Post Office Mediation Scheme
Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Jonathan Djanogly(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Arbuthnot
That is a very difficult question to answer, because the Post Office pleads secrecy. It will not tell us what is happening in the mediation scheme. We asked in July how the mediation scheme was going, but it refused to tell Members of Parliament because it was all confidential.
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this debate and on the huge amount of work he has done on this issue over many years.
Unfortunately, this saga has seriously affected the reputation of one of my constituents. I use the word “saga” because what I find so unacceptable—I think my right hon. Friend was just coming to this—is the delay. For year upon year, people’s reputations have been on the line and sub-postmasters have not known what their status or position is or how the issue is progressing. I find the Post Office’s foot-dragging, inefficiency, and years of delay absolutely unacceptable.
Mr Arbuthnot
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When people’s houses are being repossessed, as is happening throughout the country, time really matters.
The Post Office has been arguing that these cases should be excluded. It has been doing it at a stage of the process when there is not professional representation in front of the working group, because no professional advisers have appeared before it. Even the sub-postmasters have not appeared in front of the working group when the Post Office is arguing that they should be excluded from mediation. Despite the Post Office’s heralding the payment of professional support for all those sub-postmasters, in practice it is a sham. It is doing it in the interests of the integrity of the scheme.
What conclusions must we reach, therefore? The Post Office has built up the hopes of sub-postmasters so the scheme has their support. It has broken its word to Members of Parliament in so many different respects that it is frankly bewildering. There are many ways to describe it, but I think the best is to say that the Post Office has been duplicitous. It has spent public money on a mediation scheme that it has set out to sabotage.
In the “Today” programme interview last week, the Post Office spokesman said:
“I am really sorry if people have faced lifestyle problems as a result of their having been working in Post Office branches.”
These are not “lifestyle problems”. Jo Hamilton had to get help from her parents as well as from her village. Her mother and her father then both had a stroke. Was that connected? I suspect that it was. Some sub-postmasters lost their businesses, their houses and their reputations; some went through divorces and lost their families; some had to live in their cars; some had health problems; and Noel Thomas and others went to prison. Those are not “lifestyle problems”.
The Post Office spokesman also said that, “It’s not yet over.” If it was up to the Post Office, it would be; the Post Office is trying to close down the mediation scheme. And for some who have been through mediation it is actually over, because they have experienced legal bullying and the Post Office has no intention of getting to the bottom of what went wrong. Documents have been destroyed or lost.