Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill

Committee

Clause 1: Quashing of convictions for relevant offences

Amendment 1 not moved.

Amendment 2

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, leave out paragraph (c)

My Lords, in the unavoidable absence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, I shall speak to Amendments 2, 4, and 6, and to the question that Clause 3 stands part. I shall briefly touch on Amendment 1, which intended to include in the convictions to be overturned by this Bill those convictions that were secured by the Department for Work and Pensions. Although I have concerns about those convictions—I thank in particular a former sub-postmaster, Chris Head, for his tireless work on the subject—I do not think that those concerns have yet reached the extraordinary threshold required to ask your Lordships, as a legislature, to overturn convictions made by the courts.

However, I take a different view about those cases that have been before the Court of Appeal. We shall, I hope, decide today in Parliament to overturn the convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters. We need to try to be fair. as between sub-postmasters. in choosing those whose convictions we overturn. The 13 cases which have been before the Court of Appeal in one way or another are not outstandingly wicked, compared with the hundreds of other sub-postmasters whose convictions will be overturned. Those 13 will not necessarily have the recourse of going back to the Court of Appeal because there may be no new evidence in their individual cases—new evidence which other sub-postmasters whose convictions are being overturned by this Bill are not required to provide. That is not fair, and I believe we should agree to Amendments 2, 4 and 6, and we should take out Clause 3.

My Lords, I have Amendment 14 in this group, but just before I get to that, from these Benches, I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, just said. Had we had a proper, usual style of Committee we would have debated this for much longer and perhaps even taken things to a vote, but we recognise that times are different.

I have tabled Amendment 14 because I had a bit of a debate with the Minister about the previous software, Capture. I am very grateful to him for the private meeting that we had, where we discussed my concerns in some more detail. I hope he will be able to give some more reassurance.

Because there is now an inquiry or an investigation into the Capture process, it obviously cannot be included within the Bill. However, should that inquiry discover that the same sort of faults happened, and the Post Office used the same sort of criminal investigation procedure, could the Minister please explain, hypothetically, what would happen to Capture? Would it require a similar Bill to remedy the position of those postmasters, should they be found to have been incorrectly charged and then convicted? This is important because although there are differences between Capture and Horizon the more that is revealed, the more there are some striking similarities, both in Fujitsu’s denial of glitches and bugs and in the way the Post Office investigation team prosecuted cases.

My Lords, I remain extremely unhappy about this Bill and the way in which it has arisen, but I recognise the overwhelming importance of, at long last, doing justice to sub-postmasters. I assume that the evidence given to the Court of Appeal would have been similar to the evidence given to the original court. In those circumstances, it seems that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is absolutely right and they should not be treated differently.

My Lords, I am obviously dealing with this in wash-up. The priority is to ensure that we get this Bill through. The arguments have been very well rehearsed across your Lordships’ House and in the other place about Horizon, the Post Office, Fujitsu and the outcomes of that. At Second Reading, I was struck by the contributions from all sides of your Lordships’ House and the language that was used about making sure that we do, and are seen to do, the right thing. The Labour Front Bench has submitted no amendments at this stage for that simple reason. We looked at purpose, but we think the issues around the Bill are clear enough that it deals just with this set of circumstances, which is obviously one of the big issues from across the judiciary.

On the relationship with the Government and the department on the Bill, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Offord, and the team for those discussions. If we can get to a situation, following the Minister’s response and conversations with the Minister down the other end, where these amendments go through and are accepted by the Government, the Bill will be in a better place and all of us will have played our part in delivering that. We support where we are at just now. We intend this to go through, to be dealt with in the other place tomorrow and then to be legislated for. I look forward to the Minister’s response so that we get the warm words and assurances that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has worked so hard to achieve.

My Lords, I briefly intervene to thank the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, who has done really sterling work on this, together with my noble friend. I very much agree with his optimism that this matter can be adjusted. I think all of us realise that 13 is an unlucky number and 13 people were going to suffer a degree of injustice. This is an important matter. It is a very good example of what we were talking about earlier: how this House can work consensually to deliver the right result. I look forward to what my noble friend the Minister has to say.

My Lords, I will follow on and, I hope, echo that spirit of consensus. One of the spin-offs from the decision to call the election is, of course, that this Bill will make the statute book quicker than it would have in the event that it had gone through a normal process. This is a good thing. However, it will have lost some of that scrutiny. The amendments set out some of the abiding issues that I hope the Minister will address from the Dispatch Box, bearing in mind that we will not have the legislative routes to do that.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, raised the DWP in his Amendment 1, which may or may not be an issue, but the core issue that he, along with the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, raised is the 13 appellants. If the Government stay firm in not accepting Amendments 2, 4 and 6, we really have to hear from the Minister at the Dispatch Box what they are going to do instead.

When my noble friend Lady Brinton and I met the Minister and his team—I thank them for that—it was clear to me that the Minister understands the injustice that is built into this. I understand that there is a wrestling about how much judges are offended in this, but the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, made it clear that the point has been made already in the substance of the Bill. The 13 are merely an extension of the same issue and have to be included in the same way, because they were the people who had the best case to defend and bravely went to law to do it, and now they are in danger of being hung out to dry. I know that is not what the Minister wants and I believe that a way must be found.

My noble friend Lady Brinton made the point that it is not for this Bill to legislate on this. However, it is for the Minister to say that, in the event that Capture proves also to have lured people into situations where they have been unjustly prosecuted, the Government of the day will act promptly and properly to make sure that they are not dragged through the same mess as those trapped by Horizon.

My Lords, I will be moving the amendments tabled in my name. I will also discuss the other amendments tabled ahead of Committee.

Amendments 7 and 8 in my name are about condition E. They are technical amendments concerning condition E in Clause 2(6) to ensure that it is clear how the condition should operate. Condition E requires that, to be in scope of the Bill, at the time of the alleged offence, a relevant version of the Horizon software was being used in the branch where the individual was carrying out Post Office business. Currently, this condition does not have the same provision for overlapping dates, which we have in condition A relating to the offences falling within the Horizon period.

The provision in condition A ensures that convictions meet the condition if the date of an offence overlaps with the specified dates, even if it does not fall entirely within it. The absence of an overlapping dates provision for condition E means that it could be possible for a Horizon case conviction to meet condition A but not condition E, even though both are intended to relate to a relationship between the use of Horizon and the date of offending in the same way. This makes condition A less effective so, to remove this inconsistency of approach and ensure that the criteria are clear and operate as intended, we seek to amend condition E to include an overlapping date provision similar to the one included in condition A.

This approach allows us to include within the quashing the possible circumstance where, following the installation of Horizon, an alleged shortfall was identified and the Pose Office concluded that this shortfall must be as a result of theft or some other offending over a period leading up to this installation, leading to a charge offence date overlapping with the period of installation.

The DWP prosecutions were for welfare-related fraud offences and did not arise from shortfalls in the Horizon IT system. Rather, they were related to the fraudulent use of pension and allowance order books or girocheques. Many involved people stealing money intended to be paid in benefits to vulnerable people. We know of cases in which organised criminals seized large numbers of girocheques and order books, which were then converted to cash.

Crucially, unlike the cases in the scope of this Bill, cases prosecuted by the DWP relied principally or exclusively on non-Horizon evidence. They relied on physical evidence of irregularities in the security foils on the order books or girocheques, slips being cashed out of sequence in the books, stamp and handwriting discrepancies, surveillance and evidence from searches. Parallel work concluded by accredited financial investigators traced the money in many cases to show that it was actually going into staff members’ bank accounts.

A typical case could involve, for example, someone working in a Post Office removing pension books, sometimes in large numbers in conjunction with organised criminal gangs, and cashing them separately, keeping the cash for themselves. When the pensioner arrived at the Post Office to collect their pension book, it was not there, leading to delays and difficulties for them in accessing their pension.

Unlike cases prosecuted by the Post Office, we are not aware of DWP cases that have been overturned on appeal. Given that the DWP cases are of a very different character from those in scope of the Bill, I hope that the noble Lords will agree not to press their amendments. If there are cases prosecuted by DWP that do not follow this pattern, they can, of course, be reviewed by the CCRC, but it would be inappropriate to overturn them in bulk.

I turn now to the amendments on the Court of Appeal. Amendments 2 to 6 and 9 to 12, in the names of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Arbuthnot, address Court of Appeal cases. I thank the noble Lords for their consideration of Court of Appeal cases but, after careful consideration, the Government’s position remains unchanged.