Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank my hon. Friend for his work on this issue, as well as his direct experience—he is one of the few people in this House who has that experience. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) for all the work he did as my predecessor; his comments about Fujitsu, and about making sure that it is not the taxpayer alone who picks up the tab, are clearly on the record. Again, where responsibility can be assigned, there should be accountability, perhaps in the form of compensation paid by those companies. It is right, though, that the Sir Wyn Williams inquiry is allowed to take the time it needs to report and to identify blame where it exists. Those matters can then be dealt with at that time.

Alongside introducing this Bill, my Department published a revised version of the documents for the group litigation order scheme, which make clearer than ever that the scheme exists to pay full, fair and timely compensation. If compensation cannot be agreed with my Department, a decision will be made by a panel of independent experts. Any GLO postmaster who believes that the panel’s award fails that fairness test can ask the scheme’s independent reviewer, Sir Ross Cranston, to look at their case. Between them, those arrangements provide powerful and independent assurance that compensation is fair.

Turning to compensation amounts, to date, around £138 million has been paid out to over 2,700 claimants across the three compensation schemes established by the Post Office and the Government. Those figures are regularly updated on the dedicated gov.uk page. So far, 93 convictions have been overturned. We have seen positive progress since my previous statement to the House on 18 September, which announced that postmasters who have had convictions on the basis of Horizon evidence overturned are entitled to up-front offers of £600,000 as a fixed sum in full and final settlement of their claim. I can confirm that following that announcement, the first 22 claimants have now settled their claims with the Post Office, taking the total to 27 full and final settlements—I hope this will encourage other postmasters to submit claims. I should add that a significant proportion of those claimants followed the fixed sum award route.

The GLO scheme, administered by my Department for the 500 trailblazing postmasters who took the Post Office to court and exposed the Horizon scandal, has already paid out roughly £27 million across 475 claimants. Postmasters who were neither convicted nor members of the GLO can apply to the Post Office-run Horizon shortfall scheme. I am pleased to say that every last one of the 2,417 people who applied before the scheme’s original deadline have now received initial offers of compensation, and some £87 million has been paid out. The Post Office is now dealing with late applications and with those cases where the initial offer was not accepted.

I turn now to the provisions of the Bill before us. The Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill, a small Bill of just two clauses, provides a continuing legal basis for the payments of compensation to victims of this appalling scandal. Principally, it will enable the Government to continue to pay compensation under the GLO scheme that my Department is currently administering. Compensation payments made under the scheme are currently paid under the sole authority of the successive Appropriation Acts, and Parliament requires all such payments to be made within a two-year period. The first payment of interim compensation was made on 8 August 2022, meaning that, with the law as it stands, no GLO payments can be made beyond 7 August 2024. This Bill removes that deadline.

This certainly does not mean we are taking our foot off the gas. We will still want to be able to pay compensation as quickly as possible. My Department is now committed to making an initial offer of compensation in 90% of cases within 40 working days of receiving a fully completed GLO claim, and many claims will be dealt with much more quickly. However, as Sir Wyn Williams has noted, the resolution of compensation claims requires actions by postmasters, their advisers and third parties, as well as by the Government.

In his interim report, which he provided to Parliament in July, Sir Wyn expressed concern that the August deadline could leave some postmasters timed out of compensation or rushed into making decisions. The Government agree that this must not happen, and the Bill ensures that it will not happen. All GLO postmasters will get full and fair compensation, and they will get it promptly without being unduly rushed.

In conclusion, until everyone has fair compensation, the truth is known and the guilty are held accountable, Members of this House and others will rightly continue to raise issues about this scandal. In the meantime, the House should know that this Government are on the side of the postmasters, and we will continue to give these issues our full attention and do our best to resolve them. This Bill is a further example of that, and I commend it to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to ease my way back on to the Back Benches and speak about this issue and a number of others. After nearly four years of dealing with covid and its effect on the hospitality sector, the Online Safety Bill and gambling harms, nothing has kept me awake at night more than the plight of the sub-postmasters who fell within the Horizon scandal and the biggest miscarriage of justice in British court history.

I welcome the Bill and thank the Minister for all his work in trying to rectify the situation. It is horrendously complex, with many strands of compensation and a lot of different competing needs and demands. It is lovely to see on the officials’ bench some familiar faces of those who have worked tirelessly over many years, including preceding my time as Minister.

This provision is not just to extend the time available and ensure that we are ahead of the process for August next year, but is important in itself to keep this issue in the public eye. Mention has been made of “Mr Bates vs the Post Office”, which I am looking forward to seeing in the new year. With all the competing interests of what is happening in the middle east, in Ukraine, and in people’s personal lives here in the UK, it is important that we remind ourselves of what can happen if one corporation oversteps its reach. We must always remind ourselves of that, and we must drive our way through to solving this issue, getting the answers that the postmasters need and, importantly, restoring their financial situation as best we can to where they were before the detriment occurred.

I remember how we pulled levers when I was a Minister and used the fact that the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, stood at the Dispatch Box and said, in answer to a question, that he would happily look at a public inquiry. That gave me carte blanche to lean in and ensure that we used that authority, and with the backing of officials and my Department, we started what was originally a non-statutory inquiry that then became statutory. It had to become statutory after we heard from the judge in the Court of Appeal. At the time I genuinely wanted it to be non-statutory, not because I wanted to resile from anything that was happening, but purely and simply for speed and ease. It was so that we could concentrate on getting the postmasters compensation and the answers they wanted, rather than having a layer of lawyers—frankly we are seeing that at the covid inquiry at the moment—looking at other things outside the narrow term of reference. We clearly had to have a statutory inquiry once the judge at the Court of Appeal outlined his thoughts.

Despite the complexity, when I first spoke to Sir Wyn when appointing him at the beginning, we were hoping that the inquiry would be wrapped up by now, and it is frustrating that by necessity he is still going through the deliberation, taking evidence and working through a hugely complex situation. It is disappointing but understandable that compensation is taking so long to get out, for reasons that the Minister has already described regarding how we work through such complexities.

The shadow Minister talked about how the Minister might use the extra time beyond August. I hope we do not need that extra time and that it is there to get ahead of the process, rather than saying that we will extend the process because we have carte blanche permission to go beyond 24 August and kick it into the long grass. As we have heard, people cannot wait. People are dying, people are taking their own life, people have been forced out of their villages. Indeed, the constituent of one hon. Member was forced out of the country for fear of the shame of something they had not done in the first place.

With hindsight, if I were back at the start of the process I would like to run the compensation all in one go from the Department. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) is nodding his head, because he asked about that at the time. I very much take on board the work he has done not just as a campaigner but on the advisory committee. I put a lot of weight both on his words in the Chamber and on those he said to me informally outside it, when we could talk in more depth about what was happening with his constituent and the other people we were speaking about. If we had run the compensation as one process within the Department, it could have helped to narrow the focus of what needed to be done. I am not asking the Minister to go down that line, but whatever happens in the months to come, I hope he will always look at providing flexibility and at what more we can do to keep the pressure on. There is a phrase in the civil service and in government about doing things “at pace”. It is a phrase I never really hear outside government—I always heard it in government—and the problem is who defines what pace something is. What we mean is quickly, or “more haste less speed”, as my old teacher used to say.

As I have said, this is the best thing I will ever do in politics, and the officials in the Department, many of whom are here today, have repeated that. It has become very liberating, because I think we are all on the same page. We all want to get this done now, not only so that we can get people compensation, but so that we can get answers and justice, and put on the hook those who should be on the hook, rather than the taxpayer.

It is also important to do that for the future of the Post Office. I see the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), the chair of the all-party group on post offices, in her place. If this was any other type of corporation or company, the chances are that it would have gone to the wall and gone bust by now as the reputational damage would have been too big. The Post Office is too important for the fabric of our society to allow it to go by the wayside. To address its the future, we have to tackle the past as well. Making sure that those two strands are running together is so important.

I will leave it at that. I do not want to keep the House too long, but I remember Tracy Felstead, Janet Skinner, Seema Misra, Christopher Head, Lee Castleton and other people, some of whom still keep me in touch with what is happening, usually on Twitter, or X.

I wish everyone in this House a merry Christmas. I hope that we all have a good rest and a happy new year, but I want those postmasters affected to have as good a Christmas and new year as they can. I want to make sure that Christmas 2024 is an even better Christmas and new year for them, because by then, I hope we will have sorted the compensation as best we can and brought this to a close, so that they can move on, and so can the Post Office.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the SNP spokesman.