Dame Meg Hillier

My hon. Friend saves me from having to repeat exactly the same point. We can all name roads in our constituencies that are not getting post, yet apparently it is being delivered in the wider area. There is one way we can all get our post. Guess what? If someone has a parcel delivered, their post will be delivered the same day, so it is more cost effective for some of us to get small, cheap things delivered and then suddenly receive our mail. There is a bigger issue: the competitiveness of Royal Mail. Since the new owners took over, they have clearly been chasing the competitive parcel delivery market. We understand that how that would interact with Royal Mail was always going to be a challenge, but they seem to have completely junked the letter service. Other providers, some of which have been named, will send parcels. We can even email them our content, and they can mail merge it and put it in an envelope. Of course, in the end the Royal Mail delivers the last part, but we can do that at a discounted postal rate. The leadership at Royal Mail, which has a universal service obligation and the responsibility for delivering letters during the last stage of the journey, are not thinking ahead of the curve about how they could compete with the companies that are undercutting them. That seems utterly ridiculous. I turn to the postal staff, because I have a number of constituents who are reluctant to raise their concerns. They want to raise them with me, but they say that they do not want to make a complaint because they like their postie. Who does not trust their postal worker? It is one of the most trusted professions. David Beckham, members of the royal family—although perhaps they do not get their mail delivered directly to their door—and top celebrities all trust our postal workers to deliver our post, and I have no doubt in my mind about their trustworthiness. This is a group of people who take huge pride in their jobs, and as we heard from the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), very often postal workers can tell us what the solutions are. Over the years I have interacted with Royal Mail, mostly in London for the past 25 years or so. Often the solution is described locally but not delivered by the central office. The new ownership are degrading our letter service, and if we are not careful, we will go down the path of the Danish service. We cannot lose this service. There is a big challenge for the Minister. It is easy to talk about nationalisation, but that costs money. It could be that the leadership want to run themselves down so much that the Government step in, but we should not let Royal Mail off the hook. We need solutions, and we need them now.