose the inadequacies of the current homelessness legislation.

As a relatively new Opposition Back Bencher, I have found Select Committee work rewarding because it is evidence-based scrutiny. The evidence on homelessness is incontrovertible. Homelessness is increasing, and the current system is not fit for purpose and cannot cope.

This Bill takes that scrutiny a stage further and provides the opportunity to change the law based on the evidence we have received. The prelegislative scrutiny by the Select Committee has strengthened the Bill and allowed the views and concerns of a wide range of stakeholders in this legislation, including councils—my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) raised many of those concerns—to be listened to and understood, and it has enabled the Bill to address some of these concerns. It is a better Bill as a consequence.

It is fitting that we are debating this Bill almost 50 years to the day since the first broadcast of “Cathy Come Home”, which exposed the harsh cruelties of the post-war housing crisis; that coincided with the launch of Shelter and eventually led to the passage of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977. That Act created the statutory duty to house people in priority need and to advise those who do not meet the criteria.

The need for this Bill can be summed up by the experience of my constituent, Ros. She is a 69-year-old widow who lived in a privately rented flat for many years. Served with a section 21 notice out of the blue, she was unable to find anywhere else affordable to rent in the local area, and approached her local council for help. Ros came to see me, and I wrote to the council in support of her claim that she was being made homeless through no fault of her own. To my horror and to Ros’s great distress, the current law determined that her age alone did not make her vulnerable, and that the council did not have any duty to house her. She waited for the bailiffs to arrive and then approached the council again. The council gave her a list of organisations that she could call who might be able to provide accommodation. All of them required a referral from the council if Ros was to access the accommodation.

The council acted entirely within the current legislative framework, and in the face of crippling demand on its resources, it had no other choice. Ros spent several months sofa surfing, in great anxiety and uncertainty, before moving into sheltered housing, where I am pleased to say she is now settled. Ros’s situation left me deeply uncomfortable. Her homelessness was absolutely no fault of her own. She could have been my mother or my aunt. In the same circumstances, I would have expected help to be available for one of my relatives, yet there was no obligation to help, which seems too harsh. If the council had a prevention duty, Ros could have been helped before the bailiffs arrived. The sheltered housing, for which she was eligible in any event, might have been found earlier, and her transition could have been managed without the level of anxiety she suffered.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Helen Hayes]

I am afraid that I am not taking interventions because so many other Members want to contribute.

The housing crisis in the UK is unprecedented since the post-war period. Over the past five years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness. The number of people sleeping rough has doubled since 2010, the number of people accepted by councils as being owed the main homelessness duty increased by 26% between 2009-10 and 2014-15, and the number of people receiving prevention and relief support was up by 33% in the same period. The ending of a private tenancy is now the single biggest cause of new homelessness applications.

The majority of single homeless applicants are not covered by the current homelessness legislation; for them, councils need to provide only basic advice and information. However, there is little detail in the current legislation on how that should be provided, and there is no minimum quality for the information provided. In 2014, Crisis’s mystery shopper exercise found that in 50 of 87 cases, people received inadequate or insufficient help.

Many councils provide a very good service, and I pay tribute to the councils I represent, including Southwark Council, which has recently been recognised as a trailblazer for its prevention work. However, the variability between, and sometimes within, councils is not acceptable. Our Select Committee inquiry heard evidence from several witnesses who had been homeless, including Daisy-May Hudson, who has made a powerful film called “Half Way” about her family’s experience of homelessness. The evidence showed that far too many people feel that when they approach their council for help, they end up feeling like an inconvenience, judged for their circumstances and stripped of their dignity.

There is a strong rationale for a system based on priority need, but in the context of a housing crisis, having priority need as the only criterion means that too many people go unsupported, with harsh consequences. The Homelessness Reduction Bill seeks to ensure that help and support for homeless people is established on a fairer footing, and that the focus of councils’ work on homelessness shifts to prevention. Prevention is important because the costs of homelessness are so high. Recent Crisis research has shown that failing to tackle homelessness early costs the taxpayer between £3,000 and £18,000 for every person in the first year alone. The Government have estimated that the annual gross cost of homelessness to the state is up to £1 billion. Much of that cost is borne by councils through the scandalous costs of nightly-rate temporary accommodation. Ensuring that everything that can be done to maintain someone in their own home is done, or helping people to manage a transition to another stable home, should reduce local authority costs.

The Bill introduces a new prevention duty and a new duty to provide an applicant with 56 days’ help to find alternative suitable accommodation. It broadens the range of people who will be helped, and it makes the help more meaningful. Of course, additional obligations cannot simply be passed on to councils without the resources to fulfil them. I am pleased that the Government support the Bill, but the Bill introduces new burdens on local authorities. The Government must therefore make good on their support by granting local authorities the resources to deliver these new obligations. It is important that we see an announcement in the autumn statement that gives local authorities comfort on this point. We need to be absolutely clear that councils will be funded to meet the new duties.

Finally, we cannot debate the law as it affects homeless people without mentioning the wider housing crisis. We will not solve the scandal of homelessness by creating a new legal framework if the Government’s wider housing policy continues to contribute directly to making the crisis worse. Although I welcome the cross-party commitment to this principled reform of homelessness legislation, I call on the Government: to change their approach to housing more widely; to fund the building of the council homes we urgently need; to stop the forced sale of precious council homes; to reform the private rented sector to give more security of tenure; and to reform the benefits system so that people do not become homeless because the local housing allowance cap on housing benefit does not come close to covering their rent.

In the face of the evidence I have seen in my constituency and in the Select Committee inquiry, we cannot wait for all these measures to be in place before we reform homelessness legislation; the Government must back up their commitment to this legislation with resources. I urge colleagues to support this principled reform, which has the capacity to make support for homeless people fairer and more meaningful, and to enable far more people to be helped when they most need it.