Anna Dixon

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate. Like many colleagues from across the House, I have received a litany of complaints from constituents. I visited my local delivery office back in the summer with a massive dossier of those complaints. That was just at the beginning of the roll-out of the new delivery model known as DM26, which the management there reassured me would solve all my constituents’ postal delays. Unfortunately, I continue to receive testimonies from constituents about the impact of late deliveries. I will share a couple of the most impactful ones. One constituent’s elderly parents live in Cottingley. The father is 82 and the mother has dementia at 79. They do not use a computer. They have missed three NHS appointments and incurred additional charges on mobile phones, and when their children tried to raise a complaint online, they found it very difficult. The second area is Crossflatts. A constituent there has had three hospital appointment letters delivered after the appointment date, and as we have heard from other Members, birthday cards have gone missing too. None of us blames the posties. They do a fantastic job, but we need to make sure that they are working in an environment that supports their health and wellbeing. We can see that there is low morale and there are high rates of sickness absence, which I hope the Minister will address in her remarks. We must also not level down. There is a real problem with the wider gig economy, and I echo my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) in asking how the Minister will address bogus self-employment in the wider parcel delivery market so that Royal Mail and its workers have a chance. I urge the Minister to really focus her remarks on the fact that Royal Mail is a failing company. It is in financial distress. We have a regulatory model with Ofcom that is clearly not working. The financial penalties are not working. Ofcom is almost at the limit of its powers to force Royal Mail management to get its act together and address these problems. We have changed the universal service obligation once. We have introduced this new delivery model, or at least Royal Mail is introducing this new delivery model. If we get to April next year and there is still a failure to meet that USO, will the Minister look at radical options, including the nationalisation of Royal Mail?