HL Deb 24 April 1969 vol 301 cc546-7

3.8 p.m.

LORD FRASER OF LONSDALE

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.

[The Question was as follows:

To ask Her Majesty's Government why the Post Office is still selling narrow foolscap air letters, which are not as convenient to use in a typewriter or a file as were the earlier quarto forms.]

LORD BOWLES

My Lords, the current air letter form lends itself better to handling in mechanised sorting offices than the old-style one.

LORD FRASER OF LONSDALE

My Lords, should we be slaves to mechanisation to this extent? Is the noble Lord aware that every typist in Britain finds this new air letter form inconvenient in her typewriter and in her file? It requires buying a special carbon. Among others, there are quite a number of blind typists who find it inconvenient. May I also ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that the old form allowed 10 per cent. more typing space than the new one, and will he revert to it?

LORD BOWLES

My Lords, first of all, I do not think we can all be slaves to typists, either. The position is that I made inquiries. There are a certain number of blind typists in the Post Office, and they find no difficulty in this method at all. What they have to do, as the noble Lord probably knows, is to fix their margin stop so that when they are getting towards the end of the line they know when to start the next line. The shape was changed by reason of international regulation, and it conforms with the Post Office preferred (P.O.P.) range. The all-round sealing is essential now—it could not be done on the old forms—so that there is no choking of the machines which are cancelling the stamps on these air mail letters which are going through the machines at 20,000 an hour. The old forms were ballooning and expanding because they were going through at speed. It was therefore quite likely that every ten minutes or a quarter of an hour these machines would have to be stopped so that a mistake could be put right.

LORD FRASER OF LONSDALE

My Lords, is the noble Lord really saying that the machines of to-day can deal only with foolscap and not with quarto?

LORD BOWLES

My Lords, I did not say anything of the kind. I said that this was an international convention, by which we are bound.

LORD TREFGARNE

My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether the Government made any representations about the difficulties of this new size of air letter when the international regulations were arrived at?

LORD BOWLES

No, my Lords but we are going to Tokyo in November of this year and we are going to make some representation along those lines then.

LORD STRANGE

My Lords, arising from his reply, may I ask the noble Lord whether there is also an all-round sealing on the stamps which go through and which have a mark across them—the 5d. stamps—which I understand the computer picks out? I hope your Lordships will excuse the length of this interruption, but I understand that if you put some gum arabic across a 4d. stamp it goes through as a 5d. stamp. Is that right?

LORD BOWLES

My Lords, we are talking about air mail letters at the moment, and not about 4d or 5d. stamps at all.