Post Office sub-postmasters, who exposed the Horizon IT scandal that wrongfully convicted hundreds of workers for theft, should be “fully compensated” by the government, MPs have said.
Politicians have called on the government and the Post Office to provide substantial financial compensation to a group of 555 sub-postmasters who were incorrectly prosecuted for crimes they didn’t commit.
The 555 workers took the Post Office to the High Court in 2018, and in doing so helped to expose a scandal that affected hundreds of other people. A fault in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system had helped prosecute a total of 736 sub-postmasters between 2000 and 2015.
The 555 group reached a settlement with the Post Office, which included a commitment from the company to set up a compensation scheme for anyone else affected. The settlement also led to hundreds of convictions being quashed and the beginning of an inquiry into the decades-long scandal.
However, the 555 litigants only received £57.7m in damages - which totaled just £11m once legal costs were paid. Shared out amongst the claimants, that meant an average of £20,000 per postmaster.
The settlement meant that the 555 employees couldn’t claim any more money from the Post Office.
Now MPs on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee are using a new report to call on the government and the Post Office to provide substantial financial compensation for the trailblazing group.
Darren Jones MP, chair of the BEIS committee, said: “It is clearly entirely unacceptable that the group of 555 victims who first brought this scandal successfully to court are being left in a worse position that those who are being compensated thanks to their action.
“There is no valid reason to exclude the 555 from being compensated and the chancellor must come forward with the required funding now.”
Christopher Head, who was 17 when the Post Office wrongfully accused him of stealing £88,500, was one of the 555 litigants who took the company to the High Court.
He told The Independent that those sub-postmasters who had taken part in the litigation had been “punished for actually exposing the entire thing”.
“If it was not for the 555 we would not have had the high court judgement, the historic shortfall scheme, we wouldn’t have the convictions quashed in court. We would never had had the inquiry,” he said.
“They are saying because we signed that settlement we’re not entitled to any more money, when they know full well that the 555 probably lost the most money out of everybody.”
The group were forced to settle with the Post Office, Mr Head added, because they had run out of money to pay the substantial legal fees needed for the court fight.
The BEIS committee has also recommended that the government set up an independent body as a trusted first point of contact for those wrongly convicted because of Horizon, in particular for the 576 convicted sub-postmasters who have not yet come forward.
Conservative MP Lucy Allan told The Independent said it would be “entirely wrong for those who fought for justice in the courts to be excluded from the compensation scheme which is available to other victims of this scandal”.
“The sub-postmasters took on the Post Office in an epic legal battle of David against Goliath,” Ms Allan said. “The Post Office and their legal team used every trick in the book to grind the sub-postmasters into submisson.
“The victims had to fund this legal battle from the settlement they were offered by the Post Office, leaving them with little by way of compensation for their losses. Why should these sub-postmasters have legal costs deducted from their compensation?”
In the third day of the Horizon inquiry evidence sessions on Wednesday, Harjinder Butoy spoke about how he spent years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
“Everything has just fallen apart for me,” he said, “I’ve got no confidence in myself anymore.” Mr Butoy and his wife ran the post office in the Nottinghamshire market town of Sutton-in-Ashfield when he was accused of stealing £208,000.
The Post Office seized the money he had in the bank and his father and brother had to help him pay a £61,000 confiscation order. He was declared bankrupt and said he has had no luck applying for jobs since he left prison.
“I want someone to be charged on the other side,” he said, referring to the people who had wrongfully brought charges against him. “Why can’t they be? The evidence has come out. They knew the evidence was there - why didn’t they tell us? I want somebody to go to prison.”
Former Post Office branch manager, William Graham, spoke of the “hell” of being wrongful charged of stealing £65,000.
He described his day in court in 2011, saying he took a plea deal and plead guilty to false accounting to get his charges of theft dropped. With his voice breaking, Mr Graham described the moment when the judge gave him his sentence.
“They said 32 weeks in prison,” he said, “and then there was a gap. I could hear my wife scream. There was a delay between the judge telling me it was a suspended sentence and both of us thought I was going down.”
“I was diagnosed with depression because I just felt worthless. Everyone saw me as a guilty person and on paper I was.”
He told the inquiry that he wanted to get to the bottom of who at the Post Office knew that the Horizon system was faulty. “What went wrong and when did they know that it had gone wrong? They’ve known it for a long long time. Why didn’t they come out and admit that there was a problem,” he said.
“For all of us, we want some sort of justice. Get the people up here and get them to admit that they’ve made mistakes, that they’ve covered things up.”
