Post Office: Horizon Accounting System

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to decisions by the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Post Office in relation to the Horizon accounting system, what is their response to the 44 appeals not being opposed by the Post Office.

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con) [V]]

[Inaudible.]—the largest number of referrals by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in history. Yet the Government are expressly excluding from the scope of their inquiry the Post Office Ltd prosecution function, the Horizon group damages settlement and the conduct of current or future litigation. Given that the sub-postmasters who sued remain impoverished and, in many cases, bankrupted by the Government, why have the Government excluded these most important things? Why are they punishing those brave people who brought this essential litigation?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

The noble Lord was getting a bit ahead of himself in asking his supplementary question before he asked his main Question, so I will answer that main one first and then come on to the second one.

The answer to the Question that he originally posed to me as a Private Notice Question is that, on 2 October, the Post Office announced that it would not oppose 44 of the 47 cases referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. This is an important milestone for the postmasters appealing their convictions. It is now for the courts to decide whether their convictions should be overturned, and it would not be appropriate for the Government to comment on these cases until that process is complete.

I will now move to the question which the noble Lord just asked. The settlement was agreed in December and was full and final; for this reason, it has been excluded from the scope of the inquiry.

On the question of its prosecution function, the chief executive of the Post Office, Nick Read, has assured the Government and confirmed publicly that the Post Office is not currently conducting any private prosecutions and has no plans to do so.

As regards current and future litigation, of course only the courts can decide on criminal matters, such as whether to overturn the postmasters’ convictions, so it would not be appropriate for the inquiry to look at these questions, especially when the court process is still ongoing.