Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

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

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for their comments. I agree entirely with all that they said. We on these Benches support the Bill in its limited objectives. It simply provides financial power to the Secretary of State for expenditure on the compensation scheme and, as the Minister said, removes the deadline of 7 August to give people more time to claim, as recommended by the statutory inquiry. It also allows expenditure on other compensation schemes. The design of those schemes is not, unfortunately, within the remit of the Bill. We urgently need the Minister to confirm, as he suggested when he spoke earlier, that these matters will happen speedily. There is no reason to delay.

There needs to be a new rule and, following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, postmasters and postmistresses should be presumed innocent and all convictions, past or present, should be overturned. She used the word “exoneration” and mentioned other elements. If someone committed an offence and gets through because these convictions are quashed, that is a price that we hope will not be needed, but should be paid.

There have been lots of accusations in the Tory-controlled press seeking to make political capital out of personal disasters to postmasters and postmistresses. Let it be clear that no Minister of any party could have been expected to disbelieve the appalling—the word used by the Minister—lies and misinformation they received from senior civil servants and senior Post Office executives. There have been multiple Ministers—a long list—over this period. None of them deserves to be accused of anything other than believing the lies told to them by people they should have had the right to rely on.

The noble Baroness talked about Fujitsu. I understand that Fujitsu had always said that the only people who had access to these accounts were the postmasters and postmistresses, and therefore, if there was any error, it was the postmasters and postmistresses; it could not be Fujitsu. But we now find that at its headquarters, Fujitsu had the ability to access those accounts and to make alterations—maybe for the best of reasons and to iron out bugs—and was doing so. That is what happens with computer systems, but its interference may well have created a lot of these problems.

I practise as an FCA and had a long career as a partner in firms of chartered accountants. It would not be unusual for a client to say to me, “Monroe, we have a wonderful new system we are going to introduce for our accounting” or financials. I would look at the system and say, “Well, it looks all right”. But I would always say—and I imagine that all qualified accountants would say—that you should run the old system in tandem, in parallel with the new system for a period of six months or so, to see if there are any glitches in the new system. You have not burned all your bridges: they are still there.

The latest technology may be all singing and dancing, but you should still be looking at, in this case, keeping the paper-based system. Only when no sizeable discrepancies emerge could the old system be jettisoned, and that did not happen. This is elementary accountancy. This is not high-blown computer stuff. Can the Minister say whether senior civil servants and Post Office employees had any grounding in such mundane knowledge and experience? I believe that they may have been highly qualified, but I am of the opinion that their accountancy knowledge was pretty limited. Can the Minister confirm that in future—because we have got to look at the future now—the Government will not put all its eggs in one computer basket?

Also, since we are talking not just about the compensation Bill but the background to it, can he tell the House what auditing took place? Surely there would have been internal audits at the Post Office and at departmental level. There are audits all over the place, but do we hear anything about them? What was the role, or lack of role, of the National Audit Office? Surely we have a right to look to them as well. It is no defence from these auditors that certain bodies were outside their jurisdiction. I have had the honour to be the chairman of the audit committee of a Tory borough, the London Borough of Barnet, for eight years. The audit committee dealt with all the activities of the various departments. What we have is like a traffic-light signal—was it red, was it orange, was it green? If it was red or orange, I required the manager of each department to come to the committee and explain why there was this error, why there was this poor report, and to say what they are going to do in the future. That worked pretty well, but then there was a glitch—a glitch that is very relevant to the system which we are talking about now. The officers said, “Oh, that wasn’t our officers; we outsourced it”. In this case, in the London Borough of Barnet, it was to Capita, the computer company. Therefore, “We can’t tell you about that because Capita did it”. I said that the directors of Capita had to come to the London Borough of Barnet audit committee and explain why it was wrong and how they were going to justify it. They objected, saying, “Well, we’re not part of your organisation; we are outside”, as we are talking about in this instance. However, I insisted that they came, justified, put right and acknowledged the problems that were there.

Can we have less, please, of the party-political posturing and more of a look at how IT, without a knowledge of accountancy, can be a dangerous animal? The Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, used the words, “an appalling scandal”. It is an appalling scandal. We cannot stop it being an appalling scandal, but we must make sure that the postmasters and postmistresses are absolved, whether they might be guilty or not guilty. I am assuming that they are not guilty but, assuming even that somebody gets through who might have been guilty, I still feel that they all should be absolved because they were part of the system which was deficient at the maximum because it did not do what any basic qualified accountant would have done.

From these Benches we support this Bill, but we hope that the Minister will take aboard our comments about the future.