Post Office: Horizon Accounting System

Lord McNicol of West Kilbride Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, to his new position; it makes a bit of a change from Brexit. It is not the nicest of debates to open with, especially following the previous Oral Question. I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for securing today’s important debate. The High Court judgment in Bates v Post Office is viewed as the climax to more than 20 years of ordeal riddled with injustice, as we have heard—an ordeal where technology failed the workers and bosses failed their employees.

As my noble friend Lord Berkeley, did, I start by sharing some of the stories beyond that of Alan Bates, whose name is on the case. A number of them have already been covered, so I will not touch on them, but a few are striking. They go to the heart of this case, to issues of fairness and equality, and to how the case affected and still affects the individuals. There was Seema Misra, who ran a post office with her husband in Surrey, but time and again they had to put their hands in their own pockets to pay for the shortfall. It was ultimately found that the shortfall totalled about £80,000, and she was sentenced to 15 months in jail while pregnant with her second child.

We have heard about Rubbina Shaheen. Jo Hamilton was accused of taking £36,000 from the village shop she ran in Hampshire. After pleading guilty to false accounting to avoid a more serious charge, she gave up her shop and found it difficult to get a new job because of her criminal record. My noble friend Lord Berkeley touched on the case of Gary and Maureen Brown, so there is no need to repeat that. There were other cases influenced by Horizon’s problems. Its records were used as evidence against Robin Garbutt, who was accused of stealing money and murdering his wife.

During today’s debate, we must not lose sight of the human impact of these failures. Many are now seeking to overturn their convictions, and rightly so. It would be interesting to hear some words from the Minister about those previous convictions and the Government’s position on them.

I think that we all welcome last December’s High Court judgment and the approval of a £58 million settlement between the Post Office and the 550 claimants. As we have heard from every contributor, it is just a shame that so little of that will go to the individuals themselves.

The judgment confirmed what has long been known: that a number of bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon IT system had caused “discrepancies” in sub-postmasters’ branch accounts. I want to praise Alan Bates, a former sub-postmaster from north Wales, for all his work with investigative journalists and others in seeking justice. Like many noble Lords, I was struck by the vivid language that Justice Fraser used in his judgment—I do not need to repeat some of the statements; there are so many. He stated that the Post Office had shown

“the most dreadful complacency, and total lack of interest in investigating these serious issues”,

which amounted to

“the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.”

The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, touched on the concluding comment by Justice Coulson, who said that sub-postmasters were treated in

“in capricious or arbitrary ways which would not be unfamiliar to a mid-Victorian factory-owner.”

I have some questions for the Minister. Why did the Post Office make multiple appeals to try to see off the court case rather than deal with the issues and settle? Why did it ask for Judge Peter Fraser to recuse himself from the trial?

While the trial might be over, this shameful period is not. Many questions remain unanswered by the Post Office, by Fujitsu and by the Government. The Post Office’s new CEO is welcome, but the organisation cannot hide behind cosmetic changes. A cultural shift is needed from top to bottom to rebuild trust between sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses and the Post Office. Will the Post Office introduce an independent component when conducting any future prosecutions? How many branches still use the Horizon IT system? Can the Post Office guarantee that all bugs in the system have been fixed?

As we have heard, Fujitsu continually dismissed any claims of problems with its Horizon accounting system, which was being used in 11,500 branches by 2013. Do the Government support any action against Fujitsu and its directors?

We must also consider the Government’s role in this ordeal and their responsibility to help. The CWU’s branch secretary for sub-postmasters has pointed out that a government representative sits on the board of the Post Office and that they presumably took part in those board meetings that made decisions on the litigation, including the attempt to recuse the judge. Would the Minister care to comment on that?

Speaking in this House a couple of weeks ago, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, stated the Post Office had got it badly wrong and confirmed that only £12 million of the £58 million compensation would go to the individuals. He said that this was “not enough”. With that, I could not agree more. Why, then, have the Government said that they will not pay or help towards the sub-postmasters’ legal costs? Do they still hold to this policy? The crux of this is: do the Government support a full public inquiry into Horizon, Fujitsu and all the subsequent issues that arose?

I have about a minute left, so I will touch on a few wider thoughts. There is no escaping how technology will displace workers, reconfigure the labour market and change decisions made by companies and Governments in the future—in fact, it is happening now. The power of tech companies will only grow as technology increasingly dominates our personal and private lives. The fear of bugs similar to the Horizon system’s might well diminish, but human error could increase as machine learning becomes more and more common. No matter how many jobs are replaced by automation, human oversight will always be needed. A big change is coming and we must learn and be ready, but the people affected by Horizon deserve to get the justice and compensation owed to them.