The inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal has called on ministers to set up a new standing body to compensate people who are wronged by public organisations.
It is one of 19 recommendations from the just-published first report of Sir Wyn Williams’s Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Many of the recommendations are firmly directed at the Department for Business and Trade, which has oversight of the Post Office.
More than 700 subpostmasters were convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud in the 15 years following the introduction of the Horizon IT system, produced by Fujitsu subsidiary ICL Pathway, in 1999. Hundreds more have faced accusations of wrongdoing. A total of 236 people were sent to jail because of Horizon.
Williams’s report states that 13 people have reportedly taken their own lives as a result of the flawed software system wrongly showing a shortfall in the accounts of the Post Office branch where they worked.
He said that despite the government and Post Office appearing to show a genuine desire to provide “full and fair” redress that is delivered promptly, there have been “formidable difficulties in the way of achieving those aims”.
As a result, the Horizon IT Inquiry’s first report calls for the government to establish a standing public body to "devise, administer and deliver schemes for providing financial redress to persons who have been wronged by public bodies” as soon as practicable.
Williams says a principal benefit would be that such a body would be “independent of the public body or bodies which have caused the harm for which financial redress is payable”.
“One of the difficulties which the Post Office and the [Department for Business and Trade] have had to try to overcome in administering and delivering the schemes is that they are alleged to be wrong doers who caused or contributed to the harm which has given rise to the need for redress,” he said.
“Not unnaturally, their every act or omission in administering and delivering the schemes has been viewed with a great deal of suspicion by many.”
Williams adds that the creation of a new body would “promote consistency” between different claimants in the same scheme as well as between claimants in other schemes.
The inquiry chair notes that claimants to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme – or HSS for short –have not received “full and fair redress”. In one of several recommendations targeted at DBT, he says the department should fund legal advice for claimants to help them identify their best option for compensation.
“I regard it as unconscionable and wholly unfair that claimants in HSS are unable to obtain legal advice, paid for by the department, about whether they should opt for the ‘fixed sum offer’ or assessment of their claims,” he said. “Yet the department continues to resist this as if its life depended upon it.”
Claimants to the three other redress schemes – the Overturned Conviction Scheme, the Group Litigation Scheme and the Horizon Conviction Redress Scheme – get legal aid funded by the Post Office or DBT to help them choose whether to go for assessment or a fixed-sum offer.
Williams also calls on DBT to devise a process for providing financial redress to close family members of those most adversely affected by the Horizon scandal. He says such family members ought to qualify for redress if they themselves have suffered serious adverse consequences because of their family relationship with the someone directly affected by Horizon.
He has given the government until October 10 to respond to his recommendations.
In an initial response to parliament yesterday, Post Office minister Gareth Thomas confirmed the government would accept the inquiry’s recommendation to set up a scheme to give financial redress to close family members of those most seriously affected by Horizon.
However the minister was cagier about creating a new public body to oversee compensation for victims of public-sector wrongdoing.
Thomas said the government had two challenges to address.
“The first is to make sure that if there is ever another terrible scandal like this one, and all of us will sincerely hope that there isn’t, that the victims do not need to bring a traumatic court case to expose it,” he said.
“The second challenge if such another scandal happens, [is that] government is set up to offer trusted redress from the very start. Sir Wyn argues that there should be a standing public body to deliver redress in any further scandal. I have a considerable amount of sympathy with that argument, but clearly we shall need to analyse the options fully before we commit to it.
“We will reflect on how to address those twin challenges and will bring our conclusions back to the House.”