Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill

Debate between Lord Beamish and Duncan Baker

2nd reading
Wednesday 20th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and that poignant ending, with which we all empathise. He has done an enormous amount get us to this point, and I thank him for it. There is no doubt that today is a very good day. It has been brought about by the Secretary of State, Ministers past and present—they are not show ponies at all—the Prime Minister, particularly through his actions at the beginning of this year, and the chair of the APPG, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). I have worked with her many times, and I thank her for all her work.

All those people must take credit for where we are, but it has taken an awfully long time. The Minister was right that an awful lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to get to this moment. Equally, I have total empathy with the comments I receive from members of the public that it should not have taken the turbocharging of an ITV drama to put right this scandal when people across the United Kingdom knew that the situation was utterly wrong. I sometimes wish that there was as much palpable anger in our communities about other scandals as there is about what has happened to sub-postmasters, so that we could fix some of those problems.

Let us not be too critical, however. We should applaud today’s lifting of the barriers, by quashing convictions, to speed up the compensation that is due to people. As has rightly been said across the House, the judiciary will raise concerns. That is only to be expected, but I conceptualise this as an unprecedented situation that requires an unprecedented solution. The odd conviction that was warranted may slip through the net, but this has been going on for more than 15 years. As has also been said, we must not let perfection be the enemy of the good; that sums up the whole predicament and issue fairly well.

Being a new MP in this place—albeit not such a new MP any more—and being able, by quite some accident, to talk about the matter with a degree of personal feeling has been a great privilege. I never expected that in 2014 I would become a sub-postmaster for a company that had purchased a supermarket with a post office in the back of it, or that in 2015 Budgens of Aylsham, which was the post office that I was the sub-postmaster for, would become the best post office in the entire country. I am very proud of that, and it has meant that my speaking about this issue has picked up quite a lot of attention. It has been a real privilege to bring my voice to the campaigning. I suspect that I will probably be the only serving MP who has been a sub-postmaster for the foreseeable future.

What brings the debate home to me is that I could so easily have been caught up in this problem. Had we purchased that supermarket a couple of years beforehand, I could have been suffering the consequences faced by so many of the men and women we are representing this afternoon. I still remember my stepfather wandering into my office and saying, “Well, you’re the finance director, Duncan. You will be the nominated legal sub-postmaster.” We thought very little of it, other than when I was given a postman’s hat at the staff Christmas party. I remember going on the Post Office training courses. Without a shadow of a doubt, the people I met were always good, decent, law-abiding citizens—the sort of people we saw in the drama documentary and about whom we have spoken so often. Every single one of us in the Chamber this afternoon will have constituents who have been caught up in this matter.

The right hon. Member for North Durham talked about people being traumatised; that is absolutely true. In the past three or four weeks, I have sat with a lady who ran a post office in my constituency. She said, “Duncan, I have seen you on the television. Will you come round and talk to me? I was running a village post office. I haven’t been able to sleep for years because I lost money, and I want to know whether I could be recompensed.” The Minister was incredibly helpful. He immediately gave me all the links for where I could help that lady. She and I sat down and went through her books and records for the best part of an hour, totting up a few of her columns. At the end of that process, I said, “I want you to sleep better tonight. I do not think you have lost any money; I think that you are one of the lucky ones. You may have had some losses in one year but gains the next because the system just did not work.”

[Mr Jones]

We need to get that message out. I have quite a few cases in which people were not prosecuted, but they put money—a lot, in some cases—back in. The hon. Gentleman just spoke about ensuring that people come forward to get redress, and that is important. Some feel that they are not victims because they were not prosecuted or did not lose their livelihoods, but I have one case in which someone put in £80,000 over a period, and those people need redress.

[Duncan Baker]

The right hon. Member is absolutely right. The people watching this debate, or reading a report about it, must always remember that they can come forward, seek redress, and get help and support. If all else fails, contact your local MP. Most of us just want to help the communities and the people we are so privileged to represent. I entirely take his point.

I was very lucky in the case of the woman I was dealing with. I could say, “You can sleep easy tonight, because you are one of the lucky ones. The system did not work properly.” That closure—being told that—lifted a weight off her shoulders. We in this place often have the ability to open doors that people cannot open themselves. I was so pleased to be able to help.

That lady represents what we keep talking about. Sub-postmasters and mistresses were pillars of their community. Everybody in their village or town knows that those people were criminalised and simply not believed. That is where the whole of this sorry period started. In the business that I ran, I remember being incredibly worried, when the tills went down, that we had lost money. I knew one thing for sure: the staff were not taking money. I trusted them entirely.

The problem was the culture at the Post Office, which had become a corporate beast. It was losing its soul in the early 2010s, when there was an enormous push to be a stand-alone organisation, to not be reliant on the Government, and to sell, sell, sell financial products. I remember going to a 2016 Post Office conference and meeting Paula Vennells. The irony is that the conference was called “Together”, but while it was going on, hundreds of men and women up and down the country were being convicted for crimes that they had not committed. That is not very collegiate.

The legislation may not be perfect.There are Department for Work and Pensions convictions that I have taken up with the Minister that are not included in the Bill, and I know the reasons why—or his explanations. That does not mean that I do not support what we are doing today, but I certainly want to say this: we are not there yet. I think this whole situation is going to run and run for many years to come.

I do not say that light-heartedly, because I think that real closure for people up and down the country does not just mean compensation and convictions being quashed; it means criminal prosecutions of those within the Post Office who knew what had happened, but did not take the actions that they should have taken. I suspect we will see those prosecutions come forward in the years to come. I have probably said seven or so times in this place that Fujitsu needs to face some real questions. Of course, it will—it has already accepted that it will contribute compensation—but how on earth could a piece of software written by a multibillion-pound corporation have had a back door into it with no audit trail, through which somebody could simply alter figures? That is absolutely frightening. As I mentioned before, it prompts questions about the accounts of the Post Office and its auditors. So many problems will never be fixed.

As I have also said many times, I want a figure for how much money was stolen from all of those innocent sub-postmasters. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what that figure is.

[Mr Jones]

Or where it went.

[Duncan Baker]

Or even where it went. We could add up the figures that were taken off innocent men and women in the ITV drama alone, but across the country, I suspect it was tens of millions of pounds—possibly even more than £100 million. That figure needs to be identified, so that we understand the full scale of what happened here. Of course, the inquiry will conclude later this year, which will finally give us some real evidence of what went wrong.

Although I have summed up by saying there are still many questions to answer, we must remember that today is a very positive day for many, many people who are watching who were caught up in this situation. I say again, and place it on the record, that it is nice when the House comes together. There are a great number of people in the Chamber this afternoon who have done an enormous amount of good, and can hold their heads very high that we have got to this place today.

Horizon Settlement: Future Governance of Post Office Ltd

Debate between Lord Beamish and Duncan Baker

Thursday 19th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jones]

I will come back to that, which is something that I think my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) will refer to in his contribution.

The board minutes from 1999 show that the Post Office knew there were bugs in the system and software problems. It denied all the way through that, for example, the amounts that sub-postmasters inputted could be changed. That was just not true. It could be remotely done, and the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire and his constituent Mr Rudkin, who visited the headquarters where the data was being stored, proved that. In classic style, when he raised that the Post Office denied that he had ever visited the data centre in the first place, until he proved that he had. It was just one cover-up after another. The denial culture in the Post Office was described by Judge Fraser, in what I thought was a very good his judgment, as

“the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat”,

because the evidence was there all the way through. There is no way that anyone who took an objective look at the system, in terms of the Post Office or Fujitsu, the contractor, could argue that it was perfect.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

It has also come to light that the people who were fixing the system from behind the scenes, as the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, and who could go in and balance the tills as it were, were incentivised and paid to be speedy and quickly fix the issues, which made a lot of these cases even worse, so that balances that were already poor got even worse.

[Mr Jones]

It was even worse than that: for many years the Post Office denied that that could ever be done. It was only in 2011, after campaigning by me and others, that the Post Office had the forensic accountants Second Sight take a look, and it discovered exactly what the hon. Gentleman has just outlined. But what does the Post Office do? It set up a mediation service, but still denied that there was any problem, even though the evidence was there.

As for the operator, Fujitsu, it knew that there were glitches. Indeed, I have to say that it is as guilty of the cover-up as the Post Office. I cannot comment on the judgment—I think the judge has possibly referred the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to get its involvement, so I do not really want to go into the detail—but Fujitsu has a lot to answer for.