A former sub-post office operator has used an appearance at the Brit Awards to urge the speeding-up of compensation for those unfairly prosecuted as part of the Post Office IT scandal.
Jo Hamilton made her appeal alongside the actor Monica Dolan, who portrayed her in ITV’s hit dramatisation of the episode, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. The pair were presenting the first category of the evening at the O2 Arena in London.
Mrs Hamilton, 66, was wrongly accused of stealing more than £36,000 from the Post Office branch she was in charge of at the time in South Warnborough, Hampshire. To avoid a jail sentence, she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting, and was prosecuted in 2006.
The mother of two, who presented the Song of the Year award to Raye for her track Escapism, told the ceremony: “I want to thank everyone in the country for the love and the support they have given the postmasters. Please can you keep on supporting us because, despite what the government says, they’re not paying the postmasters.”
Mrs Hamilton worked a cleaning job, borrowed money from friends, received donations from the local community and twice mortgaged her house in order to pay back the money she was accused of taking.
In 2021, her conviction was overturned when it was discovered that she had been a victim of a faulty computer system. More than 900 post office operators were prosecuted for stealing money because of incorrect accounting information supplied by an IT system called Horizon.
Her call for compensation was echoed by a former chair of the Post Office, Henry Staunton, who has urged that the institution be “handed over” to post office operators.
According to a report by Sky News, Henry Staunton wrote a letter to Liam Byrne, the chair of the business and trade committee, claiming that the government had “consistently hidden behind the Post Office’s skirts, spinning their way away from trouble”.
Staunton, who was sacked in January, also accused the Department for Business and Trade of not owning up to their “failings” or doing “the decent thing” by post office operators.
He called for a “hard, concrete deadline” for victim compensation, “ideally no more than six months”. He also said the company needed to be “removed completely” from the compensation process and called for an independent body to take over.
