Access to Redress Schemes

Christian Wakeford Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises the challenges faced by individuals and businesses in accessing effective dispute resolution and obtaining redress in cases of injustice; believes that the Government needs to address these specific challenges, namely a fragmented and inconsistent redress landscape; considers statutory guidance to be an essential measure to ensure compensation and redress schemes follow common principles and lead to fair and independent outcomes; and calls on the Government to create statutory guidance with common principles for setting up and operating a redress scheme.

It is my honour to move the motion that stands in my name and that of the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. I also thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), for her recent correspondence with the Comptroller and Auditor General, calling on public bodies to have redress schemes that are effective, timely, proportionate and fair.

Samuel Beckett famously wrote:

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

What if we learned nothing from our previous failure? What if we simply failed, failed again and approached the failure as in the past, only to fail a bit differently and with many of the same mistakes as before? That is the situation we face with compensation and redress following scandals.

I imagine that every Member of this House will have received correspondence from a constituent who has been failed and treated unfairly in the wake of a scandal. Rather than being able to access swift and fair redress, they have instead been subjected to further hardship, delays and unfair treatment. Sometimes that mistreatment can be as devastating as the pain caused initially by the scandal. There has rightly been significant attention nationally in recent months on the Post Office Horizon scandal, and in particular on the various schemes set up to provide redress to the victims of what was the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

A sub-postmaster of a post office in my constituency was one of the hundreds wrongful convicted. Janine Powell was wrongfully accused of stealing £74,000 from her post office branch in Tiverton. She was subsequently sacked and arrested, before being convicted at a trial in Exeter in 2008. She described feeling “confused; dismayed; numb”. That is because Ms Powell was sentenced to 18 months in prison, serving five months. She was sent to prison just two days after her daughter’s 10th birthday. She said that the hardest part of her wrongful imprisonment was leaving her children. She said:

“I’ve missed out on doing things with them—I can’t get that back.”

No amount of money could ever make up for what happened to Ms Powell, but compensation can at least try to make up for some of the loss they faced. Sadly, the various Post Office compensation schemes that have existed have failed to provide swift and fair redress, as I know from another constituent case that I am dealing with.

According to the law firm Howe and Co, which represents 150 sub-postmasters, the compensation scheme

“continues to be exceptionally slow…and refuses to entertain applications from persons who are plainly entitled to apply”.

This afternoon, I hope to outline that the Post Office case is but one example of a wider problem. No guidance exists on when and how compensation schemes should be established or what an overseeing body should look like. That means that each scheme has its own unique and dysfunctional set of rules. Reinventing the wheel each time a scandal emerges means that victims are failed by the very system that is meant to right the wrongs of the past.

[Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Lab)]

The hon. and gallant Member is making an important point about how we seem to have unique circumstances in trying to overcome some of these issues. For example, the sodium valproate issue was raised through Baroness Cumberlege’s “First Do No Harm” report. As with the infected blood scandal and the Horizon scandal, it has been outlined time after time that redress should be forthcoming. However, the Government again seem to be dragging their feet. Why does he think that would be?

[Richard Foord]

The hon. Member is exactly right to draw a thread between several of these scandals. That is partly because when a new scandal emerges, the organisation responsible is often the organisation charged with redress. Andrew Bailey, while chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, said in 2017 that

“it just does not seem to be sensible that, every time one of these things happens, we have to set up something new.”

Beyond the Post Office schemes, we have heard criticism both here and in the press on the infected blood inquiry, as the hon. Member mentioned, and Windrush. That criticism has pointed to intolerable delays or the problematic features that often let the offending firm or institution off the hook.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for his intervention. Probably nobody in this place knows more about the Horizon compensation schemes than he does. Lee Castleton, one of the sub-postmasters affected by the scandal, said that during the past 25 years,

“£135 million has been paid to some of the victims, but we’ve had £150 million plus paid to lawyers.”

We need a set of underlying principles. We need: a collaborative approach and process; timeliness; independence; recognition of adversity; transparency; broader eligibility; greater accessibility and legal costs; a clear appeals mechanism; and, finally, fairness and efficiency.

[Christian Wakeford]

The hon. and gallant Member is kind in giving way. Moving back to the sodium valproate scandal, we keep saying that justice delayed is justice denied, but in that case, it is not only children but grandchildren who are impacted, because it looks as though the effects of sodium valproate disorder are being passed on to grandchildren as well. Schemes need to be not only fair but pragmatic, so that once compensation is delivered, they can still be open to claims. I say that thinking of the further after-effects of one of the biggest scandals in the health service since thalidomide.

[Richard Foord]

The hon. Member is exactly right about how younger generations can be affected. We have recently seen attempts by some Horizon victims, and indeed children of victims, to seek compensation. The tragedy of his point about justice delayed being justice denied is that older victims of these scandals are dying before they see that justice, and before enjoying any of the compensation that they deserved.

I set out nine underlying principles that would establish a common-sense bedrock for a compensation scheme. To deliver those principles for fair redress and to guarantee independent oversight, we need an arm’s length body to design and adjudicate the schemes. The existing voluntary mechanisms for redress are far too fragmented. We need a standing, independent body that can provide consistency for victims of scandals—no matter the sector—which can be activated whenever a new scandal emerges. It should be constituted of experts, so that it guarantees independence of judgment, and should be accountable directly to Parliament for the expenditure of any public funds and for its overall conduct. Critically, victims must also have representation on the panels.

The structure would come at no extra cost to the taxpayer, as the current compensation framework often proves lengthy and costly for both victim and taxpayer. Taken together, the nine UK redress schemes—whether active or completed—studied by the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking have cost at least £3.7 billion. That figure covers not only the amount of compensation that has gone to victims, but, as we have discussed, the fees to solicitors, accountants and firms that have engaged to undertake reviews—and indeed firms that are reviewing reviews. More often than not, victims are left feeling cheated. They eventually cling on to some sort of late, inadequate consolation of redress and compensation. In the case of the Post Office, many of the 555 sub-postmasters who were exposed to the scandal have still received little compensation, because most of the money was swallowed up.

We need lessons to be learned from the array of scandals that I have set out. I am curious to hear what the Minister has to say about the proposal for an arm’s length body to deal with situations of the kind that I and right hon. and hon. Members have described.