The Chronicle (South Tyneside and Durham)
Cleverly pledge on PO compensation
HOME Secretary James Cleverly has said the Government will not be “distracted or deterred” from providing compensation to wronged subpostmasters, after the Post Office said it stood by more than 350 Horizon scandal prosecutions.
It comes after Post Office chief executive Nick Read said in a letter to the Government last month that his organisation would oppose appeals in more than half the cases.
Writing to Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, Mr Read said the company “would be bound to oppose an appeal” in at least 369 of the 700 cases it had prosecuted.
But Mr Cleverly told Sky News yesterday: “That letter is not going to divert us from what we know to be the right course of action, which is do the right thing by hardworking people who found themselves, through no fault of their own, being targeted for criminal actions.
“So we are relentlessly focused on that, and that exchange won’t change that at all.”
Mr Read’s letter, sent shortly after the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office sparked public outrage, said the cases “involve convictions obtained by reliance on evidence unrelated to the Horizon computer system” and represented a “much more significant” proportion of the prosecutions than those the company was likely to concede in court.
The Post Office denied the letter, first reported by The Guardian, had been intended to persuade ministers against a mass exoneration of subpostmasters and said it was sent “without any value judgment on what the correct course of action might be”.
Referring to plans to accelerate the exoneration of subpostmasters convicted during the Horizon scandal, Mr Read said the Post Office “has a duty to ensure that any decisions which may be taken by the Government are fully informed”.
He said the reliance on other evidence in the 369 cases “clearly raises acute political, judicial and communications challenges against the very significant public and parliamentary pressure for some form of acceleration or bypassing of the normal appeals process”.
In an attached note from lawyers Peters and Peters, solicitor Nick Vamos said it was “highly likely that the vast majority of people who have not yet appealed were, in fact, guilty as charged and were safely convicted”.