Post Office Minister responds to Horizon IT Inquiry report
Gareth Thomas spoke to Parliament after report outlined scandal’s human impact and looking at the redress schemes which have been put in place in response.
Madam Deputy Speaker, Sir Wyn Williams has today released the first volume of his report into the Horizon scandal, which caused so much harm to so many innocent people.
The fearless and diligent work of his Inquiry has, I believe, won the trust and admiration of postmasters. The Inquiry has asked penetrating questions of a large number of witnesses and has scrutinised more than two million pages of evidence.
The whole House I know recognises the bravery of the postmasters who fought against enormous odds to see their cause recognised. Sir Wyn’s report reminds us that blameless people were impoverished. Bankrupted. Stressed beyond belief. Lost their jobs, their marriages, their reputations, their mental health. In some cases, lost their lives.
I am sure that the whole House will share my gratitude to Sir Wyn and his team for their work so far. This is only the first volume of their final report, spelling out the scandal’s human impact and looking at the redress schemes which have been put in place in response.
A second volume will in due course deal with the causes of the scandal, and how repetition can be avoided.
To be clear, I am very sympathetic to Sir Wyn’s 19 recommendations today. Clearly, a number of them require careful consideration. We will respond to them promptly as some concern the ongoing delivery of Horizon redress schemes. Sir Wyn has set us a deadline of 10 October, and we will meet it.
The House will see that Sir Wyn has accepted that “the Post Office, the Department and Ministers continue to adhere to the aims of providing financial redress, which is full, fair and prompt”. He also concludes that the majority of people who have accepted offers under the GLO scheme “will have done so because, for them, the offer was full and fair”. That said, Sir Wyn makes some understandable criticisms – especially of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme – which we will need to study closely and address.
We inherited a compensation process which was widely seen as too slow, adversarial and legalistic. Well over four years after the first High Court case exposed the scandal, only 2,500 postmasters had had final settlements.
There were clearly significant gaps in the compensation process and many victims had not come forward. Indeed, there was no compensation scheme in place for those postmasters whose convictions had been overturned by Parliament.
A year ago, Government had paid £236 million in redress. We have now quadrupled that to nearly £1.1 billion. We have launched a compensation scheme for postmasters who have had their convictions overturned; the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme and have merged Post Office’s compensation arrangements for overturned convictions into it. And through the Post Office, we have delivered a £75,000 fixed sum offer to over 4,200 postmasters who opted for it.
We have also launched an independent process to allow people to appeal their HSS settlements or offers. This should provide – as Sir Wyn says in his report – an “opportunity to put right any failures to deliver redress which is full and fair” for HSS victims; and begun discussions with Fujitsu on their contribution to the costs of the scandal.
As the House knows and as Sir Wyn’s report underlines further today, there is still a lot more to do. I know that those postmasters who have yet to agree final compensation are frustrated with the delay: so am I.
We have been consulting regularly with the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board and others on what more we can do to improve redress. Sir Wyn’s recommendations are very helpful in that regard. Two of his recommendations address issues which we have been already working on across government and with the Advisory Board.
And I can confirm that we accept Sir Wyn’s recommendation that claimants should be able to bank the best offer they get from the GLO process and should not put it at risk if they choose to go to the independent panel.
Secondly, we will provide redress for family members of postmasters who suffered because of the scandal. I have met the group Lost Chances for Postmaster Children who have campaigned with considerable courage on this issue.
Sir Wyn rightly recognises that designing a suitable compensation scheme for family members raises some very difficult issues. Nonetheless, we want to look after those family members who suffered most – meeting Sir Wyn’s recommendation that we should give – and I quote - “redress to close family members of those most adversely affected by Horizon”.
Given these challenges, we will now discuss the details of how a scheme should be run with claimants’ lawyers, the independent Advisory Board and the Lost Chances group. It will be open to close family members of existing Horizon claimants who themselves suffered personal injury – including psychological distress – because of their relative’s suffering. Other than in exceptional circumstances, we will need contemporaneous written evidence of that personal injury.
There are some fundamental lessons to be learned which Sir Wyn points to, about how compensation following wrongdoing on this scale should be delivered in future.
In particular, the Post Office should never have been allowed to run it. Decisions on funding should have been made much more quickly. And it should not have needed the ITV drama to stimulate action to overturn hundreds of unjust convictions.
We cannot now turn back the clock to fix those fundamental mistakes. We must instead address two challenges. The first is to make sure that if there is ever another terrible scandal like this one, and all of us will sincerely hope that there isn’t, that the victims do not need to bring a traumatic court case to expose it.
The second challenge if such another scandal happens, Government is set up to offer trusted redress from the very start. Sir Wyn argues that there should be a standing public body to deliver redress in any further scandal. I have a considerable amount of sympathy with that argument, but clearly we shall need to analyse the options fully before we commit to it.
We will reflect on how to address those twin challenges and will bring our conclusions back to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker, we can never recompense a person properly for their freedom wrongly bring denied them. The humiliation of being wrongly accused. Of seeing your loved ones in profound distress or worse. Or recompense someone for their good reputation being taken from them.
I cannot assuage the anger of the victims. Nor will the anger I feel on their behalf ever be assuaged.
But we are determined to do more on redress and beyond and to do it quickly to give more of the victims of this appalling scandal at least a measure of the peace they so rightly deserve.
And I commend Sir Wyn’s report to the House.