Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister; it is a pleasure to follow him. I am particularly grateful for the way that he dealt with matters last week, and the way that he has continued to deal with them today. I will attempt to emulate not just his tone but his succinctness; just because there is no advisory time does not mean that one has to go one way as opposed to the other way.

The noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is a modest man, but I am afraid that I ask him and other noble Lords to forgive me for not sparing his blushes—not just because of his work over so many years, when these people must have felt so forgotten and ignored, but because of his very succinct but powerful contribution last week. He reminded noble Lords of the very important words of the legendary jurist and Conservative politician William Blackstone, who famously said:

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.


We all know that that is from his Commentaries on the Laws of England. In those commentaries, he also said that criminal law should always be

“conformable to the dictates of truth and justice, the feelings of humanity, and the indelible rights of mankind”.

For anyone who believes that human rights were some confection from 1945, or even later in the 1960s, I remind them that William Blackstone said that not in the 1960s but the 1760s. So human rights are not some foreign body floating in our soup; they ought to be in our DNA.

In his remarks last week, the Minister very helpfully articulated the reasonable demands of the wronged postmasters. I made a note of them. The three aspects were compensation, exoneration and accountability, and the Minister repeated that formulation, to some extent, today. This Arbuthnot Bill is narrow to aid compensation, because money must be authorised. As the Minister said, it is a short and to-the-point Bill, but I say to the Government, to all noble Lords and to anyone listening to this debate or reading it subsequently, that exoneration—in my view, for what it is worth—may be achieved by a Bill that is a little longer, but not much. However, while I appreciate and agree with the Minister’s remarks that on accountability it may take a little longer to avoid the situation that he described, there must be accountability in due course. There is an element of due process, but there must be accountability none the less. That includes corporate and, potentially, individual accountability in the form of investigations—criminal investigations, potentially—as well as restitution.

We heard just this week that the management and leadership of Fujitsu are very humble, but this will not be a voluntary matter; there will have to be some legislation, I believe, to ensure corporate restitution in due course. Humility is all very well but, however big this Bill, one needs to remember the even bigger bill that the Government have met in enriching Fujitsu in relation not only to the Post Office contract but to other government contracts.

Finally, I come back to exoneration, which can be done swiftly—almost as swiftly as compensation. It is incredibly important that we do not repeat the mistakes of the Windrush scheme. There needs to be a blanket element and an automatic element to this exoneration.

I will not bore noble Lords in the short time I want to speak for with my own formulation, but it is almost as simple as declaring in primary legislation that a class of people’s convictions are hereby quashed from the moment the Bill passes, and then any application could be for a certificate of that quashing, but not for the quashing itself. That is how automatic I believe this ought to be after this length of time.

I know that some eminent lawyers, many of whom are friends of mine and many of whom I usually agree with, are nervous about this proposition. There has been much discussion, especially in the media, to suggest that somehow a proposition of that kind would interfere with judicial independence. I feel it incumbent on me to explain why I disagree with those who have made that argument, especially because some people have compared the blanket, automatic nature of the legislation I propose to the Rwanda Bill. I mention that not because I want to bang on about Rwanda as a broken record and a one-trick pony, but because it is important to make the distinction if I am to have credibility in what I propose. It is obviously not the Government’s position, but it is my position, which is important for these purposes, that the Rwanda Bill is to change facts as have been found by the highest court in the land. That is essentially what the Rwanda proposition is, whereas here, I am proposing legislation that will reflect the facts that have now been found, including by our higher courts, and implement those facts on a swift and blanket basis, to the benefit of individuals and not their detriment. That distinction is incredibly important.

As I think noble Lords and perhaps the Minister agree, this was at the very least a very gross error, involving maladministration and blind trust in technology—we must take note of that in relation to artificial intelligence, which my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton has been raising concerns about in your Lordships’ House, and must learn, remember and reflect on even after this particular circus has left town—and, quite possibly, systematic corruption and cover-up motivated by greed. Some noble Lords who have stopped me in the Corridor in the days since our last discussion have asked me whether I am troubled by even the remote possibility that a few postmasters who perhaps could have been correctly convicted should get off as a result of what I am proposing. I am very clear with them, and the answer lies in what the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said, and what William Blackstone said before him.