Sunak promises new law to exonerate subpostmasters caught up in Horizon scandal

A new law is to be introduced to exonerate hundreds of Post Office branch managers caught up in the Horizon IT scandal.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said they were victims of “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.

Hundreds of subpostmasters were convicted of swindling money on the basis of evidence from a flawed IT system.

The Prime Minister told MPs: “We will introduce new primary legislation to ensure that those convicted as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated.”

Mr Sunak also announced a new upfront payment of £75,000 for the “vital” group of postmasters who took action against the Post Office.

The new legislation will apply to convictions in England and Wales and Downing Street hopes they will be quashed by the end of the year.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Mr Sunak said: “This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history.

“People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation.”

Mr Sunak said “we will make sure the truth comes to light” and “right the wrongs of the past”.

Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake told MPs that 95 out of more than 900 convictions have been overturned.

The usual method for overturning a conviction would see the Criminal Cases Review Commission sending it to the Court of Appeal for a hearing.

But the unprecedented scale of the Horizon scandal means the Government is taking a legislative route rather than a lengthy court process.

Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has been discussing the situation with senior judges because of the constitutional concern about Parliament being seen to interfere with the legal process.

The Horizon system started to be rolled out in Post Office branches across the UK in 1999 and over the subsequent years a series of subpostmasters were prosecuted over missing funds.

In 2019 the High Court ruled that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “material risk” that shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.

The long-running battle for justice accelerated dramatically after ITV broadcast the drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which highlighted the scandal earlier this month.

Mr Hollinrake acknowledged the Government’s plan would result in some people who actually did commit crimes having their convictions quashed and being able to claim compensation.

But he insisted it is the best way to swiftly address the injustice suffered by those caught up in the Horizon scandal who have seen “lives ruined by this brutal and arbitrary exercise of power”.

“Some of those convictions will have relied on the evidence of the discredited Horizon system. Others will have been the result of appalling failures of the Post office’s investigation and prosecution functions,” he said.

He said evidence from the public inquiry into the Post Office scandal showed “not only incompetence but malevolence in many of their actions”.

Under the plan, people convicted would have to sign a declaration form, they would then be eligible to have their convictions overturned and access an offer of £600,000 compensation – or potentially more if they go through a process to have their claims individually assessed.

He acknowledged the Government’s novel approach was not “foolproof”.

“I’m sure that a great many people were wrongly convicted in this scandal, but I cannot tell the House that all those prosecuted were indeed innocent, or even that it was 90% or 80% or 70%, without retrying every case we cannot know.

“The risk is that instead of unjust convictions, we shall end up with unjust acquittals and we just do not know how many.”

He added: “As far as possible, we want to avoid guilty people walking away with hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money. But we cannot make the provision of compensation subject to a detailed examination of guilt.”

As a safeguard, postmasters will sign a statement saying they did not commit the crime of which they were accused, with anyone subsequently found to have signed that untruthfully putting themselves at risk of prosecution for fraud.