Sir Alan Bates has “serious concerns” that the government’s budget for Post Office scandal compensation will be stretched to cover the legal costs of those making claims.
This comes as he welcomed a “very positive and quite insightful” report from the parliamentary business and trade select committee.In its report, the committee called for legally building deadlines for subpostmaster redress with financial penalties for failure.
In its Post Office and Horizon scandal redress: Unfinished business report, the committee also demanded the Post Office be removed from administering any of the redress schemes, up-front legal advice to be offered to claimants, and the appointment of independent adjudicators.
It said lawyers being paid by taxpayers should be instructed to speed up payments to subpostmasters, reduce delays, give the benefit of the doubt to claimants and publish figures on government spending on lawyers.
In February 2024, during a mammoth five-hour business and trade select committee hearing, MPs heard that the complexity and unfairness of schemes for the financial redress of former subpostmasters is leading to slow and often unfair settlements. Witnesses, including Bates, called for a legally binding deadline on when payments should be made.
A year on, and payments are still too slow. In her Autumn Budget statement in October, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced Post Office Horizon scandal compensation funding of £1.8bn.
As of November, just £499m of the £1.8bn has been paid out across four redress schemes, with 72% of the budget for redress still not paid.
Lawyers’ fees
In the report, the committee referred to oral evidence provided by Carl Creswell, director for Post Office policy and business engagement at the department of business and trade, which states that the Budget 2024 allocation of £1.8bn to settle redress costs includes claimants’ lawyers’ fees.
“I have very serious concerns about subpostmaster legal costs being taken out of the financial redress pot,” said Bates. “That money should be ring-fenced for financial redress for victims, not paying their legal costs.”
The business and trade committee said it is “imperative” that claimants are offered legal advice up-front, at no cost to themselves but paid for by the scheme administrators.
“Years on from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, thousands of Post Office Horizon victims still don’t have the redress to which they’re entitled for the shatter and ruin of their lives … we can’t go on like this,” said chair of the committee Liam Byrne MP. “Justice delayed is justice denied.
“Victims should have up-front legal advice to help make sure they get what’s fair,” he said. “We need hard deadlines for government lawyers to approve the claims with financial penalties for taking too long. Crucially, we need the Post Office, which caused this scandal in the first place, taken out of the picture.”
Bates said the committee report shows that “at least the politicians involved can see the problems, although the civil servants in the department are blind to them”.
Recommendations welcome
Neil Hudgell at Hudgell Solicitors, which represents hundreds of former subpostmasters seeking compensation, said: “We welcome any recommendations to speed up redress, and many of these seek to remove unnecessary obstacles to justice we have seen over the past few years, repeated across hundreds of cases.
“We have repeatedly said claimants should have access to up-front legal advice in all scheme claims, that they should be given the benefit of the doubt where written evidence is limited given the timeframes we are talking, and that offers should be made at the top of the range for each category of loss. Sadly, we’ve not seen that across most schemes to this point, certainly not with any level of consistency.”
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).
