WHEN I worked for the Communication Workers’ Union before becoming an MP, my excellent local postman used to pull my leg about his trade union contributions helping pay my wages.
Our postmen and women represent all that is best about a publicly-owned public service.
In sun, rain or snow, they deliver letters up remote mountain tracks, across the sea to islands or up dark stairs in rough city estates – addresses which private competitors do not touch with a barge pole. Royal Mail is not any old business. It’s the spine of British society.
The public will not stand for the privatisation advocated by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. People know that if pure profit was the main aim, we would soon be condemned to collect mail from boxes in town or village centres rather than have it delivered though our front doors.
Under successive governments, mainly Tory, but sadly including our Labour one, the Royal Mail, once the envy of the world, has become a problem.
A colossal pension fund deficit of around £8 billion, costing about £600 million each year to subsidise, is crippling the business and postal workers are desperately insecure about their retirement.
A ludicrous and unfair system of promoting competition has enabled private competitors to cream off the money-making mail like pre-sorted business letters and inter-city traffic, while dumping costly post for outlying areas back onto the Royal Mail.
The universal service obligation – to deliver to any address anywhere for the same price – is now seriously at risk.
Management has also been poor and industrial relations pretty awful.
But the Government’s proposals beg many more questions than they answer.
Will they legislate for a level-playing field between Royal Mail and private carriers, instead of the lop-sided one now?
How exactly can Labour’s manifesto commitment to a “publicly owned’ postal service (repeated by ministers) be reconciled with a private company partner and stakeholder, albeit a minority one? Who wins – the private shareholder or the general public?
If the Government is to guarantee the pension fund, postal workers will very much welcome that. But surely it would also be a godsend for a new private partner since the Royal Mail would be profitable without that liability? We must not nationalise the debt and privatise the profit in our mail.
The Hooper Report on which ministers have based their recommendations was conceived of and written before the sheer scale of the global banking crisis became evident. Private is not always best. Public service is essential for business and social needs.
Change in the Royal Mail is urgently needed. But lets get it right first.
Peter Hain is Labour MP for Neath and a former Cabinet minister
