Schemes set up to compensate former post office operators wrongly accused of crimes are “a patchwork quilt” with “holes in it” that are likely to miss the deadline to pay up, the chair of the inquiry into the scandal has said.
More than 700 people were prosecuted for theft and false accounting between 2000 and 2014 after the Post Office’s flawed Horizon IT system incorrectly suggested there were financial shortfalls.
Many of those caught up in the miscarriage of justice told the inquiry that they had had depression, attempted to kill themselves and had to leave their homes as a result. A high court judge ruled in 2019 that the system contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and many of the criminal convictions were overturned.
On Monday, the inquiry’s chair, Sir Wyn Williams, called for legislative change to resolve issues for the compensation schemes that were put in place to recompense those affected by the scandal.
So far almost £100m has been paid out so far by the Post Office and the government but Williams said it was his “strongly held view” that administrators would be “unable to deliver compensation payments to all applicants” by the deadline of 7 August next year.
He has sent a report setting out his recommendations to business minister Kevin Hollinrake in an attempt to ensure “full and fair” compensation is paid to those affected by the scandal.
Williams said: “There are three schemes in existence by which compensation can be delivered to eligible applicants. They came into existence at different times, and are responses to very different sets of circumstances as they unfolded. What has emerged is a patchwork quilt of compensation schemes. And, unfortunately, it is a patchwork quilt with some holes in it.”
“The evidence upon me hasn’t changed. It hasn’t lessened to a degree. Many hundreds of people suffered disastrous consequences by reason of the misuse of data from Horizon, and thousands more suffered very significantly.”
Williams said he had “been of the view for some months that we are too far down the road with each scheme to contemplate abandoning them in favour of one comprehensive scheme”.
The Post Office had paid out more than £80m across the historical shortfall scheme and the overturned historical convictions scheme by the end of April 2023. The government also paid out an additional £19m in interim compensation under the group litigation scheme in the same period.
The chair of the Commons business and trade committee, Darren Jones, said: “Ministers promised the house that victims would be put back into the position they would have been in, had this miscarriage of justice not happened in the first place. But testimony from victims shows that the amount of compensation they’re receiving goes nowhere near that.
“These poor people have been through enough, without having the Post Office-managed scheme haggle down their compensation when executives have walked away with thousands of pounds in unacceptable bonus payments for giving evidence to the inquiry.”
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