Post Office: GLO Compensation Scheme

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I thank my hon. Friend, and yes, we will certainly keep the House fully informed. My hon. Friend the small business Minister will be providing updates as well. I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) for his work on, I think, at least one case in his constituency, where he has helped to keep this subject high on the agenda.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. I also thank the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). It is nice to see a poacher turned gamekeeper in the Department. Can I also put on record my thanks to the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully)? In a long list of useless and indifferent Ministers over the years, he was the only one who actually got it and was determined to sort it out. I would also like to give my personal thanks to Alan Bates and the Justice for the Subpostmasters Alliance, because without them the truth would not have come out, and that happened in spite of the Post Office throwing a tsunami of cash—£100 million—at them to stop the truth coming out.

This is the only scandal I have seen where cover-up and lies ran to the top, not only of the Post Office but, I have to say, of the right hon. Gentleman’s Department. Today represents a move forward, and I welcome what is being done. Does the Secretary of State agree that what we need next, following the public inquiry, is for those individuals who were responsible for ruining people’s lives—in some cases people took their own lives; others who were innocent went to prison—to be held to account? It has to be a determination for the Department to ensure that those individuals—whether they are in the Post Office or in his Department—face the day of reckoning that should be coming to them in a court of law.

[Grant Shapps]

I again pay tribute, as I think the whole House does, to the right hon. Gentleman’s extraordinary work on this issue. He is right not only to highlight my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam, who I have engaged with this morning over this, but to pay tribute to Alan Bates and all the work that he and his team have done. I was talking to him earlier. It was not until he got going in 2009 that this really started to unravel for the Post Office.

To the right hon. Gentleman’s main point, he is absolutely right to say that we cannot allow an injustice such as this to not meet justice. Of course, we have a free legal system in this country, and Alan and his colleagues were saying to me earlier that if it were not for democracy and the freedom of our courts, we would never have got this far. To really get to the nub of the right hon. Gentleman’s point: I agree with him, and we will not allow any process or shyness of what it might uncover to prevent the legal process from being able to run its full course.