Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill

Debate between Kemi Badenoch and David Davis

2nd reading
Wednesday 20th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point. That is also something that we considered carefully. It is part of the trade-off that we had to make in doing something unprecedented: Parliament overturning convictions. We respect the judgment of the Court of Appeal—it has gone to an appellate judge. We are willing to consider some of those cases individually just to ensure that nothing has been missed, but the Bill has been drafted in consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary. We want to ensure that we are bringing everyone with us. Concerns such as his have been raised, but this is more or less the consensus that we think will get the Bill done, and allow redress, as quickly as possible.

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I will elaborate on this point further when I speak—hopefully, if I catch Mr Deputy Speaker’s eye—but there is already data about the cases that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) referred to, those that are outside the Horizon case itself but were attempting to get themselves exonerated on the basis of other data. As far as I can see, they failed precisely because they were not part of the Horizon case, so I ask the Secretary of State to return to this issue before Report and look at whether we can solve that problem.

[Kemi Badenoch]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. That is something we can look at again at further stages of the Bill. We understand the issue that hon. Members are trying to resolve, and agree with them that we need to make sure that everybody who deserves justice gets justice, but we also have to be careful to make sure that we are not exonerating people who we know for a fact have committed crimes.

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[Sir David Davis]

Let me reinforce the point made by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). There are people writing to me this week about the current handling of their cases by the Post Office and Post Office lawyers; frankly, it is barbaric. The Post Office needs to be taken out of it.

[Kemi Badenoch]

I reassure my right hon. Friend that this is something I am looking at in great detail. The Post Office has clearly been a dysfunctional organisation for a very long time, and that is one reason why I have been actively taking steps to look at the management and processes in place, which, as he rightly says, many of the sub-postmasters have lost faith in.

It goes without saying that work to offer prompt financial redress alongside the Bill continues. As of 1 March, 102 convictions have been overturned through the courts. Of those 102 cases, 45 people have claimed full and final redress, and of those 35 have reached settlement. The Post Office has paid out financial redress totalling £38 million to postmasters with overturned convictions. Under the Horizon shortfall scheme, as of 1 March, 2,864 eligible claims have been submitted, the vast majority of which have been settled by the Post Office, and £102 million has been paid out in financial redress, including full and final settlements and interim payments.

Finally, under the group litigation order scheme, working from the same date, 132 claims have been submitted, 110 have been settled by my Department, and £34 million has been paid out in financial redress, including full and final settlements and interim payments. Officials in my Department are working hard to get those cases settled quickly, and we have made offers within 40 working days in response to 87% of complete claims.

In summary, the Bill amounts to an exceptional response to a scandal that was wholly exceptional in nature, and has shaken the nation’s faith in the core principles of fairness that underpin our legal system. We recognise the constitutional sensitivity and unprecedented nature of the Bill, but I believe it is essential for us to rise to the scale of the challenge. The hundreds of postmasters caught up in this scandal deserve nothing less. Of course, no amount of legislation can fully restore what the Post Office so cruelly took from them, but I hope the Bill at least begins to offer the closure and justice that postmasters have so bravely campaigned for over many years, and that it affords them the ability to rebuild their lives. For that reason, I commend the Bill to the House.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kemi Badenoch and David Davis

Thursday 30th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

I am quite surprised that there is not a word of condemnation, and the implication that the UK is complicit is really not the sort of thing we would expect from a British Member of Parliament in this House. I completely disagree with the premise of the hon. Gentleman’s question. The Government take our defence export responsibilities extremely seriously and operate some of the most robust and transparent export controls in the world.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

14. What recent progress she has made on negotiating a trade deal with India.

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[Kemi Badenoch]

I have been working with the Federation of Small Businesses and others on late payments. The hon. Gentleman will have heard the measures announced in the autumn statement; this is an issue that the Government take very seriously. I disagree that we are implementing our plans in a partial way. We will resolve this issue, but I am afraid that I completely disagree with the Opposition: have done quite a lot on this, and many businesses have praised the measures that we announced in the autumn statement.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

T4. On 14 November, the Government signed a memorandum of understanding with the US state of Florida. This is the seventh such agreement that the Government have signed with a state in the US, and I understand that there are ongoing discussions with other states. Obviously, that is welcome. Will the Secretary of State give us an assessment of the effect of this approach, and tell us what the next steps are to getting a more general trade agreement with the United States?

[Kemi Badenoch]

We are ready to have a free trade agreement with the US, but it is not undertaking free trade agreements with any country. That is, of course, disappointing, but it knows that we stand ready. That is why we have the state MOU programme. The latest figures show that UK-US trade has reached £310 billion. We are the biggest investor in Florida. I was pleased to meet Governor DeSantis earlier this month, and I also met the California Governor, Gavin Newsom, who wanted to be even faster in signing an MOU with the UK. They believe that this country has a lot of opportunity, and they want to do business with us.

Covid-19: Disparate Impact

Debate between Kemi Badenoch and David Davis

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions. She is absolutely right to mention older people, who are the most disproportionately impacted group. Someone who is over 70 or 80 is 80 times more likely to have the disease, whereas someone from an ethnic minority background is between 1.2 and 1.8 times more likely to have it. We must keep this in perspective, and we are looking at everybody who is impacted and vulnerable in whatever way.

The hon. Lady asks about money we are spending on adult health and social care. We are spending an unprecedented amount in the pandemic. We have targeted as much money as we possibly can to all the groups we believe need it. It may not be exactly what people asked for, but we are looking at decisions in the round to ensure that we are covering all groups.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con) [V]]

I congratulate the Minister on a comprehensive report. She has clearly done a great job of identifying the numerous factors that exacerbate the problem and acting rapidly on them. However, of the first 26 doctors in the national health service to die of covid-19, 25 were from minority ethnic backgrounds. Those doctors will have been comparatively well paid, so poverty cannot be the full explanation.

Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent across virtually all the groups who suffer disproportionately from covid-19, from the elderly to the obese, diabetics and ethnic minority communities. Today’s review considers only two studies on vitamin D and does not consider a huge range of new evidence that has come out in the last couple of months that shows powerful links. Will the Minister commit as her colleagues at the Department of Health and Social Care have done and look at the latest evidence on this matter?

[Kemi Badenoch]

It was the number of ethnic minority doctors who died right at the beginning of the pandemic that alerted us to this issue. We did look across a range of issues to see why that was the case. I remind my right hon. Friend about occupational exposure, which we believe is the biggest cause, and those doctors were the most exposed, probably doing the shifts right before we knew what was going on and catching the virus. We looked at vitamin D. The SAGE report from 23 September shows that it looked at vitamin D studies to see if it had had an effect and did not find any relationship.

We have found that there is a small residual risk, and I am looking at the interaction between comorbidities and occupational exposure, which we think provides the explanation. We had a second literature review and stakeholder engagement report where many people talked about their experiences of systemic racism—I asked the Race Disparity Unit specifically to look at that—but the findings were that systemic racism did not explain that. For example, when we take into account comorbidities, Bangladeshi women and white women have the same rates of mortality. Systemic racism also does not explain the differences between groups, such as black Africans and black Caribbeans. If it was systemic racism, we would expect the figures to match and they do not.

There is still quite a lot going on as we look at the socioeconomic and geographical factors, occupational exposure, population density, household composition and pre-existing health conditions. We will continue to do this work. Remember that this is the first report, not the last, and the review will be ongoing.