Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I thought for a dreadful moment that I was going to say, “I agree with everything the noble Baroness said”, but she spoiled it with her party-political points at the end. She will forgive me if I do not pick up on them, but what she had to say about what has happened is something all of us feel very deeply.

I have been around Parliament for close on 40 years, and I do not think I have ever felt so ashamed of so many things that have gone wrong, with devastating consequences. The Bill is about compensation. I do not know how you compensate people for losing some of the best years of their lives. I do not know how you compensate people for the horror that they have faced of having to live from hand to mouth. All I know is that something has gone dreadfully wrong with our system when it took my noble friend, who is a hero although he denies it, and Kevan Jones in the other place for the Labour Party, more than 20 years. This has gone on for more than 20 years, and even now we have a Bill to extend the time still further. I am not against the Bill. I can see that in practical terms it is necessary, and I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for saying that the Government are not going to take their foot off the gas. I have to say that the foot has not really been on the gas for quite some time.

My noble friend the Minister said that this is a small Bill; I think we are going to have a very big bill at the end of this process—I am referring not to legislation here, but to cash. I was delighted to see Fujitsu today, speaking from Davos—the irony—admitting moral responsibility. There is a legal responsibility as well.

I want to say a few things to my noble friend about some of the reasons that I say that this is much wider. What was the board of the Post Office doing? Did nobody on the board of the Post Office think, “Isn’t it a bit odd that we are suddenly getting all these cases?” Where were they? What has the department done to hold the board to account? Are there malice and clawback provisions—which are common throughout business nowadays—that apply to the Post Office? Are they being applied? I am sorry, but it is not good enough for Ministers to say, “We are waiting on the results of the public inquiry”. It is not the public inquiry’s responsibility to hold the members of the board of the Post Office responsible for discharging their fiduciary duties. That is for Ministers to do. I am at a loss to understand this. Look at what has happened to some of the people on the board of the Post Office: one of them is now a Permanent Secretary in a government department. I am not saying that she did anything wrong, but I just find it completely remarkable, so can my noble friend tell me what action has been taken by Ministers to look at the conduct of the members of the board? Did they not read the newspapers? Did no one think, “Isn’t it odd that we’re having all these sudden cases of alleged fraud and dishonesty coming from nowhere?”

Then we have Fujitsu. I read in the newspapers—to follow the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones —that when Ministers wanted to take action to stop Fujitsu getting contracts, they were told that poor performance in respect of one contract did not enable you to not have some of the others. What is this world that operates in Whitehall? Every household in the country, if it gets a duff builder, does not feel that it has to give that builder another opportunity, so there is something desperately wrong with the procurement process and the way in which Ministers are advised.

Now I would like to say something at risk to myself: I would like to criticise the Lobby correspondents in this place. My noble friend has raised this on numerous occasions, and we have all tried to support him in one way or another. It gets nowhere. It does not get reported. Then we have a television programme and now my noble friend is full-time doing interviews and explaining what has happened, but for years and years it was not of interest, like so many reports produced by Select Committees of this House which warn—I will not go through the whole litany of them—and they do not get picked up because the Lobby correspondents are too busy as a pack operating on how many bottles of champagne have been sold in the House of Lords, for example, which hit the headlines the other day, completely wrongly attributing it to Members and not to people who come here.

I am not a lawyer, but I always understood that lawyers had a duty to the courts and to ensure that information was disclosed, whether in court cases or tribunal cases. So what was going on with the lawyers? What was happening there? Is the regulatory body waiting for the inquiry as well? The inquiry will report and then there will be another couple of years—by which time we will all be dead—before we know what actually happened. Why are the regulatory bodies not doing this?

On the subject of the Lobby, why is it that Computer Weekly has been the hero here? Our paths crossed, my noble friend and I, after Liam Fox, when he was Secretary of State for Defence, set up an inquiry to look into the Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre. I did this with a judge, and with the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell. We exonerated the pilots. Quite frankly, when we looked at the evidence, there was a whole load of information that had not been made available to Ministers. I see a pattern.

I concluded that a whole bunch of important people concerned with security in Northern Ireland had all gone on one helicopter, which they should not have done. The helicopter had not been approved to fly safely; indeed, there was evidence that it had been thought that it would be positively dangerous. The easy thing to do was just to blame the pilots. The case took 11 years. My noble friend, again, was one of the heroes pursuing that issue. While the families battled to get clarity, some of them died, as has happened with the postmasters. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we operate when these scandals occur.

I congratulate my noble friend on his persistence. In the film, someone says, “I never thought a Tory MP could be so nice”, or something to that effect. Just for the record, whether they are Tory or Labour MPs, or even Liberals, or Liberal Democrats—are there any Green MPs?—whatever they are, the vast majority of Members of Parliament, in my experience, do their duty by their constituents and work very hard; there are some bad apples, of course. But if we get answers from Ministers that do not answer questions, if Parliament is not able to do its job because the Executive has become overmighty and too powerful, they cannot deliver. The result, of course, is a scandal of this type.

Having got that off my chest, I want to ask my noble friend the Minister one question. This concerns one individual, Lee Castleton; I know about this only because of the media coverage. We know, because the Post Office has admitted it, that Lee Castleton was used “pour encourager les autres”. He defended himself in court, he got a bill for over £300,000 and he was bankrupted. Will those legal costs be remitted to him? Will he be compensated for all the legal costs?

When, greatly to their credit, the Prime Minister and other Ministers say that people will be restored to the position they would have been in had this not happened—wow—what does that mean, and who will decide that? It does not mean just compensation in terms of some approved scale or whatever. What about what happened to their homes and house prices and everything else? When we talk about compensation, what are we actually saying here? How will this be delivered, and in a realistic timescale? We are all getting older, and they have had to wait far too long.

Finally, I want to ask my noble friend, although I know that he does not have responsibility for it, what is going on in Scotland in this respect? I read in the newspapers that, in Scotland, they are talking about providing a pardon. I am sorry but, if I am a postmaster who has been falsely accused, I do not want a pardon. I want absolutely it on the record that I have been exonerated. A pardon is not enough. I appreciate the legal difficulties but it is not enough, and you cannot have a different system north and south of the border when you are talking about restoring people’s integrity and reputation.

I apologise to the House for going on for so long at this hour. I had hoped to do it on Thursday when we talked about accountability, but we were given three minutes, and now I can talk for as long as I like. But I might lose the House if I did so.

There are some serious issues here about accountability and about the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. This needs to change. There is going to be a general election. It will be interesting to see what the parties say in their manifestos about dealing with this. We all know on all sides of this House that Parliament is broken and not working properly. We know that because we get all the legislation that comes here from the other place that is not being properly discussed. We know that because we get Answers from Ministers to Written Questions and Oral Questions which have been written by civil servants who do not show sufficient respect to Parliament, and Ministers—perhaps some—who do not respect Parliament to the degree they should. When that happens, it means that people have to battle for 20 years. I pay tribute to my noble friend, who—he really needs to shed his modesty—is a symbol of what is good about this place. This whole episode has revealed a very rotten undercurrent, which needs to be addressed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I know my noble friend the Minister does not want to comment on the particular case of Lee Castleton, but the point I was making about him was there were £325,000 of court costs. First, normally when you win you do not pay costs. The effect of saying that he is not guilty surely means that those costs should be returned. That has nothing to do with the compensation that is paid to him. So will costs be remitted? That is the key point. Secondly, in respect of that case, what do the Government mean when they say that things should be restored to where they would have been had this not happened? What does that mean because £600,000 is an arbitrary number? Some people lost their business, their house and their position. How will that principle, which I think is greatly to the Government’s credit, be delivered?

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

I commend my colleague the Postal Minister Mr Hollinrake for pushing through hard on the £600,000 because it is not for us to judge what any individual has lost; it is up to that individual claimant to make the decision about whether they want to go through the due legal process. The word “compensation” has perhaps been misapplied here. What we are actually talking about is a monetary sum to be given back which gives redress to individuals. In any particular case—for example, the case of Lee Castleton—it may well be that one can actually identify separate buckets, one of which might in fact be court costs be repaid, but within the overall settlement there will be an amount which should take account of all losses. If you have paid for someone else’s legal fees, that is a loss which needs to be repaid, so this will be tied up within each individual claim, the point being that if you do not as a postmaster want to go through the heartache and process of doing that, there is a route for you to receive a substantial sum and you can close the matter and get on with the rest of your life.