The recommendation that a new body be appointed to deal with financial claims from victims of the Post Office scandal was rejected by the government.
A report by MPs’ Business and Commerce Committee in March called for a independent intermediary to handle every step of subpostmasters’ claims amid anger over bureaucracy and late payments.
He described the current redress process as an “abject failure” and also demanded that the Post Office be removed entirely from involvement in the three main redress schemes.
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But in its response to the report, the Department for Business and Commerce (DBT) said: “Creating a new body to replace these agreements would take months and cost millions that should be spent on redress for postmasters.”
The DBT, although it pointed out that decisions in repair cases were already independent of Correios, also argued that completely removing the company from the process would only increase delays.
Hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongly convicted of robbery after bugs and errors in the Horizon accounting system, operated by Fujitsu, made it appear that its agencies were short of cash.
There have been more than 700 convictions in total from 1995 to 2015.
Victims not only faced prison but also financial ruin. Others were ostracized by their communities, while some took their own lives.
New attention was drawn to the scandal after ITV broadcast the drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which led to government action aimed at speeding up name clearing and compensation payments.
In the government’s response to the committee’s report, Business Minister Kevin Hollinrake said: “As of 24 April 2024, approximately £196 million has been paid to more than 2,800 claimants across the three Post Office Horizon schemes.”
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The document also excluded the possibility of financial sanctions for failure to meet a legally binding deadline in the repair process.
The response said: “Claimants already receive compensation for the time required to deal with complaints, in that interest is paid on most aspects of the complaints in accordance with standard legal principles: the amount payable therefore increases with time”.
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He added: “The threat of penalties can unfairly penalize lawyers for matters beyond their control.”
The update on the compensation process was delivered as the public legal inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal was heard by a top Post Office lawyer.
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Former Cartwright King Solicitors senior lawyer Simon Clarke told the hearing that senior Post Office staff defended the Horizon system “out of an almost religious panic”.
He alleged that he was “deceived and misled” by the Post Office in relation to information that was not disclosed to him for review and in the high-profile case of Seema Misra.
The former West Byfleet postmaster was suspended in 2008 and later jailed, while pregnant, for 15 months in 2010 – a conviction which was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
In response to a question from the chairman of the inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, about whether he had been misled more broadly, Mr Clarke replied: “Yes, the Post Office repeated its protests that from day dot, there was nothing wrong with Horizon, when they clearly knew there were problems with Horizon.”
He said of his role: “I was not a Prosecuting Attorney for the Postal Service. I was never a Prosecuting Attorney for the Postal Service. I was instructed to prosecute a case, the Samra case. That case went to trial on July 1st and I interrupted, and so I prevented all other cases from being processed further.
“So I was not a prosecution lawyer, I was the lawyer who stopped the proceedings.”
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
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