Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill

Marion Fellows Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully). In no way do I want the speech I am about to give to seem mean-spirited, but things have to be said, so I will say them, and I hope in a justifiable way. While the Bill is welcome, to ensure that no Horizon victims who were part of the group litigation order miss out on compensation, we must ensure that despite the extension, all efforts are made to compensate victims fairly as soon as possible. I thank the Minister for his remarks on that in his opening speech.

It is hard to see why such a Bill, which does nothing more than empower the Secretary of State to pay compensation, has taken so long to get here. Concerns were first published in the media in 2009. In 2015, the Post Office scrapped its independent investigation into the system by Second Sight the day before the report was due to be published. Post Office Ltd conceded a court case admitting Horizon faults more than four years ago, on the day of the last general election—a move that seems to have been timed to avoid scrutiny.

Calls for compensation have been clear and long. This Bill could have been passed in the first months of this Parliament, but it was not. It is now coming to the fag end of this Parliament, and we need to move on. I know that everyone is committed to that, but facts are facts. We still have no idea, three and a half years after settling, why the situation was allowed to go on for so long.

Many victims, as we are all well aware, have sadly passed away, and some by their own hand. They never saw proper justice and proper compensation for the years of trauma they endured at the hands of Post Office Ltd. Their families still suffer. The ongoing inquiry has been blighted by further delay and disclosure issues by Post Office Ltd. Each inquiry delay disgracefully delays justice and the payment of compensation. There must be no further setbacks obstructing the delivery of justice. The inquiry has uncovered further scandal upon scandal, and the pervasive culture throughout Post Office Ltd between 1999 and today has been one of dishonesty, incompetence and deceit, raising further questions over all Post Office convictions in this period, not just those linked to Horizon.

The actions of Post Office Ltd employees at various levels and in various departments, including those responsible for auditing and investigations and in the legal departments, have been brought to light in the most recent stage of the inquiry. At every level, there was clear culpability. The boastful manner in which some of those responsible celebrated the convictions of innocent sub-postmasters, while knowing of Horizon bugs, adds insult to injury for victims.

The Bill is too narrow in its scope, and in the interests of justice, it should be broadened to ensure that everyone who has been investigated and convicted by Post Office Ltd has their case investigated to ensure that no other miscarriages of justice have happened. There are still questions to be answered about the Post Office’s co-operation with the inquiry and its relationship with Fujitsu, past and present. In April 2023, Post Office Ltd renewed the contract with Fujitsu, which created and provided the Horizon software, for another year. So far, Fujitsu has avoided any financial penalties as a result of the faulty software, with the burden falling on the Government and Post Office, but in January 2022 Members of the other place said that Fujitsu should dig into its pockets for doing nothing while the scandal unfolded in front of its eyes. The inquiry is investigating how much Fujitsu was aware of the problems with its software, the risk of false reporting and what could have been done to prevent the tragedy.

Gareth Jenkins, the former chief architect at Fujitsu, was due to give evidence at the statutory public inquiry on 6 and 7 July this year. So far, he has not been able to do so. Some 4,767 documents, including some that are significant to Jenkins’s evidence, were only received from Post Office at 10.32 pm on 5 July, allowing no time for lawyers to analyse them. He was scheduled to give evidence after the summer break, and he subsequently asked for a guarantee that his testimony could not be given as evidence against him, which was denied. We are still waiting to hear from him. I therefore support amendment 1, tabled by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), which would ensure that we know the whole truth about the alleged errors carried out by Post Office Ltd, beyond Horizon. All potential victims of the practices of Post Office Ltd must get the justice they deserve.

Beyond that, real questions need to be asked of successive UK Governments—whether Labour or Tory—who allowed the scandal to fester under their watch. As the sole shareholder in Post Office Ltd, successive UK Governments have utterly failed in their oversight of the company, allowing the most widespread miscarriage of justice to continue for two decades.

Even in more recent times, the current UK Government have allowed repeated scandals to occur, with bonusgate being one of the many despicable recent episodes that have brought yet more shame to a once trusted national institution. The Secretary of State for Business and Trade described the debacle as

“news to us as Ministers.”

However, documents obtained through a freedom of information request by campaigner Eleanor Shaikh show that Ministers and officials endorsed the Post Office inquiry metric as part of their approval of its chief executive officer and chief financial officer in the transformation scheme. A letter requesting approval was sent to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s permanent secretary and accounting officer in July 2021, outlining details comprehensively. The document was then sent to the Secretary of State for Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Ministers gave their endorsement five months after the inquiry became statutory. Likewise, the UK Government Investments representative on the board was well aware of the inquiry’s sub-metric.

It is absolutely clear that Post Office Ltd’s current system of governance needs to be addressed immediately to ensure a greater level of oversight and transparency in decision making by the Government and the UKGI representative on the Post Office Ltd board. There are questions to be answered about Post Office’s co-operation with the inquiry and its past and present relationship with Fujitsu. The management of Post Office Ltd has been exposed, and questions remain over its continued stewardship of our post office network. Indeed, I became interested in post offices because of the decline in the network, knowing nothing of Horizon at the time.

Earlier this year, London Economics produced a report showing that the social value delivered by Post Office is 16 and a half times greater than the financial input it receives from the Government. Closures have picked away at the post office network, as the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam mentioned. The Department for Business and Trade must do more to protect communities.

I extend my sympathies to the victims of this scandal, who still endure the trauma inflicted by Post Office Ltd. The Minister is right: we are all here today to make sure that people get the compensation they deserve. However, some of the figures are sobering. I understand that some of the problems may be due to the difficulty of making a claim in the first place, and I thank Dan Neidle for his exposure of that.

I pay tribute to all the campaigners. I will also make a special apology—to Alan Bates—because at one point, when I did not realise the significance of what had happened, I said that I did not believe in witch hunts. I still do not believe in them, but evidence is building against those who have made serious mistakes and errors, and who, in some cases, have hidden facts.

I was pleased to hear the Minister talk about corporate and individual responsibility, which is really important. I thank him for saying that compensation claims will still be pursued vigorously. This is really a technical Bill to allow payments to carry on, and they must do so as speedily and efficiently as possible. Nothing can make up for the trauma that so many people have gone through, but we need to compensate those who have suffered, and we need to compensate them properly, well and timeously.