Victims and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Beamish

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti’s amendment. We discussed this in Committee. My involvement, like that of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is through the experience of the Post Office Horizon scandal. In those cases, we saw computer evidence put before the court with the presumption that it could not be faulty or in any way questioned. I accept that the Government started a consultation on trying to update the present law. That was last April and I think that, like all these things, it has been put in the “too hard to deal with” category, but as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has just said, other jurisdictions and other countries have moved ahead on this. It is, I have to say, a challenge for any Government, in the sense that the rapid rate of change in our technology throws up these challenges to any system. However, when there is a situation whereby a body such as the Post Office not only used the law but actually pressed it and persecuted people in a very hard and uncaring way, we get the scandals that face us today, with the Post Office scandal.

It is still going on. We now have the first of the Capture cases, which was the system before Horizon, going to the Court of Appeal. Even though, when I first exposed this, the Post Office had no information on this system, we were helped to put together, through various campaigners and individuals who came forward, the details of the Capture system. It was not a network system like Horizon, but still a system that was reliant, in those days, on corrupted floppy disks, and the program was wrong. The Government’s position has been that these cases should go to the CCRC. I think that there are fewer than 30 cases in this category. Even though the Government have now agreed to pay compensation to the Capture cases, the first case is going to the Court of Appeal.

Strangely, for some reason the Post Office has taken it on itself to oppose this case. No doubt we will hear from Ministers—I accept this is not my noble friend the Minister’s responsibility—that the Post Office is at arm’s length and therefore a decision has to be taken on what it does with cases such as this. But with the Horizon scandal we saw the Post Office spend somewhere in excess of £100 million of public money to defend the indefensible. I am not suggesting that it will spend that much on this case, but it seems to be carrying on the argument that the computer cannot be wrong.

To me and other campaigners, a clear precedent has been set on this and those cases should be set aside and overturned as the Horizon cases were. In one case going before the court, the individual is dead but her elderly husband is now facing a longer wait and yet another fight, with the Post Office using public money. As I say, when I and other campaigners first exposed Capture, the Post Office said that it had nothing on it, but it now seems very quickly to have found a good reason to oppose this case. That is why an urgent change needs to happen, as my noble friend has outlined.

I join others in thanking my noble friend the Minister for her engagement on this issue. She realises that this needs to be addressed and the constructive way she has engaged with us on it should be commended. I hope we can get some change and that, with the wider issues arising from not just this but the Capture case, the Government think before again allowing the Post Office to go down this blind alley of defending the indefensible. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I join the Minister’s fan club and thank her for her engagement on this, which has really helped get this to a better place. I am grateful for that. I believe we will hear from her what the Government’s plan is, but can she also assure me on a couple of points?

First, whatever the new process is to be, how will a person subject to a glitch or misinformation assert their case without having proper access to the system from which the evidence emerged? How will we ensure that the court is quick to understand and question the validity of the information and the system that produced it, and how will we educate the legal profession on the depth and breadth of information that seems plausible but is false? How will we do all that in sufficient time to save the next set of victims?

I too recognise the problems raised by the Minister in those meetings around the ubiquity of computers, but there is an equal and opposite concern that, in an age of AI where hallucinations, deepfakes and melded information are a norm, if we are willing to continue with the presumption, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said, that information from a computer is reliable, that not only is untrue but creates distrust in the law. When this moment has passed, could there perhaps be a piece of work looking forward to challenge the presumption in law in a more careful and considered way, which this quick fix does not quite reach?

Victims and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Beamish

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 61 in the name of my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti.

When I left my home in Durham on Monday morning, I had a phone call. It was from an individual I had met five years earlier. He was the husband of a postmistress in Northumberland who had been prosecuted by the Post Office. She was prosecuted in 1998. He was ringing me to tell me that on the Saturday morning, she had received the letter overturning her conviction under the Horizon Post Office scandal.

I met the couple five years ago. They had a thriving business and were well respected in the community—a small village in Northumberland. They now live in a small council house in the same village. As they explained to me when I sat in their living room, everyone still thinks, “That is the woman who stole the money from the Post Office”.

That woman was traumatised. That is the only word I can use. She had blanks in her mind. It was very difficult for me to get the information from her, so traumatised she was. That woman has suffered for nearly 30 years. She has now got that letter saying that she did nothing wrong and can now hold her head up high in her community. As I said to her husband, that must be an unbelievable feeling.

That couple are going to get compensation—quite rightly—but, as the husband said, that is not important. The important thing was that woman’s and their family’s good name. That was ruined, because computer evidence, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, just said, was used to persecute a decent, hard-working woman.

Over the last 15 or 16 years that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and I have been campaigning on this, I have met many victims of this scandal. They are decent, ordinary people whom you pass in the street. If you were their friend, you would consider it a privilege. Their lives have been completely ruined. That is because the presumption was that the computer had to be right. It was classed as a mechanical machine and that this could not be infallible.

The judiciary needs to take some blame in the Post Office scandal, because I have read many court transcripts of the cases. I think of one. There was a postmistress from County Durham called June Tooby, who was not involved in the Horizon case but the pre-Horizon scheme—Capture. She was an absolutely marvellous woman and she defended herself in court. She said to the judge that her argument was that the computer was wrong and gave the reasons why. He dismissed her completely out of hand and would not listen to her that somehow this was a possibility.

That is not the only case that I have seen where judges have taken the approach of completely dismissing that. I am not one for attacking our judiciary, but I get annoyed when judges get on their high horse and say that somehow they cannot be criticised. The judiciary played a part in this scandal and must take responsibility for that.

The noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said that this is urgent. It is urgent. My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti said that the consultation started on 21 January 2025. Sarah Sackman, the then Minister, said at the opening of that consultation:

“We must learn the lessons of the Post Office scandal … Ensuring people are protected from miscarriages of justice is … one part of the government’s Plan for Change”.


That was over a year ago. I know that things move very slowly in this Government and that things sometimes have gestation periods longer than that of an African elephant, but this cannot wait. I urge the Minister. We do not want any more reviews or need any more consultations. That seems to be the in word these days—if you do not want to make a decision, have a consultation or say, “We are considering it”. This is now urgent.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti on tabling this amendment. It must be done in this Bill. It cannot wait. Speaking for myself—and, I think, on behalf of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot —we will not let this rest. This is the opportunity for the Government to put this right. I would love to know what the Ministry of Justice has been doing for the last year because it is a very simple thing; nor is it controversial. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has just said, people will still be found guilty. There will be more victims if we do not change this. This would also send a clear signal to those victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal that this Government are taking this seriously.

I say, very gently, to the Minister, not to come back with, “We’re going to review it” or that there is some next stage to go through. Frankly, I am getting sick of this. My heart drops when I hear of another review or consultation. It seems to be a great “Yes Minister” way of kicking things into the long grass. This cannot be kicked into the long grass. I am determined that it will not be.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 61, to which I have added my name, and associate myself with the noble Baroness’s words on Amendment 62. I was sitting here thinking that if I was guilty of the total creative expression that I have consumed, I would have to be locked up for life. It was moving to hear how one small fraction of the population is being discriminated against on this count, so I add my support on that issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble Lords, Lord Beamish and Lord Arbuthnot, have laid out the case comprehensively and persuasively. There is indeed a great deal of history to it. I thought it might be useful for me to concentrate on the justification of successive Governments for resisting it. This centres primarily around the idea that computers now permeate every aspect of life and that altering the presumption in law, in the words of the former Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, would bring into scope

“evidence presented in every type of court proceeding and would have a detrimental effect on the courts and prosecution—potentially leading to unnecessary delays”.—[Official Report, 18/12/24; col. GC 160.]

It is important to hear that, because it was almost identical to the words spoken by the previous Minister, the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, who said:

“Almost all criminal cases rely on computer evidence to some extent, so any change to the burden of proof would or could impede the work of the Crown Prosecution Service and other prosecutors”,—[Official Report, 24/4/24; col. GC 580.]


leading to great delays. In other words, they had exactly the same rebuttal to a suggestion that we made, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, explained, in not one but two previous Bills. My worry is that the argument appears to be that computer evidence is so pervasive that we cannot change the law. But the reverse must also be true: if it is going to be so pervasive, how can we allow it to remain above the law?