Baroness Ludford (LD)

My Lords, I look forward to the two maiden speeches. I am a relative Johnny-come-lately to the story of this scandal. There are a number of people who deserve our thanks and regards: first, the sub-postmasters and their families, who have suffered terribly from the incompetence, arrogance and bullying of the Post Office. Sir Alan Bates, of course, stands out. The noble Lords, Lord Beamish and Lord Arbuthnot, have also been on the case for a long time and I thoroughly applaud their work. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, for instigating this debate. They both made excellent speeches. ITV played a big role in reaching a wide and outraged audience with its admirable hit series “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”. There are lawyers, such as Neil Hudgell, battling for the postmasters. Among journalists, I must single out Nick Wallis. It was his BBC Radio 4 series five years ago that first alerted me, although he had been working on the issue for a decade previously, when he was a presenter on BBC Radio Surrey. An article on him three years ago described what happened: “It was a tweet that any journalist might have ignored. It came … from a taxi owner asking if he could pitch for the local radio station’s taxi account … Davinder turned out to be the husband of Seema Misra who had been thrown into prison on her son’s 10th birthday while pregnant, for supposedly stealing £74,000 from the Post Office … Davinder insisted not only that his wife was innocent but that it was the Post Office computer in her sub-Post Office that was at fault”. It was November 2010. The rest, as they say, is history; a very painful one. Sir Alan Bates, brilliantly played by Toby Jones on TV, is of course the most famous of the wronged sub-postmasters. Lee Castleton is another well-known name. He recently tweeted: “Why is it so difficult to be open, fair and quick. It is disgusting that Betty Brown at 92, is still waiting for the return of Her money. JUST PAY HER what she is owed”. Someone replied: “Still can’t help but feel they’re still putting 2 fingers up to us”. The Financial Times reports that “many victims are still locked in a glacial, bureaucratic process of offers and appeals that could end up back with the courts”. Some 72% of the budget for redress has still not been paid. One recalls the adage, justice delayed is justice denied. The worst problems are in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme—the HSS—which I will mainly speak about. Tony Downey is a former sub-postmaster caught up in this terrible injustice, together with his wife and business partner. He has been granted only 20% of his claim. Tony has written to Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the Post Office Horizon inquiry, and is allowing me to quote from his letter: “The Post Office agree we paid the shortfalls, they agree they made us both bankrupted with their action and they agree this made me sick and unable to work since, they agreed at the meeting that the forced sale of the property was related to the Horizon. However they will not pay me the lost income as in other schemes, they will not pay the bankruptcy or costs of my wife and business partner, they will not pay me the full amount of the head of claim for sickness, they will not pay for the loss of the property”, which was, I think, the family home. Tony Downey, Christopher Head OBE—another wronged postmaster—and journalist Nick Wallis have drawn attention to a curious feature of way the Horizon Shortfall Scheme is being administered by the Post Office that might help explain why claimant sub-postmasters with complex cases are receiving offers way below their claims. The HSS assessors seem to be—indeed are, and have said that they are—working to a set of guidelines different from the published principles and are refusing to share them with the claimants’ lawyers. One claimant has commented: “We guess they include every get out clause possible”. One of the claimant lawyers replied to Post Office lawyers as follows, and it bears quoting fully, which I have permission to do: “The Post Office approach to HSS claims is on the basis of breach of contract and assessing damages had the contract been ‘validly terminated’. We fundamentally oppose that basis of calculation which is at odds with the Principles that are widely published in relation to the HSS, and therefore the narrow contractual approach taken by Post Office does not satisfy the tests presented in the Principles document. The document to which you”— that is, a Post Office lawyer— “refer appears to be fundamentally different to the widely published one and seems to be separate guidance used by the Panel and has never seen the light of day publicly, so how can we or a Postmaster be on an equal footing in this claims process, when you refuse to disclose guidelines used by the panel? This would not be an acceptable situation in any other claims or legal process in this country”. As far as I can see, he is absolutely right that a narrow contractual approach, which effectively gives a sub-postmaster only redundancy money, is not at all the same as the Post Office’s published Horizon Shortfall Scheme Consequential Loss Principles and Guidance document, whereby: “The object of the assessment will be … to put the postmaster into the position that the postmaster would have been in but for the Horizon Shortfall”. For former sub-postmaster Tony Downey, this is the difference between getting redundancy money amounting to two years’ or so income and being fully compensated for inability to work since a nervous breakdown in 2007 after being suspended, audited twice, bullied to pay shortfalls in order to get reinstated, having to sell the business at a loss, both he and his wife having to declare bankruptcy, and losing their home. He says: “We had gone from owning a mortgage free property now worth £900,000 with a successful business and savings to having nothing and the scheme is unable to put us anywhere near the position we should have been”. Inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams wrote in his July 2023 first interim report on compensation: “It would be tempting for some to be sceptical about whether” full and fair compensation, “can be achieved … a commitment to provide compensation which is full and fair is not the traditional stance taken by a defendant in our adversarial system of civil litigation”. That was very prescient. What will the Government do to oblige the Post Office to follow the published principles on consequential loss, not revert to being a traditional adversarial defendant? Can the Minister ensure not only that the Post Office’s secret guidelines, which are not in accord with the published principles, are made available to all claimants and indeed to parliamentarians and everyone else, but that it stops using them? The Business and Trade Select Committee reported on 1 January on redress for the Horizon scandal. The government response was not available yesterday or first thing this morning. I imagine the Minister can assure us that it is imminent; by my calculation, the deadline for the response is tomorrow at the latest. Your Lordships will probably all have read the committee’s recommendations, one of which was that the Post Office should be removed from administering any of the schemes. It says, and I strongly agree, that the Post Office acted as “judge, jury and executioner” when pursuing sub-postmasters and that now it “should not be deciding on what financial redress is owed to victims of its own scandal”. I do not have time to discuss the other recommendations from the committee, but I just point out that the present reality is that claimants not only have to fill out a complex form with no legal support but face a scenario of snakes and ladders. This is well-described in a letter that a former sub-postmaster, Christopher Head, wrote yesterday to inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams—he has made it public, so I can quote from it. He describes how a claimant faces “the risk that should she pursue a claim above the Fixed Sum, she could be offered less and then have to enter the long drawn out dispute processes that could continue for years … There is also no guarantee she would get close to the fixed sum award let alone the sum claimed. All this must be done without any legal advice, unless the individual is willing to pay for their own representation, which is out of reach of most people”. Mr Head rightly says: “Claimants should be able to receive these awards”— the fixed awards— “in any of the schemes and then be invited to raise a further claim for the remainder of their claim should there be sufficient evidence to do so and a likely chance of success … without any risk”. How does the Minister react to that suggestion, and can she tell us whether the department will take over the Post Office scheme? I will conclude by quoting briefly from an interesting and heartfelt book by the former Prime Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady May, entitled The Abuse of Power. In her words, she, “describes many examples of injustice against ordinary people perpetrated by the powerful and mighty”, with “often a sense that protection of the institution is more important than fairness, justice or seeking the truth”. That is what we have seen with the Post Office. She concludes that “we need to reconsider who we are as a country and the urgent need for those in authority to ensure that in all they do, they are putting the country and the people first”.