Victims and Courts Bill

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Lords Chamber

My third question concerns an issue that was raised a year or two ago by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—namely, how do civil processes get dealt with through this? Will the Minister commit to following this up, not only through the Criminal Procedure Rules but also through the Civil Procedure Rules? I would like to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt on this issue and I re-express my gratitude to her for our meeting. It leaves in place the absurdity that computer evidence is held to be reliable even though we know that it often is not, but we must come back to that perhaps some other time.

[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?