Transparency data

Post Office Horizon compensation data: January 2024

Updated 26 April 2024

The government is determined that postmasters affected by the Horizon IT scandal receive the compensation that they deserve. As of 11 January 2024, approximately £153 million has been paid to over 2,700 claimants across 3 schemes:

• Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS): £93 million

• Group Litigation Order (GLO) Scheme: £27 million total value of all payments including interim payments

• Overturned Convictions (OC): 95 convictions have been overturned: £33 million total value of all payments including further interim payments

Claim data by scheme

Scheme	Claims received	Offers made	Offers accepted	Claims paid
Overturned Convictions (OC): initial interim payments	90 [+3]	85 [+2]	85 [*]	84 [+1]
Overturned Convictions (OC): full and final settlements	36 [*]	34 [*]	31 [*]	31 [*]
Group Litigation Order Scheme (GLO): initial interim payment	N/A	N/A	N/A	476 - 483
Group Litigation Order Scheme (GLO): full and final	51 [+3]	44 [+18]	29 [*]	28 [*]
Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS): eligible claims before deadline	2,417 [-]	2,417 [-]	2,051 [*]	2,040 [+6]
Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS): eligible late claims	336 [+45]	233 [+5]	142 [*]	132 [+4]

Information correct as of 11 January 2024. Changes from last month in square brackets. 

[-] indicates no change since last month

[*] indicates not reported before, or a new way of reporting so change on previous month is not available.  

We will now be reporting the number of ‘Offers Accepted’. This is the first month we have published this data.

Notes for table

In the above table:

• spend is rounded to nearest £1 million
• data regarding the HSS and OC is sourced from Post Office Ltd which retains full responsibility for the data published on its website
• Overturned Convictions (OC):
  • initial interim payments are available to eligible postmasters upon getting their conviction overturned on the grounds that it was reliant on Horizon evidence
  • a ‘full’ settlement comprises both pecuniary (financial) and non-pecuniary (personal) losses, but the Post Office has been progressing non-pecuniary settlements first to get money to postmasters as quickly as possible, which means a number of partial settlements have been reached in addition to the full and final settlements published here
  • from this month (January 2024), the department is now publishing data on full and final settlements. Claims received are no longer being broken down into pecuniary and non-pecuniary settlements as in previous months
• Group Litigation Order (GLO) Scheme:
  • 63 postmasters (out of the 555 who were members of the Group Litigation Order) had convictions and are therefore eligible to apply for compensation once their conviction has been overturned. The remaining 492 postmasters are currently eligible for the Group Litigation Order Scheme, of whom 484 qualify for interim payments. Progress continues to be made on distributing shares of the £19.5 million interim payments announced in June 2022. For disclosure reasons, the exact number of claims paid is now withheld. This month, the number of payments increased by less than 9
  • work continues on the remaining payments in complex categories such as those recently deceased and people who have not taken up the offer of an interim payment
  • we have adopted a new method of data collection for claims received and offers made for this month, which we believe is more accurate in reporting only full and final claims and no partial claims. This means that we cannot currently compare to previous months’ reported figures of GLO claims received and offers made
  • a full claim on the GLO Scheme is defined as a claim which DBT considers, with advice from its legal advisors, does not need any further evidence in order to assess every element of the claim. Should the department consider further evidence is needed in order to make a full assessment, this claim is no longer counted in our data as a full claim until such time that the required evidence is received from the claimant or any other source. This means that the figures reported for number of claims received may need to be revised
• Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS):
  • Post Office received 2,417 eligible claims to the HSS before the application closure date of 27 November 2020. Post Office continued to receive late applications after the closure date and in October 2022, the government announced that additional funding would be provided so that these late claimants could be compensated. Post Office has received 336 eligible late claims to date
  • interim payments on the HSS are available before and after claimants receive an offer of compensation. The £93 million paid out on the HSS includes £21.7 million in interim payments to original claimants and £1.9 million in interim payments to late applications

Post Office data

Find further data on:

• compensation for those with overturned convictions
• the Horizon Shortfall Scheme