Postal Services Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 5:22 pm on 2 May 2000.

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Photo of Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Liberal Democrat 5:22, 2 May 2000

My Lords, I wish to touch on two issues with regard to post offices and sub-post offices, particularly in rural areas. The first concerns reasonable access and the second concerns how small sub-post offices will be kept going when they face a 40 per cent cut in their income.

If I were a cynical person, I would think that the PIU report had been delayed deliberately. I am sure that the Government did not intend that, but it is regrettable that the PIU report and the White Paper have both been so delayed. No doubt the reason is that some of the questions that need to be answered before the Bill passes through the House are particularly difficult. The question of access to services is one of them. I looked recently at the attempt of the Index of Local Deprivation to define what access means. In an extremely good and jargon-free report it said that it is very difficult to define access to services,

"because it may not necessarily be a question of physical proximity to services. For example, someone without a car and with poor public transport options could have more difficulty reaching a post office that is one mile away than someone with a car or good public transport options who lives five miles away from the nearest post office. Range, cost and frequency of public transport are a key".

Unfortunately, the best measure that the Index of Local Deprivation can come up with is an "as the crow flies" measure. When the Post Office comes to look at how reasonable access will be measured, I fear that it will have no greater success than the Index of Local Deprivation.

Noble Lords have touched on the issue of access to small sub-post offices and the services that they offer. The Third Reading debate in another place also concentrated on post office services. For rural areas and many urban neighbourhoods, the post office is a means of delivering a wide range of services, not all of which are post office services. I wish therefore to move to the question of subsidy. How much of the subsidy will be for post office services? That is clearly what the Government must intend as it is in a Postal Services Bill. But if it is okay to subsidise government services, how is that not an unhealthy reliance on one form of government service? How is it that, suddenly, a subsidy for providing information through small sub-post offices is permissible and is not to be regarded as unhealthy?

How will this form of subsidy deal with multi-functional premises where perhaps the sub-postmaster also runs a garage? He may be receiving a healthy income from the garage, but he may have to deal with much paper work in the evening and spend much time in order to run what is very much a charitable service for his community as the sub-post office would not provide a meaningful income without the subsidy. How will the Government begin to test sub-post offices for viability?

In endeavouring to put the question of post office services into one small pocket and look at a subsidy for that--and in advance of the White Paper on rural matters and the PIU report--the Government will struggle. I hope that the PIU report will be available before the Bill completes its passage through this House. From which pocket of money is the subsidy likely to come? The Treasury, so it thinks, has made a large saving of £400 million. In order not to spend vast amounts of its now saved money, will it think of taking the subsidy for rural post offices out of its matched funding for the rural development regulation money, thereby diminishing that pot? Perhaps it is thinking of taking it out of some other pot earmarked for rural areas. I should be interested if the Minister believed that the subsidy would come out of new money. The history of Treasury subsidies for rural areas does not lead me to think that that is in the slightest way likely. What stage have the discussions with the Treasury reached? What understanding is there with the Treasury as to whether this money will be found by regions or areas from money already allocated to them, or will it be genuinely new money?