Post Office and Horizon Software

Debate between Steve McCabe and Karl Turner

Thursday 5th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Karl Turner]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: alarm bells must have been ringing. I am not saying that my legal advice at the time was bad advice; I think it was perfectly good, considering the weight of the evidence and the instructions I was receiving. However, somewhere in the Post Office, someone must have been saying, “Hang on a minute. We get maybe two or three allegations of wrongdoing per month or year”—I do not know what the figures might be—“but all of a sudden, we have 550 thieving, dishonest sub-postmasters who have never had so much as a parking ticket in their lives,” as Janet Skinner said to me. It is utterly deplorable.

For me, the alarm bell rang in 2015 when “Panorama” did its documentary, which was chilling. My blood ran cold, because I had to remind myself what advice I had given and check with myself whether everything had been absolutely right in that regard. Since I have been involved with this matter, I have been contacted by a sub-postmaster who got the opportunity to not be prosecuted by paying the Post Office back; he had to sell his house to do so. He has made the important point that the only people he could turn to were those in the National Federation of SubPostmasters.

That sub-postmaster agreed to do an interview in a spare bedroom of his own home. He says in his email that he was shocked to witness the investigating officer, when speaking with the NFSP representative, telling him to “fucking shut up”. At the time, he thought for that reason that the NFSP representative was on his side, but he now thinks that it was all a scam—that the representative was pretending to be interested, to be befriending him, and to be representing him in that interview.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

Mr Turner, can I ask you to start winding up?

[Karl Turner]

Thank you, Mr McCabe; I will finish now. That sub-postmaster is now wondering whether what he experienced was all part of the scam. Given what has now been found in these proceedings, I wonder that as well.

People have to be compensated properly. Lawyers must be paid. This was an incredibly costly litigation—a David and Goliath situation in which people needed to make representations in proceedings before courts. The Government must step in immediately, pay the legal costs on behalf of those victims, and get them the money they so desperately deserve.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I am going to have to impose a six-minute limit on speeches if we are to get everybody else in.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve McCabe and Karl Turner

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

5. What steps he is taking to maintain the capacity of the Serious Fraud Office to investigate and prosecute economic crime during the comprehensive spending review period.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

6. What steps he is taking to ensure the effective prosecution of cases involving fraud and economic crime.

Sentencing

Debate between Steve McCabe and Karl Turner

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

Although I do not agree with a blanket 50% discount, I accept the sincerity of Government Ministers in trying to reform sentencing. Despite the Lord Chancellor’s denials, the problem is that the Treasury has set those Ministers a slightly unreasonable cost-cutting agenda, which will inevitably undermine some of their ambitions. Cost cutting simply will not give us better sentencing outcomes, and as I am sure the Lord Chancellor knows, effective community alternatives to custody are not a cheap option.

Any review of sentencing needs to take account of the public and demonstrate that both the politicians and the experts charged with the reforms genuinely listen to and take on board the public’s concerns. In that respect, we need to start with victims and ensure that their needs are at the centre. We need to ensure that they are not forgotten or tacked on as an afterthought as courts focus too much attention on the offence and the offence tariff rather than on the impact of the crime.

The public need to know that the money being spent makes a difference and that the justice system belongs to them and not to the professionals or the experts, or even worse, to the offenders, as it sometimes seems. If the Lord Chancellor really wants to protect victims and witnesses in the judicial process, we perhaps need to prise some elements of the justice system from those that currently hog the scene. This is not about blaming judges, but I am not convinced that the current structure of our courts and the selection of judges and—in some cases—magistrates, are the best that they could be. Their sentences frequently do not make sense to most normal people, and at times, they seem to be totally out of touch with the communities that experience most of the crime.

[Karl Turner]

My hon. Friend mentions victims. I have just been doing the maths on this. Someone who is convicted of the offence of causing death by careless driving while over the proscribed limit will end up with something like nine months. How is that fair to the victim?

[Steve McCabe]

That is my point about focusing more on the impact of the crime.

We need to return to the experiment with community courts for lower-level crimes. That kind of approach has public support, even if the legal establishment, which is well represented in the House, is sceptical, and many of my constituents would welcome attention being paid to these matters. Thinking about what the Lord Chancellor said, it seems to me that we need a rethink. This is not about who runs the prisons, but about how they are run. We need to establish the value of short custodial sentences. What does a 10-week sentence set out to achieve? More importantly, we need to know, as he acknowledged, why it is easier to get drugs and other contraband in prison than outside. [Interruption.] Members can say, “It’s your legacy”, but it is a legacy that has been developing for years, and if we reduce the debate to that sort of silly, cheap remark, any benefits we might derive from the time available for debate will be lost. That is why they are wasting their time with that kind of muttering.

I want to know why this continues to happen. Why do we keep reading about prisoners taking us to court? Why can anyone in prison for more than a few months leave still unable to read and write? If the Lord Chancellor really wants to help and to demonstrate that the things he has spoken about today will be activated, he needs to tell us what he is going to do, and to do more than simply repeat the concerns in the Chamber.

We need to clarify the purpose of custody. The priorities for long-term prisoners are straightforward. They should be about security and then a long path to rehabilitation. However, for the short term and the frequent offenders that he mentioned, surely we need to have more credible forms of punishment and restitution, and more imaginative sentencing. That might mean ending the divide between prison and the community. Why not have prison sentences for evenings or weekends? Why not curb leisure time? Surely what matters is that the time is used constructively, and that any activity is not confused with leisure time or voluntary activity; it has to be about punishment, control and making amends.

The public want to see and hear punishment as well as rehabilitation. There have to be fewer opportunities for people to avoid responsibility for their actions, and courts need to entertain fewer excuses. I agree with the Lord Chancellor, but where in his policy are there clear directions and obligations in sentencing? I want to know that there will be rigorous testing, directive counselling and control for offences relating to substance abuse. If the Government were to take us along that path, rather than spending so much time repeating an analysis we all broadly share, and if they were to make clear their intentions, we might be able to have a much more constructive debate, instead of one in the terms being debated today.

Nevertheless, we are having this debate because the Government have set out to cut prison numbers, largely on a cost-cutting basis. The Lord Chancellor has refused to give details of exactly how he is going to provide credible—