Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill

Debate between Duncan Baker and David Davis

2nd reading
Wednesday 20th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I hope the Secretary of State will not take this amiss and will understand that I mean no criticism of her or her Minister of State, or indeed his predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), when I say that the Bill represents the best of a bad job. Everybody has said it already; there is a difficult trade-off between natural justice and a fast, low-stress solution for the postmasters. That is what this Bill attempts to achieve.

That being said, it is not the way I would have done it. It is not what I would have proposed. The courts should and could have considered all the cases in which the convictions were based on Horizon evidence in one set of proceedings. I took senior legal advice on this; it would have been perfectly possible to take three or more former Supreme Court justices out of retirement, give them a courtroom and task them to deal with this in three months. They could have bracketed very similar cases together—there would have been hundreds in those categories—and then they could have focused on the ones that were really difficult. Regrettably, it is rumoured that the judiciary itself rebuffed that course of action, which I think was unwise and plain wrong. As the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) pointed out, the judiciary has a responsibility, too. That is why we have gone this route, and I have every sympathy with what Ministers are trying to do.

Even so, the Bill still risks lumping the genuinely innocent majority with a very small potentially guilty minority. Each difficult case could have been dealt with on its individual merits rather than abandoning due process in the rush to bring this disgraceful episode to a close. We got into this situation by failing to follow proper processes, and I am wary that the Government, almost by default, are again failing to follow proper process to extricate themselves from this historic mess.

Despite my misgivings, I will not stand in the way of the Bill, because it will serve the vast majority of postmasters to secure justice for them. For that reason, I will support the Bill. However, that is not to say that the legislation will not continue to create problems of its own. I recommend that Members read some of the early reports before Report stage. The BAE Systems Detica report, which everyone should read, is a six-month review of the Post Office’s fraud and non-compliance issues in 2013. It paints a picture of complete chaos in the Post Office’s accounting systems—not just Horizon but all the accounting systems. Over a decade ago it was known that:

“Post Office systems are not fit for purpose in a modern retail and financial environment”.

Note that it refers to “systems”—plural—not just Horizon. The report goes on to say that ATM—cashpoint—accounting was clearly flawed and that

“removing the ATM reduces the risk of SPMR being suspended”.

By SPMR the report means sub-postmasters, and I am afraid that suspended means persecuted, as that was outcome. That was not Horizon related.

That matters because dozens have come forward to raise concerns over a second IT system used by the Post Office, called Capture. Again, documents show that Capture was known by the Post Office to have issues early on. The culture of denial in the Post Office over the decades is truly extraordinary. The Bill will exclude people who have already had their appeal cases heard and rejected. Those rejections may well have occurred because the evidence that the appeals were based on was not Horizon but some other failure of the accounting systems. We must be careful not to give up once we pass the Bill, but to see if we can also absolve people who are not guilty because of the wholesale chaos that existed.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

rose—

[Sir David Davis]

I give way to probably the best-informed man in the House on this matter,.

--- Later in debate ---

[Duncan Baker]

My apologies. The debtors would have said that those innocent sub-postmasters owed the Post Office corporate accounts what we now know to be tens of millions of pounds. But they were wrong—that was fictious and they were not owed that money. Will we ever get to the bottom of that and restate the Post Office’s accounts, which must have been materially wrong year after year throughout that period from 2010?

[Sir David Davis]

My hon. Friend has more experience of this issue than anyone, and he reinforces my point. Frankly, if I had a magic wand I would force the Post Office to re-audit every set of accounts for the last 20 years and give back the money, but that will not happen: it would drag on forever, and we know the stress that it is causing postmasters even today. My worry is that we may feel at the end of this process that we have solved the problem, but there will be some—perhaps only dozens or hundreds, not thousands—who will be left not absolved or exonerated, but who deserve to be. That is the risk of this approach.