What is being done to deliver justice for victims of the Post Office scandal?

The ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office has provoked a further wave of public outrage about the original Horizon scandal and the slow and unsatisfactory way in which it was subsequently managed by the authorities, including by the Post Office itself.

Politicians from all parties have called for rapid compensation and exoneration for post office managers wrongly convicted of fraud or false accounting. Former cabinet minister David Davis, for example, has said that the convictions were based on the fact that the “Post Office lied”, that every single one is “unsafe”, and that this information should be used to “turn them all over”. He also called for a criminal investigation into the Post Office as well as Fujitsu, which provided the faulty software.

A petition calling for the former chief executive of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, to return her CBE or else be stripped of it has accumulated a million signatures. The Horizon affair is becoming an unexpectedly potent party political issue...

Rishi Sunak says he has approved the plans for compensation from three different funds, and ministers are meeting with the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, to see if the process can be speeded up. Sunak says ministers are working to expedite the compensation process for victims: “People should know that we are on it, and we want to make this right... that money has been set aside.” The prime minister is quite clear that “People were treated absolutely appallingly. That’s wrong. And we should do everything we can to make it right.”

The current minister for postal affairs, Kevin Hollinrake, says that interim payments of up to £168,000 have been made to known victims, that 64 per cent of known victims have accepted full settlement, and that he is “working day and night to do more”.

In the House of Commons on Monday night, he announced an independent panel to assess the financial losses of postmasters with overturned convictions, where disputed, adding that the justice secretary would be consulting senior members of the judiciary to see how things can be speeded up.

Nonetheless, many are asking why it’s taken an ITV drama series to inject some urgency into the matter, and for more victims to come forward.

Many hundreds of millions of pounds – but some, at least, of the money has always actually belonged to the Post Office branch managers, or subpostmasters as they are traditionally known. When their Horizon terminals came up with mythical losses of thousands of pounds, they had to make up such shortfalls from their own resources or else face prosecution, ruin and jail.

Yet the money they were forced to pay to the Post Office was always theirs, because the shortfalls were simply phantom numbers made up by the faulty software – which is why the scandal was so widespread. An epidemic of dishonesty among the nation’s subpostmasters didn’t suddenly break out in the early 2000s; it was to do with the Fujitsu software, rolled out from 1999, and the Post Office’s refusal to accept reality.

Thus the money paid to the Post Office by these managers was always theirs and was extorted from them. The Post Office, being a nationalised industry wholly owned by taxpayers, is part of the state. It used this money in the course of its normal activities, but it was always, in effect, “borrowed”, and the ultimate financial responsibility for the Post Office lies with the government. Now it has to be paid back, with the added costs arising from compensation and legal fees. Sadly, some of the subpostmasters have now died, so in that sense, justice can never be done.

The overriding reason is the institutional defensive instinct that is shared by all organisations, from Lehman Brothers to the Roman Catholic Church to Yorkshire County Cricket Club, which leads them to close ranks, deny responsibility, and cover up problems in the hope that they will go away.

The Post Office refused to accept the problem, then stonewalled and denied fault to the public, subpostmasters and MPs alike. Much of the public anger arises from this alleged cover-up, and from the fact that no one from the Post Office or the government has suffered prosecution or other detriment in respect of their actions and failures.

Naturally. The leader of the opposition himself is basically saying that the government hasn’t done enough, and is still not doing enough, to deliver justice. It would not be surprising if he raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Questions this week – it is a popular cause, and feeds into a general sense of malaise surrounding Britain’s public services, which in the view of many voters are simply not working.

Keir Starmer is demanding rapid, summary action via an urgent law: “I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service. And these convictions, the remaining convictions, need to be looked at en masse ... The government could pass legislation, so obviously we’d support that if they did.”

Starmer has also cautiously backed the calls for Vennells to lose her CBE and for the Post Office to relinquish its anachronistic powers of prosecution.

No, because the Post Office, for historical reasons, has its own powers of investigation and prosecution, entirely separate from those of the director of public prosecutions. So Starmer couldn’t properly have got involved. This hasn’t prevented some people from saying he should have. Thus Nigel Farage, the president of Reform UK, tweeted: “Why did @Keir_Starmer not intervene in the Horizon scandal when he was Director of Public Prosecutions? The story first broke in 2009, yet the prosecutions continued until 2015. Given the mounting concern at the time and over 700 cases, he has serious questions to answer.”

As X/Twitter’s Community Notes addendum points out: “Royal Mail Horizon prosecutions were private criminal prosecutions. This is not uncommon in England. Organisations like the RSPCA regularly bring private criminal prosecutions. The Crown Prosecution Service (and Director of Public Prosecutions) are not involved in these.”

The Liberal Democrat leader was indeed minister for postal affairs in 2010-12, under the former Lib Dem leader, Vince Cable, who was business secretary in the coalition government. Notoriously, Davey refused to meet Alan Bates, a wronged subpostmaster and campaigner, because he judged that it wouldn’t “serve any purpose”, though he later relented and is now full of remorse.

Davey pleads that Post Office management misled him. However, he could arguably have probed more deeply and used his powers to get to the bottom of the scandal, and he’s not being let off. As Jo Hamilton, another campaigner, told The Times: “Of course Davey should have been asking more questions. He’s the minister; what does he get his ministerial salary for if he’s not asking questions? ... He always calls for other people’s resignations; now it’s time for him to look in the mirror.”

Whatever else, it’s not helpful for the Lib Dem leader among voters in the close-knit rural constituencies where the village post office is the hub of the community.

Yes, and we’ve got one. So one complicating factor in relation to ministerial action, prosecutions and other redress is that the official statutory inquiry is still continuing, and will report later in the year. It wasn’t set up until September 2020, under retired judge Wyn Williams, and has had to plough through hundreds of witness statements, internal documents from former Post Office management, recordings, and evidence from legal teams involved at the time, investigators and victims, as well as get its head around complex accounting and software systems.

The usual procedure would be for the government to consider the recommendations of an inquiry and take appropriate action. But this won’t satisfy public opinion.

More claims, more media interest, and more revelations, particularly from the public inquiry. Another disturbing aspect of the story, for example, is that Post Office prosecutors classified branch owner-operators by ethnicity, and used a racially sensitive epithet.

If Sunak moves rapidly now, he can get ahead of the story, and can perhaps ameliorate the damage caused by the delay in achieving justice stretching back across the 13 years for which the Conservatives have been running the country. If not, then Labour will continue to make capital out of a scandal that is still dragging on, and should, in fairness, have been settled long ago.