Kemi Badenoch v the Post Office is a great political soap opera. Like much good TV, however, it distracts us from reality. The business secretary fired Henry Staunton, the former chair of the Post Office, in January. A month later, Staunton told the Sunday Times that Sarah Munby, a senior civil servant, instructed him to slow compensation payments to victims of the Horizon scandal. Badenoch then launched an extraordinary character assassination from the dispatch box in the House of Commons, claiming Staunton had been fired after accusations of bullying (she originally told the public he had left by “mutual consent”). It’s not clear which story is true, but the prime minister notably refused to repeat Badenoch’s claims.
The row has become an embarrassingly public case of “he said, she said”. Staunton’s note of the meeting records the conversation with Munby, but not the exact words. Munby denies Staunton’s account; she also kept a note of the meeting, but too much of it is redacted to know whose story it supports. All of this is ultimately a perfect distraction from Staunton’s real revelations: the Post Office is rotten at its core and the government is unwilling to do much about it. The Horizon compensation schemes, whether by design or good old-fashioned incompetence, seem likely to frustrate victims’ claims. The “overturned convictions” scheme, which is supposed to provide compensation to those who were wrongly convicted, didn’t open until three years after the court of appeal exposed the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history”. Most victims are yet to receive a penny. Payouts from the other programmes are as low as £15.75.
The schemes themselves are Kafkaesque. The forms are almost impossible to understand without a specialist lawyer. Until recently, the Post Office refused to fund such assistance. Victims are told they must keep the details of their claim secret. But there’s no law that stops victims telling their friends, family, or advisers about settlement claims (or, crucially, comparing notes with each other). In a candid moment, Kevin Hollinrake, the Post Office minister, conceded the compensations schemes are too slow. The situation seems suspiciously close to what Staunton described.
Staunton is right to say a “toxic culture” still persists at the Post Office. The origins of the Horizon scandal lie in a years-long, institution-wide deception, the details of which are now infamous. Rather than admit its flagship IT project didn’t work, the Post Office foisted the blame on innocent post office operators, ruining hundreds of lives. The performance of Post Office witnesses at the inquiry suggests little has changed. As Computer Weekly’s editor in chief, Bryan Glick, reported: “Employees insist … they were only doing what they were told. Managers insist they never told them to do what they did. Fingers are pointed at nameless executives. Executives insist it wasn’t them.”
The Post Office’s cooperation with the inquiry has been sporadic, at best. It failed to disclose (or disclose on time) more than 400,000 documents, and caused repeated delays. Lawyers representing the victims have accused it of using “malevolent” tactics to conceal the extent of its wrongdoing. Nick Read, the Post Office’s CEO, told the business and trade select committee he was “delivering great things for the Post Office”, but victims reported the opposite. Last year Read and other senior staff were paid bonuses for cooperating with the inquiry (Reid agreed to return his bonus after news of it became public). In January this year he wrote to the secretary of state for justice, saying that the Post Office would be “bound to oppose” overturning convictions of 369 out of the 900 victims of the scandal. This sounds like Staunton’s description of an institution that continues to insist on the guilt of the victims. Before the select committee, Read changed his tune, claiming that only “one or two” of the 900 are guilty.
Staunton has been right in his view that the government has no interest in dealing with the long-term issues. Before ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office pushed the scandal to the top of the political agenda in January, the current government devoted parliamentary time to it on just three occasions in two years. Meanwhile, ministers delayed exonerations by maintaining real terms cuts of 60% to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (the body which deals with wrongful convictions). Since Mr Bates, the government’s response has been largely performative. Its “exoneration bill” looks like decisive action, but it is really the opposite.
The government could give the commission and the courts the resources to investigate outstanding wrongful convictions. But this would risk exposing more Post Office wrongdoing and/or highlight the long-term flaws in the justice system that allowed false prosecutions to go on for so long. Instead, the government is sweeping the whole thing under the carpet by overturning all the convictions in one fell swoop. This is great for the victims who will have their convictions quashed. But it’s a transparently political manoeuvre. Ministers (despite knowing about the scandal for years) showed no interest in mass exoneration until it saw a political upside. This sets a dangerous precedent, overturning criminal convictions based on political opportunism rather than justice, fact, and law.
Staunton wasn’t hired until 2022, so is one of the few who can convincingly claim to have had nothing to do with the scandal or cover-up. Yet he’s the only senior person at the Post Office to suffer any consequences. He was a sufficiently high-profile figure to (as he put it) “carry the can”, making it look like ministers were taking action while, in reality, the status quo prevailed. Yet the terms on which he left are ultimately diverting our attention from the real scandal: the Post Office hasn’t addressed the culture that led to the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, the government is doing nothing about it, and ministers and Post Office executives still seem willing to deceive us.
Sam Fowles is a barrister, author and broadcaster. He was part of the legal team that successfully overturned the convictions of 39 sub-postmasters in the court of appeal in 2021
