Jim Sheridan – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Sheridan on 2014-06-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what estimate he has made of the proportion of Royal Mail staff who bought shares in the newly-privatised company in (a) Paisley and Renfrewshire North constituency, (b) Renfrewshire and (c) Scotland.

Michael Fallon

The Government has not made any estimates by constituency, county or country of shares bought by Royal Mail staff.

As part of the Royal Mail Initial Public Offering, each eligible employee has now received 729 shares free of charge. Only 372 of the 147,000 eligible employees opted out of the scheme. Approximately 99.75% of employees accepted the shares that we offered them. Under the Employee Priority Retail Offer, over 15,000 employees (just over 10%) bought additional shares in Royal Mail.