Lord Redwood (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to intervene in this debate, owing to the general lack of interest, but it is a pity because this is an important subject. I agree with the two former speakers that, when the service lets people down, it can be very damaging to their businesses or lives. If drugs do not arrive on time or a company needs an urgent supply for its production process and it does not arrive, these are very disruptive events. I welcome the new Minister to his post. It is in all our interests that Ministers feel happy in their job and are positive about what they can do. He will be relieved to know that I will not blame him for anything today because he needs the opportunity to read his way in. However, I will raise one or two more general points in relation to postal services and other public services, as we on this side of the House try to get used to a Government under new leadership. We have read or listened to the Prime Minister’s speeches very carefully and we wonder whether there is going to be change for the good as a result of the new devices that the Prime Minister is introducing. The postal services market is competitive, and I am pleased to say that my own personal experience has been extremely good. Deliveries have been swift, prompt and accurate, and I am very grateful to the variety of carriers that have made that possible. I hear in the criticisms that there is a very serious worry about theft. This is of course a matter for criminal law enforcement, where the Government, through the Home Office, police forces, police commissioners and local government, can have a role. It would obviously be good if there was a way to ensure that fewer of those parcels were lifted from doorsteps. However, it is also the case that all of us customers can do things to help ourselves. Obviously those of us who are busy may not be at home to receive the parcel when it arrives, although the safest thing is to be at home to receive the parcel yourself. It is probably a good idea to have an alternative safe place where you can ask them to put the parcel, and most online services now give you the right to specify some place out of sight, or even under lock and key, where you could receive the parcel to avoid theft. Those who do not have that kind of equipment or money may well have a friendly neighbour who would be in to take the parcel, so you can volunteer their address. In that way some self-help could supplement the competitive market, which is clearly driving prices down for quite a lot of carriage and, on the whole, for people like me and many others here, is delivering a pretty good service. However, what fascinates me about the changes that the new leadership of the Government are introducing are matters of process—the theory that areas of service in a competitive market such as postal services may not be good enough and that a bigger government involvement would in some way be helpful to achieve those higher standards. As we hear, the Prime Minister thinks he has at least two major options in his toolkit. There is full nationalisation, which he seems to favour, where he thinks a nationalised service would be better than a private competitive market. That is not my experience, and certainly there were lots of troubles when the postal side of the Post Office, as it was then, was fully nationalised, and of course it was only the Royal Mail services which were privatised. Therefore we can contrast the experience of the privatised mail services with the results of the nationalised industry, the Post Office. Is that my time limit? Then I complete my remarks.