Post Office Ltd: Management Culture

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the management culture at Post Office Ltd.

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George.

Many right hon. and hon. Members past and present continue to work on Post Office issues, especially the Horizon IT scandal—the greatest miscarriage of justice in UK history. Others outside this place who brought that scandal to public notice, including Alan Bates, Nick Wallis, Eleanor Shaikh and the many sub-postmasters past and present who suffered and, in some cases, died because of the management culture of Post Office Ltd, deserve our gratitude.

We should all remember that the statutory inquiry into the Horizon scandal is still ongoing; it has not even reached the stage at which it will forensically examine the management culture of Post Office Ltd past and present. For me, Post Office issues have never been party political. I have focused on the viability of the network. Post offices fulfil a vital role in local communities, and sub-postmasters worked right through the pandemic—that is the kind of people they are.

A local sub-postmaster and his wife came to see me in 2015, just after I was elected. Their sub-post office was being closed down and they were fighting for decent compensation. I was totally unaware that this was going on across the UK as part of the network transformation. A new sub-postmaster took on the post office in his local shop half a mile away. He was assured that that would boost his business’s revenue, although how that was going to happen I do not know—it was the same folk from the old post office that were going to withdraw their benefits at the new shop. A few years later, he told me he made more from his new coffee machine than from the post office.

Many long-serving sub-postmasters have been forced to stay on to try to recoup their investments in their post offices. Post Office Ltd confirmed recently that it will reduce the compensation for sub-postmasters of hard-to-place post offices from 26 months to 12 months. During my time as an MP, there has been a constant battle to ensure that sub-postmasters receive decent compensation when they retire and decent remuneration while they continue to serve their communities. Government funding increases have gone to Post Office management; under former and current management, SPMs have been last in the queue for pay increases. Does the Minister think that is fair? Does he agree that the Government promise that post offices would be the “front office of Government” has never been kept? That would have given much more revenue to sub-postmasters.

The Horizon IT scandal is the result of the culture of Post Office management, and I will show that that culture still exists. In his March 2019 judgment in Bates and Others v. Post Office Ltd, Mr Justice Fraser stated:

“There seems to be a culture of secrecy and excessive confidentiality generally within the Post Office, but particularly focused on Horizon.”

Eventually, in September 2020, a non-statutory inquiry was announced. It was led by Sir Wyn Williams and subsequently became a statutory inquiry. It was to gather information, to consider whether Post Office Ltd had learned the lessons and embedded the cultural change deemed necessary in Mr Justice Fraser’s judgment, and to consider the impact on affected sub-postmasters.

That commitment was echoed by Post Office Ltd chief executive officer Nick Read, who was appointed in September 2019. In a letter to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in June 2021, he stated that he was

“undertaking to drive a culture of genuine commercial partnership between Post Office and postmasters with openness and transparency at its core.”

He said that

“a major programme of improvement has been underway. The goal is to overhaul the culture of”

Post Office Ltd.

There is no doubt from the evidence submitted to Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry that there is a long history of obfuscation, secrecy, cover-ups and incompetence, for which no one has yet been called to account. We are now at the halfway point of the inquiry, and almost daily revelations have cast doubt on the claim that a cultural change has taken place. I do not intend to go into the details of the historical management culture, as Sir Wyn Williams is yet to cover that, but there is sufficient evidence that the hope of a cultural change at POL has not been realised.

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

I was shocked that the inquiry was suspended again last week because the Post Office had failed to disclose documentation to it. Does that not show that the secrecy, incompetence or cover-up is continuing?

[Marion Fellows]

I could not agree more with the right hon. Gentleman. I will come on to that point.

Openness, honesty and integrity are guiding principles of public life, but it seems that for decades the management of Post Office Ltd has not adhered to them. Shamefully, the compensation schemes set up to right the wrongs of the deplorable chapter of Horizon have not been immune to Post Office Ltd’s unjust approach. In recent months, tax expert Dan Neidle has written of the unfairness baked into them. He initially wrote about the unfair tax burden imposed on the compensation awards. Thankfully, that opened up an additional £26 million from the Government to “top up” compensation for historical shortfall scheme claimants, but he soon realised that the schemes are designed to ensure that the lowest amount of compensation is paid out. That goes against the assertion of the chair of the inquiry that “normal negotiating tactics” used in “hard-fought litigation” are not appropriate for Horizon compensation.

The application forms for the compensation schemes are so legally complex that Mr Neidle, a legal expert, said that even he would require legal advice when filling them out. However, the provision of legal and tax advice from POL-appointed lawyers has been totally insufficient and, as Mr Neidle says, “token”. Everything that follows the initial application is framed by the lack of legal assistance. The Post Office guidance, and the lack of clarity on the forms from Post Office Ltd that applicants can claim for damage to their reputation, leads many applicants to claim much less compensation than they are entitled to. Furthermore, there is no option to claim punitive damages. Mr Neidle says that a lawyer would spot that, but a layperson would not. Once again, that means that applicants, who are often elderly and in a weak financial position, are likely to miss out on a large portion of their compensation.

Shockingly, the Post Office continued to attempt to suppress the truth by warning sub-postmasters who received an offer under the HSS that they could not mention the compensation terms to anyone, including other applicants, the press, and their family and friends. That is inaccurate, misleading and, most of all, shameful. One applicant described the process of trying to get fair compensation as “soul destroying”. Have these people not suffered enough?

The recent scandal in which Post Office Ltd executives paid themselves tens of thousands of pounds in bonuses for taking part in the ongoing Horizon inquiry, which they were legally obliged to do, has been referred to as “bonusgate”. To make matters worse, one sub-metric that the Post Office remuneration committee deemed to have been fulfilled was required to be signed off by the inquiry chair, Sir Wyn Williams, but he had not done so.

In June, Nick Read, the Post Office Ltd CEO; Henry Staunton, its chair; Amanda Burton, the chair of the remuneration committee; Lisa Harrington, the former chair of that committee, and Tom Cooper, a former director from UK Government Investments, were brought before the Business and Trade Committee. Once again, there was a total lack of openness and clarity. It was claimed that the metric had been changed to require approval from Sir Wyn’s team rather than from Sir Wyn himself. Post Office Ltd still had not received such approval, but it exercised “discretion” to go ahead pay out the bonuses.

The Chair of the Business and Trade Committee, the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), outlined the statutory definition of “false accounting”—ironically, a charge on which many sub-postmasters were wrongly convicted. He said that

“it seems to me that in the annual accounts that Post Office reported to Parliament there was false or misleading information presented that did lead to the financial gain”

of Mr Read and some of his senior colleagues. As the single shareholder in Post Office Ltd, what steps are the Government taking to ensure that this situation never recurs?

The messaging is simply terrible. While sub-postmasters often earn less than the national minimum wage and others fight tooth and nail for compensation, executives pay themselves hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses for doing “a reasonable job”, even though the bonus sub-metrics they set themselves have not been properly achieved. That is the management culture of POL: bonuses for doing “a reasonable job”. Mr Read is on the record refusing to pay more than the token amount he has repaid. Compare that with the management bonus culture for sub-postmasters, whose area managers periodically offer them the chance to enter into a draw for a luxury hamper of tea products. It is teabags for sub-postmasters, and tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses for executives and managers.

Shockingly, in recent weeks, following a freedom of information request by Eleanor Shaikh, it was revealed that Post Office Ltd had racially categorised the sub-postmasters it was investigating, using what have been described as Victorian-era racist terms. I will not repeat them. Post Office Ltd has since confirmed that the relevant document was in use until 2011. It is incomprehensible that no one in the POL management questioned the language in that document.

The chance discovery of that document raised further concerns about Post Office Ltd’s disclosure of documents at the inquiry. Sir Wyn Williams outlined that the late disclosure of documents

“has the potential to jeopardise the smooth running of the Inquiry”.

He said:

“It wastes public funds, it delays the provision of answers to those who were affected and delays the learning of lessons through the recommendations that I will in due course make.”

Subsequently, the Post Office informed the inquiry that it would not be able even to identify relevant documents by the date set by the chair, which Sir Wyn described as “grossly unsatisfactory”. At disclosure hearings, it was stated that the Post Office had been

“unable to identify the scale of the disclosure, and cannot give a timescale.”

However, Jason Beer KC, representing the inquiry, said that the number of documents that needed to be reviewed could be significant.

Representatives of the core participants lambasted the disclosure issues and their impact on victims—people who have already suffered immeasurably are being retraumatised—and called for an adjournment of the inquiry. Reflecting the views of victims, Mr Henry from Hodge Jones & Allen said in his oral submission:

“If a man deceives me once, shame on him. If a man deceives me twice, shame on me.”

He added that Post Office Ltd had taken for granted the chances that it had been afforded early in the inquiry, noting that there had been previous disclosure issues yet Post Office Ltd had acted vexatiously and done the same again. He said that those he represents will not say, “I told you so,” and that

“they knew the future…for the past they knew.”

Mr Henry spoke of the “mental scars” that victims had suffered for two decades because of the Post Office’s cruelty, culture of deceit, secrecy, cover-ups and lies.

Another representative of victims said:

“Post Office always throws a spanner in the works…They have total disregard for any of us. They’re making fools of everyone”.

Another victim said that having to relive the Post Office’s tactics had made them relive the way they were investigated and treated during Horizon, which had a significant impact on their mental health. The representative of Howe & Co. brought up compensation delays. He quoted a victim who spoke of seeing no light at the end of the tunnel and said that victims have no faith that all claims will be settled by August 2024.

The inquiry has been derailed, having been being suspended until the end of July, but that is under review and it is entirely plausible that it will not sit again until September. This latest in a very long list of Post Office-manufactured scandals is a kick in the teeth for victims, who are once again losing faith, for the inquiry and for the general public. The significant non-disclosure of documents by Post Office Ltd makes it feel like nothing in the toxic management culture has changed and, sadly, raises serious concerns about its future.

Sean Hudson of the Communication Workers Union described the management culture perfectly, saying:

“Every serious management failure results in a culture of offering that failure up for external investigation at significant expense to POL and the taxpayer, without learning from those mistakes.”

When were the Government made aware of disclosure issues, and what discussions have they had about them with POL?

The UK Government are the single shareholder in Post Office Ltd. Traditionally, the small business Minister, whatever title they have or Department they are in—at the moment, it is the Department for Business and Trade —has oversight of POL. UK Government Investments has a director on the board of POL, presumably to protect the Government’s interest in the company. The Post Office Ltd board has responsibility for the operation of the Post Office. Is that tenable, given the cultural issues of the past and present?

UKGI is the Government’s centre of expertise in corporate finance and governance. Until recently, its representative on the POL board was Tom Cooper, a senior civil servant, but he has now resigned as a director. Mr Cooper was heavily criticised for failing to tell Ministers about the error regarding bonuses for five weeks after it was revealed, leaving officials to read about it in a statement on the Post Office’s corporate website. That is not a great look for the Government and it raises real questions about the governance of Post Office Ltd.

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a Government adviser on a compensation scheme for Horizon victims, said that Cooper’s failure to tell Ministers and Parliament about the mistake was

“of a piece with the UK government’s representation on the board throughout this sorry saga.”

While I understand that the Department for Business and Trade has said that Tom Cooper’s resignation was planned before bonusgate, does the Minister accept that Horizon victims may find that hard to believe given the culture of deceit within Post Office Ltd?

The Minister has said that the salaries of the leaders of the Post Office reflect the need to have people with the right experience and expertise. Does he still think that the Government have got value for money from the current leaders of Post Office Ltd? Do the Government think it right that its CEO received £455,000 in bonuses and its chief financial officer received £310,000 while Post Office Ltd oversees scandal after scandal, drags its heels on compensation and offers substandard remuneration packages to hard-working sub-postmasters?

In the same way that the Post Office apologises for each scandal or crisis as it arises, the Government criticise Post Office Ltd and commission a report, yet there does not seem to be much action—I put that more kindly than what I wrote, which was: “and then they do nothing”. Government oversight has not solved any of the issues of the past, including Horizon. It is the hard work and tireless campaigning of SPMs themselves, journalists such as Nick Wallis, and campaigners such as Alan Bates, the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance, Eleanor Shaikh, Dan Neidle, Tim McCormack, the CWU, the National Federation of SubPostmasters, and many Members in this place, past and present, that has continued to push the Government on the issue. I exclude myself from that, because I just take everybody else’s work and talk about it.

It is about time that the Government offered a different approach, because with the current arrangement they are presiding over disaster after disaster. Sub-postmasters are essentially left to subsidise a Government-owned network at great personal cost, and when things go wrong, they are left to fight for justice themselves. It is about time that we started to see proper support for those at the coalface. Will the Minister outline the Government’s plan for the post office network, and provide assurances that the constant barrage of scandals will come to an end and that the management culture at Post Office Ltd will change forever?

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I congratulate the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) on securing the debate. I declare an interest that I am a member of the Government’s Horizon compensation advisory board. Many will know that I have been involved in addressing what has become known as the Horizon scandal for many years.

I am usually an advocate of the cock-up theory of history—mistakes happen—but my involvement in addressing the Post Office and Horizon scandal started when a constituent of mine, Tom Brown, who was being prosecuted by the Post Office, came forward. The more I looked into the issue over the years, the more I realised that these were not mistakes but deliberate lies, cover-ups and deceits, which, as has been said, led to innocent, upstanding members of the community being prosecuted, bankrupted and, in some cases, sadly taking their own lives. That takes us back to issue raised by the hon. Lady: it is the culture of the Post Office that led to the Horizon scandal.

I have described the culture of the Post Office as rotten to the core. Based on recent evidence, I do not think a great deal has changed. Let us see what that rotten culture led to. The hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) has referred to the vicious prosecution of individuals. The evidence that came out of the inquiry—Lord Arbuthnot and I were aware of this—showed that the board knew in 2011 that the Horizon computer system was flawed. The argument that kept being peddled out—that somehow the system was infallible—was just not true.

In spite of that, the Post Office continued to prosecute individuals, including one horrendous case where it sent a pregnant mother to prison. Some 927 individuals were prosecuted. The numbers went up substantially, so why was nobody at the Post Office saying, “Wait a minute: have we suddenly got a load of kleptomaniacs employed as sub-postmasters?” Alarm bells should have been ringing, and yet the Post Office doubled down on prosecuting people. My constituent Tom Brown went through agony for two years after being arrested for allegedly stealing £84,000, only to get to the Crown court in Newcastle and be told that the case was dismissed. In that time, he had gone bankrupt and had his reputation completely ruined. There are many other stories. I and other Members have met some of these individuals, so we know of the mental strain and cruelty that they have experienced. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by their situation.

The hon. Member for Telford also raised the issue of the board’s approach of resistance. I have referred in the past to a tsunami of public cash being used to defend the indefensible, as happened in the court case that Alan Bates and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance brought against the Post Office. There was also the ridiculous situation in which it challenged Mr Justice Fraser in the court and tried to have him removed. That was a delaying tactic—it was not about getting to the truth, but about trying to outspend the applicants. That all happened at our expense—the nearly £100 million it spent was our money—yet it knew back in 2011 that what it was arguing in court could not be defended.

The hon. Lady also mentioned the role of the board. There were faceless individuals sitting on the board and agreeing all of this. They were quite happy to get remuneration for sitting on the board, but they did not ask basic questions about what was going on. For many years I have not been able to get to the bottom of the role played by the UK Government Investments share- holder. That person was meant to represent the interests of taxpayers on the board, yet they were quite happy to sign off £100 million of legal fees for the Post Office. I shall make an exception for the present Minister, but I have dealt with many Ministers over the years, all of whom, to be frank, trumpeted the same rubbish every week, obviously guided by their shareholder on the board. It would be interesting to see what the shareholder said over the years. These faceless individuals are taking remuneration, and they need to be held to account for their actions. It is no good saying that time has passed. They have ruined people’s lives—that is the important thing.

The ironic one is Paula Vennells, who ran the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. It has already been mentioned that she got a CBE for services to the Post Office. Even in 2019, when she got it, we knew about the scandal that was going to break, yet somebody thought it was great to sign off on the CBE. They not only did that, but made her a non-executive director at the Cabinet Office and the chair of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. What the hon. Member for Telford said is correct: it is a chummy club where we think good people—either good men or good women—can go on to these other things, and no doubt get, for those two roles, quite substantial payments. How was that allowed to happen? How did somebody in Government say, “Wait a minute; this scandal is about to break—we’ll give her a CBE and appoint her to two public bodies”?

Finally, I come to the present board. It has already been said that Nick Read’s salary is £415,000. He had a bonus of £455,000. The chief financial officer, Alisdair Cameron, gets paid £110,000 and got a £316,000 bonus. I ask them: where is their moral compass? How did they think it was right to accept such ludicrous bonuses when we are still fighting over compensation for victims of the Horizon scandal? That is wrong. I do not understand how someone can get nearly £1 million a year for running an organisation that is supposed to provide a public service and think that somehow it is right to get a bonus for doing their own job, while there are people who are broken, who are destitute and, in some cases, who still have the moral shame that came with prosecution. That is a moral issue. I do not know how these people sleep at night. How do they think it ethically possible to accept such a figure?

I think Nick Read has paid something like £7,000 back. Big deal! Let us be honest: that is pocket money in terms of his overall remuneration package. Part of the bonus was actually for their work on the Horizon scandal. It was complete nonsense: they said that Sir Wyn had to sign the thing off, but Sir Wyn did not even know about it. The Post Office made that up. At the end of the day, this is public money, not their money. This is not a private company; this is taxpayers’ money, which is the important point. I would not mind if it was actually good, but as has already been said, the inquiry has now been held up because the Post Office has not disclosed documents. The Post Office cannot argue that somehow it cannot find documents or that there has to be a delay. Somebody should have done a trawl of this. If certain people have kept money for work on the Horizon scandal, the Government should sue them, because frankly they are holding up the inquiry.

There is a lot of anger, quite rightly, among sub-postmasters, sub-postmistresses and their supporters, not only about what has happened in the past. There are some clear governance issues. I think that there is call to sack the board on various social media, and I agree with that: the present board needs to be sacked. We also need a fundamental change in the way the Post Office is structured and operated.

[Lucy Allan]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the lawyers, Herbert Smith Freehills, should be sacked?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Lawyers are lawyers. The hon. Lady said she was a lawyer, and I mean no disrespect, but let us be honest, if the lawyers are going to get a good living out of it, they will take the money and give the advice. A lawyer will say anything if they are paid enough. The point is that the board is still not performing its scrutiny role. As the hon. Lady rightly said, the role of non-executive directors is to challenge and question things, but they are not doing that.

There needs to be an emergency situation and the current board, including Nick Read, needs to go. We need to put in some interim arrangements, and then in the long term we need to look at how the Post Office is run. It is frankly a farce that it is considered to be a private, stand-alone company. It is not: it is 100% owned by taxpayers. Unless that is done, I fear that these people will keep taking large bonuses and salaries and, as the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, our network will get smaller and smaller and the people who do the real hard work every day of the week at the front end will get less and less.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kevin Hollinrake)]

It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Sir George. I thank the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for securing today’s important debate and for her constant work in this area on the all-party parliamentary group on post offices. It is always a delight to work with her in these areas. We share her passion for the post office network and the services that it provides to communities up and down the country.

A positive management culture is paramount for the health of any organisation, so I welcome today’s debate on the culture of the Post Office. As raised by the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier), culture is critical to any organisation. As Emerson once said,

“An institution is the lengthened shadow”

of a single person, so leadership is hugely important in this context.

The Horizon scandal has had a devastating impact on those affected and on Post Office itself. It has now rightly accepted that it got things very badly wrong. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for all the work they have done in campaigning over many years, including the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw, my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) and the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I also thank the noble Lord Arbuthnot, who is in the Gallery, and the many other people associated with this work, including the barrister Paul Marshall, the journalists Tom Witherow and Nick Wallis, Dan Neidle and, of course, Alan Bates and the 555 people who took the matter to court. We would not be here without them, and we are at least starting to put these matters right.

When the current chief executive of Post Office, Nick Read, started his job in September 2019, he made it clear that Post Office needed to apologise for the events of the past, fully address them and, of course, compensate those who suffered detriment. A key part of that will clearly be the restoration of trust between Post Office and postmasters. That is so important, because, as I said previously in other debates, there is no post office network without postmasters.

In December 2019, the parties to the group litigation order in Bates v. Post Office Ltd took part in a mediation session and issued a joint statement confirming Post Office’s commitment to resetting its relationship with postmasters. Since then, Post Office has appointed two non-executive director postmasters, who were elected by other postmasters, to the Post Office board. This ensures that postmasters’ voices are being heard at the highest level—something that I witnessed yesterday when I attended the board meeting at the company’s offices. It is crucial that senior management is cognisant of the impact that its strategies and changes will have on those who are on the frontline of delivering services. Post Office has also appointed a current postmaster to a new director role, who leads the day-to-day relationship with postmasters.

Alongside those appointments, Post Office has looked into operational matters to improve culture and trust between senior management, staff and postmasters. Improved training packages, and the hiring of more than 100 new area managers to provide dedicated local support, are examples of positive changes. On the Government’s part, I enjoy chairing our regular working-group meetings with Post Office and the National Federation of SubPostmasters, as I did yesterday, and I find them to be a useful forum to discuss the high-level issues affecting postmasters.

On compensation, it is right to say that in order to look to the future, Post Office must first address and learn from its past mistakes so that it can rebuild trust in the business. We are determined that postmasters affected by the Horizon scandal receive the compensation they deserve, and the Government are supporting Post Office with funding to deliver that.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), challenged me on what the Government are doing to make sure that justice is delivered to those affected, and I am determined to make sure that we do everything possible in that regard. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for North Durham for his work on the advisory board, to which he referred. The board initially looked after just the GLO part of the scheme, but that was extended to all three schemes on the request of him and his colleagues on the board. I am delighted to see the work it is doing, and I am determined to give it what it needs to make sure that the schemes are fit for purpose and delivering outcomes as expected. Indeed, we expanded membership of the board to include, for example, Professor Moorhead, who has been a leading advocate in this area.

Although there is still work to do, good progress has been made across the different compensation schemes. For postmasters who were wrongfully convicted due to Horizon shortfalls, Post Office has to date paid out over £20.4 million in compensation. That includes initial interim payments to 81 individuals and, additionally, 65 partial settlements, top-up payments or hardship payments. Post Office has reached full and final settlement with four claimants, and will continue to process claims that are lodged as quickly as possible. The Horizon shortfall scheme, which was set up as part of the settlement in the 2019 group litigation case against Post Office, provides redress for postmasters who repaid shortfalls but were not convicted or part of the court case. Over 99% of the original claimants to the HSS have now received an offer, and the value of the offers is more than £100 million. A further £2.1 million has been offered to the 91 late claims that have been processed so far.

The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw says she believes the claims have been settled at the lowest possible level. I do not accept that. The advisory board, including the right hon. Member for North Durham and the noble Lord Arbuthnot, and I attended a session with the HSS panel and the lawyers connected to that panel. It was clear to me, and I hope to other Members who attended that call, that the panel works on an inquisitorial basis, trying to identify any detriment, financial or otherwise, and to ensure compensation in full on those matters.

The group litigation order scheme is being delivered by my Department—the Department for Business and Trade—rather than the Post Office. It is always tragic to hear the many cases that relate to these issues. I have a constituent—Sam Harrison of Nawton, near Helmsley—who sadly passed away while waiting for her claim to be paid from the GLO. That is unacceptable, and we need to accelerate outstanding payments through all schemes. To date, the Department has paid out over £21 million in compensation, including through interim payments. We have received 18 claims. Across those areas, our priority is providing fair and swift compensation to those affected, so that postmasters achieve the justice they deserve. Indeed, we have made some adjustments to the scheme and to previous schemes, in terms of the tax treatment of the HSS. When the board has come to me on any matter, we have delivered on its suggestions.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I would like to put on the record my thanks to the Minister and his predecessor, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), for the way in which they have approached the Horizon compensation scheme scandal. The board made some recommendations to the Minister at the last meeting. When will he be in a position to respond to those recommendations?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am keen to respond, as the right hon. Member knows, on a potential appeals process. I am looking at this carefully, and we will continue to engage on that, but we want to ensure that everything is fair and that people are confident in the process for getting the compensation they deserve. We want to ensure that the compensation is delivered on time. We have an August 2024 deadline, as the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw mentioned. We are keen to deliver on that deadline and are looking again at further ways to expedite payments to all those still waiting.

On governance, Post Office Ltd is a public corporation, and as such its board retains responsibility for the strategic direction of the company.