Just £500 for our suffering postmasters
Outrage at payouts for hounded staff
FORMER Post Office staff who were bankrupted and given criminal convictions over the Horizon IT scandal have been handed as little as £500 in compensation.
Hundreds of postmasters, once pillars of their communities, were removed from their posts or dragged through the courts accused of thieving from their own tills.
But after a decade-long legal fight, a court ruled that the shortfalls were the result of glitches in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.
A group of 550 postmasters won a historic victory when the Post Office capitulated in December, paid a £58million settlement and apologised.
But, in a first tranche of payments handed out last week, postmasters received between just £500 and £10,000 for their years of anguish.
They branded the sums a ‘pittance’, saying that in some cases their losses ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
It is the first time some postmasters have received any financial redress in a saga that has run for two decades.
The payments come from the £58million compensation settlement, but are considerably smaller than expected because of the postmasters’ legal fees, estimated to be £47million.
This leaves just over £11million to be divided among the claimants, with each postmaster expected to receive an average total of £20,000 when the second tranche is paid in June.
But they have been left in the dark as to how the money will be divided. The initial payments received in the past fortnight have left many furious they will never be fairly compensated. Some suffered huge losses and others served time in prison.
Kashmir Gill, 63, was given a criminal record for false accounting and was forced to sell her business in Oxford to pay back £58,000 of ‘ missing’ money, but only received £500 in compensation last week.
The mother- of- one, from Wendlebury, Oxfordshire, said: ‘What’s £500? I’d rather have got nothing. My family lost hundreds of thousands of pounds because of the Post Office.
‘It’s been ten years of shame and suffering. We can’t get those years back. It feels like it’s us getting punished not them.’
Another former postmaster, Tom Brown, 74, was sacked and stripped of property worth £325,000 after being accused of stealing £38,000 from the till. Last week he was handed £10,000 in compensation.
The widower, from Stanley, County Durham, said: ‘It’s ridiculous. My salary was £48,000 a year and I made £20,000 off the shop side. That’s a big chunk of earnings I’ve missed.
‘It’s been very hard. I’m not destitute, but there were always some who believed I’d taken the money. It never leaves you.’ The
From the Mail, March 27 Daily Mail has written extensively about the plight of postmasters as part of the Save Our Local Post Offices campaign.
The Horizon IT scandal began in the early 2000s when random shortfalls started appearing in postmasters’ accounts.
The Post Office accused postmasters of stealing the money. It suspended them, froze their assets and in at least 60 cases successfully prosecuted them for false accounting and theft. In 2018, more than 550 sued the Post Office in the High Court, claiming they had been wrongly accused of taking the money ‘missing’ from their branches. After spending £32million of taxpayer’s cash on legal fees, the Post Office capitulated.
Last week the Criminal Cases Review Commission sent 39 cases, including Mrs Gill’s, to the Court of Appeal to consider whether they should be overturned. If successful, those postmasters will be able to pursue new claims for compensation.
A letter to the postmasters from their solicitors Freeth’s, which is dividing up the compensation cash, said the amount people receive was ‘defined by the circumstances of their claim’. It added: ‘It will be at least the amount of your proportionate share but it may be that you are set to receive more.’
A spokesman for Freeth’s said: ‘The actions of the Post Office made this a long and complicated battle. This victory was hard won and would not have been possible without multimillion-pound legal funding.’
The Post Office said it had ‘sincerely apologised’ and was ‘undertaking a complete reform of the way in which we work with postmasters’.