Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Jim Shannon Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman for making that salient point. I am aware that there are many affected postmasters and families in Northern Ireland, including some in my constituency. What they are seeking is a timescale for when all postmasters in Northern Ireland—and, indeed, across this great United Kingdom—can expect to receive their compensation, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman is going to ask for that now. Those in my constituency have not received any word about compensation yet. Does he agree that when the Minister sums up the debate, we want to be given the timescale for the compensation? We want to know that right away.

[Mr Jones]

Yes. We now have this Bill and we have got the compensation scheme moving, and I think we need to move very quickly to get the money paid out.

Another issue relates to overturned convictions. Nearly 900 people have been convicted, 700-odd through the Post Office. Some of them in Northern Ireland and Scotland were convicted under a different system. Some were prosecuted by the DWP, for example. I will not rehearse the arguments now, but only 93 of those convictions have been overturned and that does not sit right with me. Somebody asked me why people had not come forward, but they are never going to come forward. They have been so scarred and traumatised by the court process that they will never go anywhere near a court process again. We need to tackle that, and I will cover that when I speak to my amendment later.

I welcome this Bill. My final point is on responsibility. If this scandal had happened in the United States, which takes a very different approach to financial crime and misdemeanours, people would be in jail by now. The evidence is all there, and I accept that Sir Wyn is slowly prising it out of the Post Office, but there are individuals such as Paula Vennells, who, ironically, got a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office, even though she oversaw all that was going on. I have written on numerous occasions to the Honours Forfeiture Committee to get that taken off her, but I have had no answer.

If there is one broad lesson to be learned from this scandal by Ministers and future Ministers, it is that when the state does something like this that is so wrong, there should be no hiding place for anyone who has been responsible. Sir Wyn is doing a great job in his inquiry to unearth some of these things. Fujitsu has been mentioned. That is an organisation that definitely has some huge questions to answer.

I think there are two parts to this. First, we have to get the compensation paid. The Minister has committed to trying to put people in the position they would have been in if they had not been affected, which is what we need to do. Will the compensation ever fully compensate them for what they have been through? No, it will not—they will have a scar—but it will help. The other important thing is that the people responsible should be brought to justice and have their day in court. Clearly, they need to answer for it.

I finish with the final line of Tom Brown’s evidence to the public inquiry, at paragraph 89:

“I would…like to find out who was responsible once and for all and to see someone take accountability for the wrong doings of the Post Office.”

I could not have put it better myself.