Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, how many and what proportion of the Post Office Horizon Scandal GLO compensation claimants are represented by lawyers who have not signed up to the tariff of reasonable legal costs.

My Department has offered to meet the reasonable legal costs of postmasters applying to the GLO scheme in line with a tariff agreed with claimants’ legal representatives. I wrote to all GLO postmasters in December 2022 advising them not to engage any lawyer who asks them for payment, as this might mean their compensation would be reduced by legal costs which they could not recover. My Department’s understanding is that only one lawyer has been engaged on that basis, representing one or two out of 492 claimants in the GLO scheme.