Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

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

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, I enthusiastically support this legislation, which has received support from every corner of this House—even from the sober representation of the Democratic Unionists. I suspect that we are not responsible for very many of the bottles of champagne that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, made reference to earlier.

This issue has deep personal resonance for me. I come from a Post Office family. My mother worked for many years for the Post Office. My father worked his entire adult life for the Post Office until his retirement in 1987. I shudder to think what either of them would have made of this appalling scandal. In the 1970s, my father spent a good deal of his time working alongside virtually every sub-postmaster and sub-postmistress in Northern Ireland, helping them to fit what were referred to as “bandit screens”—a euphemism for a form of protection used to try to protect post offices from robbery. That should give us pause for thought.

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, highlighted that the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses are the backbone of our communities and the glue that holds them together, but we should also remember that the service and self-sacrifice they give to the community have often come at deep personal risk. Post offices were quite often targeted as the easiest and most vulnerable target of organised crime, terrorism and local villainy whenever robberies were being pursued. Those are the people at the heart of the scandal before us.

It is right that this legislation is just one piece of the jigsaw. It is important that the inquiry deals with accountability at both an organisational and an individual level. It is clear that there has been negligence, deceit and maybe even criminal behaviour on the part of some of those individuals and organisations, and it is right that we hold those people to account through the due process of law. It is also the case that the focus needs to go beyond accountability and that the inquiry should deal with many of the systematic issues that have been highlighted in this debate and beyond: the future role of AI, the shift in the burden of proof when it comes to the reliability of computer evidence, and the question of which organisations should have the power to take criminal prosecutions. All those issues need to be taken into account, and many more.

It is right that we focus today on what may be euphemistically called compensation for sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses who have been affected. The contents of the Bill are of great merit: it is right that the Minister is given the power to compensate and, indeed, that the scope is wide enough to cover all those who have been directly affected.

I welcome the removal of what I think is an artificial date: the restriction of compensation ending, in effect, in August 2024. I also welcome the Minister’s commitment that the foot will not be taken off the pedal in relation to this.

It is also vital, as has been highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and others, that this covers sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Post Office is a unitary body, effectively, throughout the United Kingdom. Whether it is in the inner-city branch or the most rural of settings, tasks, performance and terrible things have happened throughout this kingdom, so it is right that everybody is put on a level playing field.

To that extent, the Government need to look at the scope of exoneration. It is clear that the Government are rightly determined to ensure exoneration throughout the system, but, when questioned on this last week, they highlighted initially that the legislation was focused on England and Wales. But we know that in Scotland and Northern Ireland, there have been 100 prosecutions, I think: 76 in Scotland and 24 in Northern Ireland. I appreciate that the Government have committed to consulting with the relevant bodies in both those jurisdictions to take matters forward. But I say to the Government that, if we are left with a process that, at best, becomes unnecessary duplication of legislation in other jurisdictions to achieve the same effect or at worst, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, an inadequate pardon, which becomes a form of second-class solution, that is inadequate. It is worse still if we leave some of those sub-postmasters and postmistresses in a situation in which justice and exoneration for them comes with a level of unnecessary delay because of that duplication. That would be unacceptable.

I appreciate that there are legal barriers as to why this is difficult to do, but I urge the Government to take every action they can to think outside the box to ensure that we have legislation which covers every sub-postmaster and sub-postmistress who has been affected throughout the United Kingdom. That is the fair solution, as we have with this legislation.

Many years ago, there was a slogan used in Northern Ireland in an election campaign. I cannot remember which particular election it referred to, or even what it directly sought to overturn, but the slogan was “To put right a great wrong”. We all know within this House that whatever we do cannot completely put right what has happened in terms of the wrong that has been done to the victims of the scandal. For some, it is sadly too late. Some have taken their own lives; others, through the passage of time, have passed away; and for any sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress who has been impacted by this, irrespective of the level of compensation, if you gave them the choice of all the compensation in the world or turning the clock back and making sure that this never happened to them, they would choose the latter. We cannot completely put things right. But today at least, and I think with a unanimous voice, we can take a large step in the right direction by passing this Bill.