Mass miscarriage of justice by Post Office requires urgent mass solution

Jo Hamilton of South Warnborough first approached me in 2009. Jo is warm and friendly and transparently honest. Her story was incredible. I did, actually, believe it (because you can’t do otherwise with Jo), but she was by then a convicted criminal. And now we know that there were hundreds and hundreds of others like her, all told they were the only ones, all pillars of their communities, all hounded and humiliated in front of those same communities.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office has caught the imagination of the public. Suddenly, and at last, a scandal that had been flying under the radar for years has gripped a nation which is horrified that this could have happened here. This is a country we like to think of as the fount of fairness, compassion and the rule of law. Yet the callous legal system, the stand-offish government, the ineffective politicians (including myself) and the lying, bullying, incompetent Post Office have shown us we have a lot of work to do.

So what needs to be done?

First, of between 700 and 900 convictions (why on earth do we not know for sure how many people the Post Office got convicted?), only 93 have had those convictions overturned. The painstaking process of each subpostmaster gearing up to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, producing evidence they may no longer have (or which may have been taken from them by the Post Office), proving that their conviction is unsafe (the burden of proof is on the subpostmaster) and then having the same argument with the Court of Appeal is unfair.

More to the point, it isn’t working. The subpostmasters, battered into the ground by their experiences, trust nobody and are not coming forward. And the Court of Appeal is rejecting some of the appeals that do come forward on the grounds that they are not “Horizon” dependent. Given the shocking nature of the Post Office investigators’ behaviour, incentivised as they were to prioritise asset recovery over justice, that seems harsh.

So we have a mass miscarriage of justice here, and we need a mass solution to it. Quite what that solution should be has yet to be hammered out, but it is clearly urgent. We can’t have more subpostmasters dying with their convictions still in place. No subpostmaster should have to prove their conviction was unfair – we know already that it almost certainly was.

And we also need to put in place a simple and generous tariff of compensation that doesn’t require masses of paperwork, overseen by a person trusted by the subpostmasters and appealable to somebody else trusted by the subpostmasters. The restoration of trust is a key element of the solution we need.

And who is to pay for all of this? Sadly, the taxpayer will bear some of the cost because we took (in profits from the Post Office suspense accounts) some of the ill-gotten gains. But Fujitsu, which has kept a very low profile throughout, should also contribute generously.

Which brings me to the final thing that needs to be done now – retribution. Paula Vennells has been in the spotlight over the last few days. It makes me uncomfortable because although she bears a good part of the blame, there were so many other culpable people that the attention should not be only on her.

If we have learnt anything from this dreadful saga it should be that justice needs to be measured. I hate to think what some of these subpostmasters went through when the communities they lived in thought they were thieves and fraudsters. We must not replicate that with those in Post Office management, Fujitsu and Government who now deserve retribution of their own.

Lord Arbuthnot is a Tory peer and former MP and a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board

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