Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)

My Lords, I will speak on Amendment 61. I did not speak at Second Reading, for which I apologise to your Lordships’ House. I lacked the ingenuity of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, in moving an amendment to the Bill. I pay tribute to her for doing so. Everything she said about Amendment 61 was right. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for pursuing this issue with her usual persistence and eloquence. I am grateful to her for having involved me in some of the meetings that she organised. My first point is that evidence derived from a computer is hearsay. There are very good reasons why we treat hearsay evidence with caution. To admit hearsay evidence is a step in itself, but to presume that it is reliable is a giant stride beyond that. Secondly, we are all aware of how frequently we have to redo the programming on our Apple iPhones or whatever, partly because of bugs in the programming of the computer technology on which we rely so much. Bugs are inevitable in computer programmes. That was why Fujitsu—I hope the Minister will answer the point about whether Fujitsu has paid, or might pay, any money to the taxpayer or to the sub-postmasters— had an office dedicated not just to altering the sub- postmasters’ balances, shocking as that was, but to altering and amending a programme that was never going to be perfect, because no computer programme is. If computer programmes are inherently unreliable, to have a presumption in law that they are reliable is unsustainable. Thirdly, the consequences of the repeal of Section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—which, I remind your Lordships, happened partly because the Post Office asked for it to happen to make its prosecutions easier for it—were that Seema Misra was sent to prison when she was eight weeks pregnant and on her son’s 10th birthday. She collapsed when she was sentenced. This is an urgent matter. If we leave it in place, further injustices may happen as soon as tomorrow. That is the first point about why it is urgent. The second point about why it is urgent is that any defence lawyer, in any event, will point to the Horizon case and say that it is perfectly obvious that this presumption is wrong. It is perfectly obvious. We cannot, in all good conscience, permit to continue in law a presumption which we know to be incorrect, and I hope that the Minister will at least set out a path to changing it.