Lord Beamish (Lab)

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti’s amendment. We discussed this in Committee. My involvement, like that of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is through the experience of the Post Office Horizon scandal. In those cases, we saw computer evidence put before the court with the presumption that it could not be faulty or in any way questioned. I accept that the Government started a consultation on trying to update the present law. That was last April and I think that, like all these things, it has been put in the “too hard to deal with” category, but as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has just said, other jurisdictions and other countries have moved ahead on this. It is, I have to say, a challenge for any Government, in the sense that the rapid rate of change in our technology throws up these challenges to any system. However, when there is a situation whereby a body such as the Post Office not only used the law but actually pressed it and persecuted people in a very hard and uncaring way, we get the scandals that face us today, with the Post Office scandal. It is still going on. We now have the first of the Capture cases, which was the system before Horizon, going to the Court of Appeal. Even though, when I first exposed this, the Post Office had no information on this system, we were helped to put together, through various campaigners and individuals who came forward, the details of the Capture system. It was not a network system like Horizon, but still a system that was reliant, in those days, on corrupted floppy disks, and the program was wrong. The Government’s position has been that these cases should go to the CCRC. I think that there are fewer than 30 cases in this category. Even though the Government have now agreed to pay compensation to the Capture cases, the first case is going to the Court of Appeal. Strangely, for some reason the Post Office has taken it on itself to oppose this case. No doubt we will hear from Ministers—I accept this is not my noble friend the Minister’s responsibility—that the Post Office is at arm’s length and therefore a decision has to be taken on what it does with cases such as this. But with the Horizon scandal we saw the Post Office spend somewhere in excess of £100 million of public money to defend the indefensible. I am not suggesting that it will spend that much on this case, but it seems to be carrying on the argument that the computer cannot be wrong. To me and other campaigners, a clear precedent has been set on this and those cases should be set aside and overturned as the Horizon cases were. In one case going before the court, the individual is dead but her elderly husband is now facing a longer wait and yet another fight, with the Post Office using public money. As I say, when I and other campaigners first exposed Capture, the Post Office said that it had nothing on it, but it now seems very quickly to have found a good reason to oppose this case. That is why an urgent change needs to happen, as my noble friend has outlined. I join others in thanking my noble friend the Minister for her engagement on this issue. She realises that this needs to be addressed and the constructive way she has engaged with us on it should be commended. I hope we can get some change and that, with the wider issues arising from not just this but the Capture case, the Government think before again allowing the Post Office to go down this blind alley of defending the indefensible. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.