A committee of MPs has urged the government to reconsider its decision to reject recommendations for "essential" changes to its handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal.
The Business and Trade Committee's January report, Post Office and Horizon scandal redress: Unfinished business, examined the government's progress on responding to the high-profile scandal in which more than 700 subpostmasters were convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud in the 15 years after the Post Office introduced its flawed Horizon IT system.
It made a series of recommendations relating to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, which the Post Office set up in 2020 to provide financial redress to current and former postmasters who suffered losses related to previous versions of Horizon.
Among the recommendations, the report urged the government to transfer administration of the scheme from the Post Office to the Department for Business and Trade – a step the Post Office has also called for – and to provide free legal advice to help subpostmasters apply.
“Subpostmasters do not want Post Office Ltd to deal with redress and neither does Post Office Ltd itself. Post Office Ltd should not be deciding on what financial redress is owed to victims of its own scandal. The government must finish the job in hand and remove Post Office Ltd from the Horizon Shortfall Scheme,” its report said.
In its response today, the government said instead that it would continue to “support and challenge the Post Office in delivery of the HSS”, saying its priority is “ensuring that full and fair redress is paid out to victims of the Horizon scandal as quickly as possible”.
However, it said the government would “continue to consider whether it should take over responsibility for making first offers under the HSS”. A decision will be made this spring, the response said.
“This would not be a straightforward step, and risks significant disruption, which could cause delays in providing redress. A core principle will be ensuring that taking over responsibility would not slow down the pace of offers, nor add to the overall cost of administering the scheme,” it said.
Commenting on the response, the MPs called the decision a "mistake".
The government's response meanwhile flatly rejected the committee’s call to provide no-cost legal advice to support subpostmasters’ applications to the HSS through what it called a “complex questionnaire”.
The MPs had said the lack of provision “acts against [claimants] receiving the full redress they are due”. In its response, the government said the HSS had been designed so that claimants could apply without legal input. “Claimants can, and are encouraged to, seek legal advice when they receive their HSS offer with funding for reasonable fees provided by the Post Office. That funding continues if they choose to challenge their offer,” it added.
It said it had worked with the Post Office to rectify the “overly complex” nature of the original application process for the HSS by introducing the option to apply for a fixed-sum award of £75,000, with a shorter application form, rather than making a full claim. It has also made “improvements” to the guidance and forms for full claims, it said.
The government also rejected the recommendation to introduce binding timeframes for each stage of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme process "to draw this saga to a close".
Its response said imposing penalties for exceeding binding time limits would not speed up the delivery of compensation. It pointed to evidence from the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, which said limits "would not change the behaviour of those responsible for the schemes".
However, the government said it expects the backlog of HSS claims to be "reduced significantly" in the coming weeks thanks to measures it has introduced to make the process more efficient. These include the £75,000 fixed-sum offer; automation of administrative processes; and introducing limits to the number of dispute resolution process cases going back to panel.
It said it would update the committee on its progress tackling the backlog in spring.
In a statement accompanying the response, DBT committee chair Liam Byrne said the new government had made "extremely important progress in accelerating redress payment to the victims of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history" but that "too many are still waiting too long, and former subpostmasters are still dying before they receive justice".
He said the government’s response is a “start” to improving matters.
“But we respectfully ask ministers to listen harder to what the committee has recommended, reflect again on what we proposed and re-submit its response to the committee,” he said.
“We look forward to receiving a clearer signal for all those affected that meaningful justice will be served, and to seeing the plan from government that will deliver it.”