Post Office Horizon: Compensation and Legislation

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee.

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

May I put on record my gratitude to the Minister for the speed and attention he is paying to this issue? The bottom line, however, is that redress is too slow and the offers are too low. Papers that the Select Committee is publishing this afternoon show that at the core of the problem is a toxic culture of disbelief of sub-postmasters, which still persists at the top of the Post Office. Indeed, the board minutes for March last year show that board members lamented that the board was tired and constantly distracted by historical issues and short-term crises. I am afraid that that is not good enough when only 40% of the allocated budget for the Horizon scheme has been paid out and only 4% of the budget for the overturned conviction scheme has been paid out. When the Minister brings forward his Bill, will he make sure that the Post Office is now taken out of every single one of the compensation schemes, and that a hardwired instruction to deliver, with a fixed, legally binding timetable to deliver compensation agreements, is written on the face of the Bill?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his points, his kind words earlier, and his work on this matter. I know that he will be chairing a Select Committee session on it tomorrow, and I look forward to his recommendations.

I agree that compensation has been delivered too slowly. We are trying to accelerate its delivery every single day, and we are, I think, doing good work with the advisory board to ensure that that happens. I do not accept that the offers are too low, although I am not saying that there are no exceptions; no compensation scheme will be 100% perfect. In respect of the GLO scheme, for example, 58 full claims have been submitted and 41 have been accepted without reference to the next stage of the process, involving the independent panel, which would seem to indicate that the offers that have been made are fair. Of course people will not take my word for it—they will only accept it when those cases have been resolved—and there are bound to be high-profile cases, as indeed there have been, in which people say that the offers are too low. However, we are determined to ensure that everyone has full compensation that is also fair to the individual, fair to the other individuals within the schemes and, of course, fair to the taxpayer.

As for the people who are running the scheme, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, the Horizon shortfall scheme was set up as a scheme run by the Post Office, with an independent panel including eminent KCs such as Lord Garnier. I have met its members, as has the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and we have confidence in it. Nevertheless, we are looking at recommendations from the advisory board for an independent appeal process. The GLO scheme is independent of the Post Office; it is within our Department, and we are working to ensure that the offers are fair. As the right hon. Gentleman suggested, we are considering bringing the overturned conviction scheme back in-house, and we will have more to say about that in due course.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned 40% of the budget. We set a maximum budget of £1 billion—not a cap, but a maximum budget at this point. Part of the reason why only 4% of overturned convictions claims have been settled is the fact that the convictions have not in fact been overturned, which is why we are legislating in this way. Once those hundreds of convictions have been overturned, en masse, people will have access to rapid compensation via either the fixed-sum award, whereby compensation takes only days, or the full-assessment route, which takes longer.

The right hon. Gentleman spoke about a legally binding route, and of course we will look at all the various suggestions that are made. We have just legislated to extend the timescale for GLO compensation because we did not want to be bound by an arbitrary date, and I think he supported our legislation. I would therefore caution him against suggesting a legally binding date, because not everything is in our gift, in terms of when we receive a claim and how fast it can then be processed.