Post Office: Compensation for Horizon Scandal

Debate between Aaron Bell and Paul Scully

Thursday 30th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

Can I add my name to the chorus of praise for the Minister? I also thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), for her generous words to him. The reality is that it has taken far too long to get to this point, and not just in miscarriages of justice like this. We have also seen scandals in the NHS where people have to wait too long for Governments finally to admit fault and then to compensate people. That is often because they have been badly advised along the way. Given what we have heard from so many people around the Chamber today about the people involved in these cases being old, retired and often still in poverty—and, as the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) said, some of them have died—can I impress on the Minister the urgency of his continuing his good work so that we can get this fully resolved as speedily as possible and everyone can get the justice and compensation they deserve?

[Paul Scully]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words. Receiving this praise is great for me, but this is not about me. As he rightly says—please do carry on, by the way—it is about the people who have suffered terribly at the hands of people in authority. Some of them have taken their own lives and many of them have been stigmatised and left in debt and abject poverty, so we have to keep the pace going, not just to get that compensation for them but to get those lessons learned and hold people to account.

Economic Crime: Planned Government Bill

Debate between Aaron Bell and Paul Scully

Wednesday 26th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

As I said, the £4.3 billion figure cited is an inference by journalists; that money has not been written off by this Government. We are working with partners to ensure that we tackle the fraud that is clearly in the system, having given the money out at a crucial stage in the pandemic to enable businesses to survive. On the phoenix companies that the right hon. Gentleman talked about, that is exactly why we introduced the Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Act 2021, which tackles such directors, but there is clearly more that we need to do, and we will do it when parliamentary time allows.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and endorse everything he asked for. I know the Minister cannot anticipate the Queen’s Speech, but may I ask him to read the debate the House had on lawfare last Thursday, to which the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, our hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), responded? Right now in our courts, in cases that are being investigated, litigants are outgunning the Serious Fraud Office. Oligarchs are basically waging lawfare in judicial review against our regulators and preventing these cases from being prosecuted properly. Will the Minister speak to our hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Justice and make sure that any future legislation takes into account the threat of lawfare?

[Paul Scully]

I agree that the lawfare debate was incredibly interesting and enlightening. We will make sure that we work together across Government to take all those matters into consideration when drawing up future legislation.

Postmasters with Overturned Convictions: Settlement Funds

Debate between Aaron Bell and Paul Scully

Wednesday 15th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

I have said that the majority of them are pioneers, and I need to do more work with them. I say “the majority” because some of the 555 were convicted themselves and will potentially have unsafe convictions, so they will be eligible for the interim payment of £100,000 and will move on to the wider compensation that we are discussing today.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

The Horizon scandal is one of the worst we have seen, and the wider Government—not just the Post Office—particularly need to learn the lessons on how to treat IT evidence. I welcome the statement and the approval of these funds, but does the Minister agree that the Post Office must now make significant cultural and organisational changes to repair the relationship with postmasters and to make sure that such a situation can never be repeated?

Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill

Debate between Aaron Bell and Paul Scully

Friday 22nd October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

I raised it as an interesting point. I do not underestimate the stress, and I will cover that later when I talk about the solution we have come up with. It was a resolution, but none the less we want to get rid of the bully-boy tactics—the use of fire and rehire as a tactic of negotiation—because that should never be able to happen. As we have said, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but we want to make sure that we get our resolution and our approach correct so that it does what it says on the tin rather than have some of the unintended consequences that we have heard about today.

I was talking about the recovery. We have one of the fastest recoveries of any major economy in the world, thanks to this Government’s will to act and plan to deliver. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said at our conference that we were embarking on a change of direction for the UK economy, away from the broken model of low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity; away from a broken model underpinned by reliance on uncontrolled immigration to keep wages low. We want to build back better in a new direction towards a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy, which the people of this country—workers and employers—need and deserve.

A key part of the building of that economy will be to continue to champion a flexible and dynamic labour market, creating the conditions for new jobs, protecting existing ones and maintaining the UK’s excellent record on workers’ rights—one of the best records in the world.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

Is it not the case that now, with unemployment lower than before the pandemic, the bully-boy employers that mistreated their workers will find that those workers—this is the genius of capitalism—will go and look for jobs with better employers?

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are taking proportionate and appropriate action on the issue of fire and rehire, but that must avoid any course of action that runs the risk of doing more harm than good, increasing the risk of collapsing businesses and subsequent increasingly redundancies and unemployment. I have real concerns about the approach in this Bill, as it would significantly increase administrative burdens and costs to employers, when they are already facing challenging circumstances.

I want to assure the House that the Government take reported misuse of fire and rehire really seriously, and we are continuing to assess the evidence available from different perspectives. I will set out today what I believe to be a proportionate response to the available evidence on the practice of fire and rehire. It is an approach that encourages best practice by employers, protects workers from unscrupulous employers and, above all, protects jobs and livelihoods by not forcing employers into a situation where they need to make redundancies or close entirely. That is an approach which, in line with the Government’s actions over the past two years, has supported businesses, livelihoods and jobs through the profound impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the whole country.

Arcadia and Debenhams: Business Support and Job Retention

Debate between Aaron Bell and Paul Scully

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

In terms of shopping centres it is really important that we get the balance right between landlords and tenants. The moratorium helps tenants but clearly does not help landlords, so we have to get the balance right. We will work with the retail sector to try to achieve that balance in the weeks and months to come.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

The Dorothy Perkins in Newcastle-under-Lyme was already closed earlier during the pandemic, and we have also lost major tenants such as Laura Ashley and Edinburgh Woollen Mill during this pandemic, so I welcome what we are doing with the future high streets fund. We have a bid in with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Can the Minister confirm that it will be accelerated? We need to hear about that bid as soon as we can so we can get our towns fund bid in as well.