Post Office Board and Governance

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the Chairman of the Select Committee.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for joining us for most of the five hours of hearings yesterday, but he will know as well as I do that what we saw yesterday was complete chaos at the top of the Post Office, when what we needed was a clarity of purpose about paying redress fast and fairly. Not a single witness yesterday said that they were satisfied with the speed of any one of the three processes. In fact, the lawyers for the claimants said that it may now take one to two years in order to complete the payment of redress, and we heard evidence of offers being made that were, frankly, insultingly low. That is true across each of the three schemes.

Most worryingly, we heard that the Post Office chief executive had not had regularly meetings with the Secretary of State or received a clear written instruction to accelerate every one of the three schemes; there were no deadlines and no targets, and there are no incentives to get the redress schemes done and dusted. That is not good enough. Will the Minister again reflect, when he brings his Bill before the House, on the need to eliminate the Post Office from this process to the maximum possible extent and ensure that there are a legally binding set of timescales under which claims are given the information they need and processed, with offers made and offers settled? I say that, because we cannot go on like this.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I do think the chaos was caused by one individual. I sat through the whole session; for the bit I was not in the room with the right hon. Gentleman, I was watching on television. It is right for people to be able to say that they are not satisfied with the speed of compensation. I have said that time and time again from this Dispatch Box, and we are keen to accelerate the process and make sure it is fast and fair.

We are aware of the recommendations from the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) on an appeals mechanism for some of the schemes where people feel the compensation is too low. We are looking and will continue to look at that. Every compensation scheme I have dealt with, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland global restructuring group scheme and the Lloyds-HBOS scheme, has been too slow, because of some of the complexity involved. We heard some good suggestions yesterday about how we might remove some of that complexity, which I am very keen to do. We heard some positive remarks from the individuals concerned, for example, from some of the solicitors, and from the Post Office on the fixed-sum awards—the £650,000 for the overturned convictions and the £75,000 for the GLO scheme. We heard how that was reducing the amount of disclosure that was required—that is one of the limiting factors. This should mean that the timescales that some people put on the table of one to two years should be rapidly reduced, and I am very keen to build on that work.

As the CEO confirmed to the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) yesterday, I meet him every month, and we speak about the need to accelerate compensation every single time. We have targets for when to pay the compensation by: August for GLO cases, and for all cases ideally by the end of the year. As we heard yesterday, 1,000 new claimants have come forward since the ITV series, which makes it difficult to put deadlines on payment. I am aware that the right hon. Gentleman wants a legally binding target. I am happy to discuss that with him, but we have just removed one legally binding target because not everything within the process is within our gift.