Post Office Horizon IT Scandal: Compensation

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Darren Jones

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

The victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal should be fully compensated, so that they are put back into the position they would have been in had they not been a victim of this miscarriage of justice in the first place. The Minister has agreed with that statement from the Dispatch Box before, but it is not happening. Can I say that it is not a complicated process to be able to quantify their losses and to be able to compensate them fully? My Committee, I understand the advisory board and the statutory inquiry have suggested that one way to try to improve this is to remove the Post Office entirely from this process and to make it an independent process, properly budgeted, with the requirement to fully compensate the victims in the way I have described. Why will the Government not just do that?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank the hon. Member for his work in challenging us in this area. I would probably push back a bit. It is complicated to assess loss. Both I and the right hon. Member for North Durham sat in on a long call with the HSS panel recently and some eminent lawyers gave us a lot of confidence that this was being done right, on an inquisitorial basis, but it is complicated to assess those losses. I would refer to Sir Wyn Williams’s comments. He basically says that we should carry on what we are doing. He would not necessarily have advised this route in the first place, but what he says now is that the best thing we can do is push on with the frameworks we have in place. There are three different schemes. We need to push them on more quickly of course and I am very keen to do that.

Post Office: Horizon Compensation

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Darren Jones

Thursday 23rd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for his statement and advance notice of it, and the members of the advisory board for their important work.

I want to focus on one particular sentence of the Minister’s statement, which is very important. He said that the intention of the compensation scheme is

“to return postmasters to the position that they should have been in had they not been affected by the Horizon scandal”.

He will know that that has an important meaning in law for the calculation of compensation. Some victims of this scandal feel that they have not been fully put back into the position they would have been in had they not been a victim of this scandal. Can he confirm for those victims what process they should follow to ensure that the compensation scheme delivers on its intention as stated on the Floor of the House today?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his work as Chair of the Select Committee. There is a clear process in the GLO scheme for a claim being submitted and then settled. There is claims facilitation if a case cannot be settled, and an independent panel following that. Through those processes, there should be a mechanism to get fair compensation. If he has evidence of people who feel they are in the situation that he refers to, I would be keen to meet him to discuss those cases.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Darren Jones

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

Britishvolt, the once valued £3.8 billion site of national importance for the production of electric vehicle batteries in our country, is today going into administration. Does the Minister agree with me that the future of UK car manufacturing relies on UK battery production? If so, what is he going to do about it?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. It is important to note that we have not withdrawn any money from Britishvolt, but clearly British taxpayers’ money is important and it is important that we dispense that money in a responsible way. There are clear milestones that we expect anybody in receipt of public money to hit. We are looking at the situation very carefully to make sure that they are doing so.

Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Darren Jones

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 25th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s delight at serving together on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. The evidence speaks for itself, to stretch a metaphor when we are talking about evidence. The Science and Technology Committees in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as well as the Government’s own reviews and the Forensic Science Regulator’s annual reports, have all pretty much concluded the same thing: where standards cannot be enforced by providers and the validity of the forensic process is brought into question in prosecution, miscarriages of justice will have followed. The forensics regulator has been pretty bold in making that case in her annual report to Parliament. That is why, I am pleased to say, there has been broad consensus on the measures brought forward in the Bill to ensure that she can enforce the standards for more providers of forensic services.

That is why successive Governments have been notionally committed to putting the regulator on a statutory footing for nearly eight years. Many right hon. and hon. Members have called for this for a long time. That is what underpinned the conclusions of the reports from the Science and Technology Committees in this House and the other place that I mentioned to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller).

Last year the Science and Technology Committee, of which I was a member, concluded in its inquiry on this issue that

“the Regulator—now more than ever—needs statutory powers.”

A couple of months earlier, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee had said:

“It is hard to understand why…the Forensic Science Regulator still lacks powers they need… The Forensic Science industry is in trouble; such action is now urgent.”

The regulator herself said in the report:

“Legislation is urgently required to give the…statutory enforcement powers”

needed to do the job properly.

I therefore appreciate the Government’s willingness to co-operate in seeking to carry the Bill, and the support of the Minister and his officials in producing the Bill and the explanatory notes, and in helping to secure the Bill’s passage through the House today. It is especially important that the Bill does pass today, because the availability of these services on time and to reliable standards is often patchy.

When the then Government announced the wholesale closure of the loss-making Forensic Science Service in November 2010, the Science and Technology Committee warned that they had failed to give

“enough consideration to the impact on forensic science research and development (R&D), the capacity of private providers to absorb the FSS’s 60% market share and the wider implications for the criminal justice system.”

That warning has proved prescient. Today, many scientific processes are conducted in-house by police forces, but this is piecemeal in its extent.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing forward the Bill, which I understand has a fair chance of success. Clause 6(4) allows the regulator to prohibit a person from carrying out forensic science activities. Where that person is employed in-house at a police force, as he describes it, what would happen to the employment status of that individual?

[Darren Jones]

I think that is an important enforcement question. Of course, this has been one of the bedrocks of the voluntary model: where services are provided that do not meet the accredited standard, either by a private provider or in-house by a police force, that has just been able to continue. How a police force dealt with an in-house service that did not reach the accredited standard would be an issue for that police force, but I suggest that it might either bring its service up to the accredited standard or have confidence in the private sector market to find a provider that met that standard, which would be enforced by the regulator. I have every confidence that every police force across the country wishes to do this in the right way; there has been a huge amount of pressure on them to do so previously.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and I do not object to the clause. I welcome the fact that, unlike under most regulators, individuals will be held to account, not just the organisation. My question is: where an individual who is employed by a police force is held to account, might disciplinary proceedings be taken against that individual, for example?

[Darren Jones]

It is not for me to conclude on that issue in debate on a private Member’s Bill. My personal view, for what it is worth and to entertain the hon. Member’s intervention, is that one would not want an employee to be dismissed as a consequence, but they might receive further training to meet the accredited standard and be able to continue their duties. However, as I say, it is not for me to judge an employment issue in such a setting.

As a consequence of some of the points that the hon. Member raises, individual services are often outsourced by police forces, but a lack of clear incentives for providers to seek accreditation, given the overriding need to compete on price, has created a vacuum of accountability. Last year’s House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report set out the situation. Their lordships concluded:

“Simultaneous budget cuts and reorganisation, together with exponential growth in the need for new services such as digital evidence, have put forensic science providers under extreme pressure. The result is a forensic science market which is becoming dysfunctional and which, unless it is properly regulated, will soon suffer the shocks of major forensic science providers going out of business and putting justice in jeopardy… This is not just a budget issue: structural and regulatory muddle exacerbates the malaise. There is no consistency in the way in which the 43 Police Authorities commission forensic services. Some Police Authorities have taken forensic investigation predominantly in-house whilst outsourcing some services to unregulated providers. These actions call into question equitable access for defendants and raise issues over the quality of the analysis undertaken and the evaluation of the evidence presented.”

Their lordships therefore recommended that

“the Forensic Science Regulator should urgently be given a number of statutory powers to bolster trust in the quality of forensic science provision.” This is a multi-layered challenge that defies simple political or partisan characterisation, but the enduring message is that consistent standards, consistently applied, must be foundational to the effective provision of a forensic service across the whole country. Although forensic evidence is generally of good quality, the consequences of a market that is failing to perform that function to measurable standards are, of course, serious, specific and widespread.

The Home Office commissioned a joint review of the provision of forensic science, which identified a growing perception about the risk of unsafe forensic evidence and demonstrated the twofold impact of an inadequate enforcement regime. Some judges, the report noted,

“were not specifically aware of accreditation requirements or”

the Forensic Science Regulator’s codes of practice, and defence lawyers expressed concern that

“perceived compromises regarding quality standards meant that challenges to the integrity of forensic evidence presented in court could soon become routine.”

I think that it is of value for us to pause and reflect on that submission to the Government’s review. Defence lawyers had a concern that the forensic science process itself was being used as a mechanism to provide arguments in prosecution cases. Of course, the service itself should not be the basis for such submissions.