Sub-Postmasters: Compensation

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab) (Urgent Question)]

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy if he will make a statement on the steps taken to ensure that the group of 555 sub-postmasters are fairly compensated.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

I fully take your words on board, Mr Speaker, and humbly apologise. I thank the right hon. Member for his question. It is really important that we discuss this matter.

Over recent weeks, the House has repeatedly returned to the subject of the Post Office Horizon scandal. Members from all parts of the House are rightly united and outraged at what the sub-postmasters experienced and at the way that they have suffered as a consequence. Some people’s lives have been unjustly devastated, losing their roles as postmasters and often their other businesses as well. Some were imprisoned, and more faced the shadow of convictions over their working and personal lives. Saddest of all, some did not live to see justice, including some who took their own lives.

The Post Office has already apologised, but we know that that is not enough. The victims rightly want the truth to be known and those responsible to be held accountable. That is why we asked Sir Wyn Williams to hold his inquiry, which has lately heard so much tragic testimony from those affected.

As well as apologies and accountability, people want proper compensation to be paid. Those people who exposed the scandal in the first place—the postmasters who won the court case against the Post Office—have not been fairly compensated. But those who were not convicted were not entitled to receive historical shortfall scheme compensation themselves, which, paradoxically, could leave those postmasters eligible for receiving the HSS better compensated than those who won the court case.

The Government recognise that this is just not right, which is why the Chancellor announced today that we are making funds available to ensure that those in the group litigation order group are not financially disadvantaged by the decision to litigate against the Post Office. The GLO group will now be able to access the same levels of compensation as its non-GLO peers.

The postmasters’ legal case was funded by litigation funders Therium. Our worry in Government has always been that any compensation that we bring forward for this group of postmasters would not be fully passed on as Therium has a right to claim a proportion of any compensation received. However, following extensive negotiations with the company, I am really pleased that Therium has agreed to waive its rights to any claim on this compensation, meaning that we can now proceed.

We envisage that the funding will support payments under a new scheme similar to the HSS to compensate those GLO members who were not convicted. Those who have convictions overturned already have access to compensation, and we want this compensation to be paid as promptly as possible. We will be writing to the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance to consult it about the scheme’s operations, and I am meeting representatives of the JFSA on 30 March to discuss these proposals. We will set target dates for compensation awards in the light of our discussions with them. It will not be a long and formal consultation. It will aid decisions on the approach, and I will then inform the House of our plans to deliver that just compensation, which these people so richly deserve.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I thank the Minister for his statement. I congratulate him on moving this matter further than his predecessors who made pathetic attempts and showed such ignorance.

The Treasury statement this morning said that the 555 group will be fully and fairly compensated. Similar things were said by the Prime Minister, and the Minister said that before the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Can he outline what that means in practice? Is it just reimbursing the legal costs, or will we have a more sophisticated scheme? Certainly, my constituent Tom Brown, who paid back £84,000 that he did not need to pay, is £84,000 out of pocket. He needs that back.

I am also interested to know about interim payments. The sad fact is that there are people in abject poverty now, who are living from week to week, so the quicker we can get some interim payments to those people, the better.

On the overall historical shortfall scheme, has the Minister any idea about how many people were affected by it? I would like to reopen that, because the window given to these sub-postmasters was very short, so it needs to be looked at in detail.

The other question I would like to ask the Minister is about those who have died. He points to the fact that, tragically, some have taken their lives, but there are many others who have died. Will the scheme involve their estates? It would be a complete injustice if those families did not get any of that compensation. I urge him to take the administration of the scheme out of the hands of the Post Office. I, the 555, the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) and others have no faith at all in the Post Office to administer it. It is important that it is seen to be independent of the Post Office.

The Minister talks about the 555. I am happy to meet the Minister and, I am sure, the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire and Lord Arbuthnot to talk about the details of the scheme, but I reiterate the point that we need to get this right now. I accept that this is a step forward, but this will not go away. The Minister knows that—can he tell the Treasury that? It will cost quite a lot of money, and I do not know whether he has established yet how much. Does he have an open cheque book now from the Treasury? He might need one.

[Paul Scully]

Once again, I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his work and for bringing this urgent question to the House today, because it is important that we continue to press on and get this done. I really welcome his attention to this matter. I also thank Lord Arbuthnot, whom he mentioned, who has helped in the past couple of weeks to unlock the situation we have today.

The right hon. Gentleman asks how the process will work and how quickly the 555 will get their money. That is the conversation I want to have with Alan Bates and the JFSA over the next couple of weeks, to ensure that we get something that they feel confident in. I envisage its sitting alongside and being similar to the HSS scheme, which starts on the basis of looking at losses and ongoing losses. It is important that we address those in the full and fair way I have described and make the compensation meaningful. Yes, we will absolutely work with estates; the HSS already works with the estates of those who have died and with the creditors of those who may be bankrupt, to ensure that they can be restored to a far better position.

I will happily meet the right hon. Gentleman and colleagues across the House who have campaigned on this issue for so many years. I would love to say I have a blank cheque from the Treasury, but that is clearly not going to happen in this place. However, the Treasury knows that we need to sort it out. I want to ensure that the scheme has the confidence of the JFSA. The HSS has an independent panel with it, so it has a degree of independence specifically to give people confidence, but we will work on that in the weeks to come.