Post Office Horizon: Compensation and Legislation

With permission, Mr Speaker, I shall make a statement to update the House on the progress that has been made to support victims of the Horizon scandal.

Since this terrible miscarriage of justice was first exposed, the Government have been working tirelessly to put matters right for postmasters. We have set up an independent inquiry and funded various redress schemes that we have continuously improved to speed up compensation for all affected. That work has been taking place for many months, and long before ITV aired the excellent programme “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”. The work included our announcement last autumn of the optional £600,000 fixed-sum award for those who have been wrongfully convicted. We continue to develop our response to the scandal, and on Thursday I made a written statement detailing the way that we plan to legislate to overturn Horizon-related convictions en masse. We expect to introduce that legislation as soon as possible next month.

My statement set out that the new legislation will quash all convictions that are identified as being in scope, using clear and objective criteria on the face of the Bill. Convictions will be quashed at the point of commencement, without the need for people to apply to have their convictions overturned. The criteria will cover the prosecutors, extending to prosecutions undertaken by Post Office Ltd and the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as offence types, ensuring that those align with offences known to have been prosecuted by the Post Office. That means that only relevant offences such as theft and false accounting will be in scope. On offence dates, a set timeframe will ensure that convictions are quashed only where the offence took place during the period when the Horizon system and its pilots were in operation. The criteria will also cover the contractual or other relationship of the convicted individual to Post Office Ltd, so that only sub-postmasters, their employees, officers or family members, or direct employees of the Post Office will be within the defined class of convictions to be quashed. On the use of the Horizon system at the date of the offence, the convicted person will need to have been working, including in a voluntary capacity, in a post office that was using Horizon system software—including any relevant pilot schemes—at the time that the behaviour constituting the offence occurred.

Such legislation is unprecedented and constitutionally sensitive, but this scandal is unprecedented too. I am clear that this legislation does not set a precedent for the future, and nor is it a reflection on the actions of the courts and the judiciary, who have dealt swiftly with the cases before them. However, we are clear that the scale and circumstances of the miscarriage of justice demand an exceptional response. We are also receiving invaluable support from the Horizon compensation advisory board in this effort. Once again, I thank the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and his colleagues on the board, including Lord Arbuthnot. The board met on Thursday. We were joined by Sir Gary Hickinbottom and Sir Ross Cranston, who will be the final arbiters of claims in the overturned convictions and GLO schemes respectively. At the meeting, the board strongly supported the proposals in my written statement for legislating to overturn convictions. They also proposed sensible measures to accelerate compensation for those impacted.

I call the Opposition spokesperson.

May I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement? The Horizon scandal has rightly left the public outraged by the scale and shocking details of the injustice that has been committed. The scandal is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. It has robbed innocent people of their livelihoods, their liberty and, sadly, in numerous cases, their lives. More than 20 years on, the victims and their families are still suffering the consequences of the trauma of all that they have been put through. Until recently, there has been little progress and delays at every turn, which has caused even further distress.

Victims and their families have been trapped in a nightmare for too long. We all want to see the exoneration of all the remaining convictions, and the delivery of rightful compensation to all those affected sub-postmasters as quickly as possible. On the Opposition Benches, the Labour party has made it clear that we want to see a swift and comprehensive resolution to this insidious injustice, and we are committed to working with the Government to ensure that happens.

I recognise the important work that the Minister has done, both on the Back Benches and in his current role. The unprecedented scale of the legal work being carried out will be possible only with cross-party working and cross-party support. I want to take the opportunity to thank the advisory board for its tireless work in supporting the Government in getting this right, as well as hon. Members on both sides of the House and in the other House.

I welcome the Minister’s commitment to progressing the legislation. Labour is committed to working with the Government to deliver rightful exonerations, but I know that many Members will have had questions following last Thursday’s written ministerial statement, so I welcome the Minister returning to the House. I have a series of questions to pose to him. First, in the light of what he has said today, what further details can we expect on the legislation being tabled? Will he further clarify why convictions prosecuted by the Department for Work and Pensions are excluded from the legislation and what steps he will take to get the Department to deliver exonerations as soon as possible?

I thank the hon. Member for her collaborative comments. I am keen to work with her going forward, as we have every step of the way on this issue. I do not accept that we have made little progress. Let us be clear that 78% of all full claims that have been submitted have been settled—that is 2,700 claims that have been settled. Nor do I accept that there have been delays at every turn. That is not a correct characterisation of the situation.

With regard to our next steps, as I said, we expect the legislation to be tabled next month, which is as quickly as possible. I am working on this on very much a daily basis. On the differences between Post Office and CPS cases—those we are seeking to overturn with this legislation—and DWP cases, I think it is fair to say there was a different standard of evidence. Those DWP cases relied on evidence independent of Horizon such as the surveillance of suspects, collation and examination of cashed orders from stolen benefit books and girocheques, handwriting comparisons and witness statements. Those cases were very much not simply relying on Horizon evidence.

My engagement with the Lord Chancellor has been extensive, and our engagement with other stakeholders—including the hon. Member’s shadow Front-Bench colleagues—has also been extensive. We decided that was the right thing to do. Having said that, these are unprecedented steps. I think that again speaks to the fact that we are keen to make as much progress as possible, rather than as little.

The hon. Lady mentioned safeguards. The standard of evidence is critical to get to this point. It is fair to say that the trailblazing 555, who successfully took their case to the courts in the first place, set a high bar for anyone to emulate or replicate. We will be clear in the legislation that convictions will be overturned based on objective criteria, as another way to deal with this. That speaks to the hon. Lady’s last point on Capture, which I am very aware of and I have discussed with the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) on several occasions, including immediately prior to this statement. We need to ensure that we have the right evidence base. I am happy to continue the dialogue on that, but it is important that we do not include cohorts where we do not have the evidence base, as we have for the cohorts that we have set out—where the CPS and the Post Office prosecuted cases. We are taking very serious measures to overturn the convictions. We should never resort to this kind of approach lightly.

Will the Minister take UK Government Investments out of its role of controlling and supervising the Post Office? It has allowed these gross injustices to go on for too long, allowed the Post Office senior managers to rack up huge losses of £1,391 million to last March, with more to come this year, and given the executives bonuses for losing us that much money. It has left the Government with a great financial black hole. Would it not be better to change the Post Office management, to have it report directly to the Minister, and to make its No. 1 task giving justice to the sub-postmasters?

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. He and I have had serious conversations about the future of the Post Office, which I am keen to continue to engage on. The current UKGI representative who sits on the Post Office board is Lorna Gratton, for whom I have a great deal of time and respect. Clearly it is important that the inquiry does its work to determine who did what in the past. As we look to the future, there are different opinions on how the Post Office should be governed. I am happy to keep those discussions ongoing with my right hon. Friend.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Under successive Labour, Tory and Liberal Ministers, Post Office Ltd has overseen the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history. The Horizon scandal is just appalling. Unusually, both the Scottish and Northern Irish Governments have written to the UK Government, calling on them to rule on devolved affairs. It is vital that the UK Government work to ensure that exonerations in Scotland and Northern Ireland take place at the same time as those in England and Wales. [Interruption.] I do not find this amusing at all, but obviously the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) does.

Utterly shameful.

Order.

The devolved Governments have no power or locus in the UK Post Office, so we really need to get this together. When will the legislation for both the exoneration and the redress schemes be published? The Scottish and Northern Irish Governments have written to ask for UK-wide legislation. We need the UK Government to act, because otherwise we cannot guarantee simultaneous legislation that is compatible and comparable with UK Government schemes. When will there be a response to the Scottish Government? This is really important.

There were reports yesterday that Post Office Ltd has only now brought in external investigators to investigate its internal investigators. Does that not seem quite late to the Minister? Why was that not done earlier? Is it just to avoid the appearance of continued cover-ups in Post Office Ltd?

I thank the hon. Lady for her work and for her points, including on the devolved issues around Scotland and Northern Ireland which she is right to raise. We considered that very carefully. When we originally set out to legislate, we were very clear that it would be for England and Wales only, but that we would work with our counterparts in the other parts of the United Kingdom on what they might do. Indeed, we have responded to them already. We met them last week before we announced the legislation in this statement to the House. We decided to legislate for England and Wales only, because justice is a devolved matter. As she said, the Post Office is UK-wide, but justice is a devolved matter in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and of course they have different legal systems in those areas and different prosecutors. Taking action to interfere with the independent judiciary is a very, very serious thing to do, of course, but we believe that it is the right way. We are working closely with our counterparts in the devolved Administrations to ensure they understand our legal approach and we are very happy to assist with any legislation they may seek to undertake in their own Parliaments.

On redress, there is a single UK-wide scheme, so once somebody’s conviction is overturned they can access redress in exactly the same way as anybody in England and Wales. On the investigation or investigators, that is initially a matter for the Post Office but also for the inquiry to see what happened in the past. There is little point in the huge expense of setting up a public inquiry, as Members called for, and then seeking to do the inquiry’s work ourselves. We need to see exactly what the inquiry makes of that and of many other issues.

I commend the Minister and the Secretary of State for the firm and consistent approach the Government are taking to getting justice for the affected sub-postmasters. We heard earlier about precedent. The Minister will know that many of us have concerns about precedent in bringing forward special legislation in this case, although we know, of course, that many hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters have suffered the most serious miscarriage of justice. The Minister just said that the scale and circumstances of the Post Office’s actions in this case rightly require an exceptional response. Will he set out how using that mechanism will ensure that the people we are bothered about, the sub-postmasters, benefit speedily and accurately from those measures?

I thank my hon. Friend for his point and for his work on the Select Committee. He is right that we will take those steps very carefully and very much as a last resort. He concluded his question on exactly the right point. This is about sub-postmasters and the speed of overturning those convictions: the speed to justice. We looked at doing that through other means, but did not feel that they would achieve the same level of speed. He may be aware that hundreds of people have passed away—there was a report in the newspapers over the weekend—waiting for compensation and justice. That is just not acceptable. We made the difficult decision to deal with this situation in this particular way. As we have often described it, this is the least-worst option but it is still the right option.

I call the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee.

May I put on record my gratitude to the Minister for the speed and attention he is paying to this issue? The bottom line, however, is that redress is too slow and the offers are too low. Papers that the Select Committee is publishing this afternoon show that at the core of the problem is a toxic culture of disbelief of sub-postmasters, which still persists at the top of the Post Office. Indeed, the board minutes for March last year show that board members lamented that the board was tired and constantly distracted by historical issues and short-term crises. I am afraid that that is not good enough when only 40% of the allocated budget for the Horizon scheme has been paid out and only 4% of the budget for the overturned conviction scheme has been paid out. When the Minister brings forward his Bill, will he make sure that the Post Office is now taken out of every single one of the compensation schemes, and that a hardwired instruction to deliver, with a fixed, legally binding timetable to deliver compensation agreements, is written on the face of the Bill?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his points, his kind words earlier, and his work on this matter. I know that he will be chairing a Select Committee session on it tomorrow, and I look forward to his recommendations.

I agree that compensation has been delivered too slowly. We are trying to accelerate its delivery every single day, and we are, I think, doing good work with the advisory board to ensure that that happens. I do not accept that the offers are too low, although I am not saying that there are no exceptions; no compensation scheme will be 100% perfect. In respect of the GLO scheme, for example, 58 full claims have been submitted and 41 have been accepted without reference to the next stage of the process, involving the independent panel, which would seem to indicate that the offers that have been made are fair. Of course people will not take my word for it—they will only accept it when those cases have been resolved—and there are bound to be high-profile cases, as indeed there have been, in which people say that the offers are too low. However, we are determined to ensure that everyone has full compensation that is also fair to the individual, fair to the other individuals within the schemes and, of course, fair to the taxpayer.

As for the people who are running the scheme, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, the Horizon shortfall scheme was set up as a scheme run by the Post Office, with an independent panel including eminent KCs such as Lord Garnier. I have met its members, as has the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and we have confidence in it. Nevertheless, we are looking at recommendations from the advisory board for an independent appeal process. The GLO scheme is independent of the Post Office; it is within our Department, and we are working to ensure that the offers are fair. As the right hon. Gentleman suggested, we are considering bringing the overturned conviction scheme back in-house, and we will have more to say about that in due course.