Starmer faces questions over his lack of action during Horizon scandal
Labour leader did not raise the issue of wrongful convictions as director of public prosecutions
‘The fact is this was a private prosecution and Sir Keir was public prosecutor’
SIR KEIR STARMER is facing questions over why he failed to intervene in the prosecution of innocent sub postmasters when he was the director of public prosecutions (DPP).
The Labour leader was insistent yesterday that the powers of prosecution given to the Post Office needed to be removed.
“I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service, we’ve prosecuted for other departments, we can do it here – that should be done straight away,” said Sir Keir.
“And these convictions, the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse.”
But his critics have questioned why he did not raise the issue when the scandal was first breaking and when he, crucially, was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip who is said to be pondering a return to front-line politics, was vexed enough to share his frustration to his 1.8 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He wrote on the social media site: “Why did Keir Starmer not intervene in the Horizon scandal when he was director of public prosecutions?
“The story first broke in 2009, yet the prosecutions continued until 2015. Given the mounting concern at the time and over 700 cases, he has serious questions to answer.”
The post was followed with some clarification a few hours later. “The DPP has the right to intervene in any prosecution. Where was Starmer?” asked Mr Farage.
Sir Keir will be wary of being dragged into a scandal that is clearly not of his making. But he was DPP for five years from 2008 to 2013 before embarking on a political career that has taken him to the threshold of Downing Street.
The question for Sir Keir is, did he have an opportunity to intervene and kick the Post Office prosecutions into touch?
The rules on private prosecutions state that “there will be instances where it is appropriate for the CPS to exercise” the DPP’S powers “either to continue the prosecution or to discontinue or stop it”.
The power comes from a crucial piece of legislation under Section 6 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985. But before the CPS can take over a private prosecution – and potentially shut it down – it must first know about the legal case.
There is no formal mechanism by which CPS is told about private prosecutions so the organisation wouldn’t necessarily have known about those carried about by the Post Office.
However the CPS did carry out the prosecution itself in a number of cases against sub postmasters. “It is a relative drop in the ocean compared to the 700 or 800 the Post Office are involved in,” a CPS spokesman said last night. It is unclear how many of those will have been under Sir Keir’s watch as DPP, although by 2009 – when Sir Keir was a year into the job – the first trappings of a scandal emerged in an investigation carried out by Computer Weekly, which highlighted seven potential miscarriages of justice.
One of the first was a case brought against David Hughes, a sub-postmaster who pleaded guilty to making a false instrument at Workington magistrates’ court in about 2007 and sentenced to a 12-month community order and 100 hours of unpaid work.
Except, like hundreds of others, he was wrongly convicted, the fault of a faulty IT system called Horizon that the Post Office had for years insisted was foolproof.
‘The bosses are still free, they have their families, while I was in prison’
‘They didn’t realise they were playing with my life, a mum’s life, a wife’s life’
The accounts had shown a “discrepancy” of a few thousand pounds caused by Fujitsu’s system. In 2021, a full 15 years later, Mr Hughes was finally acquitted of all offences, his reputation restored and cleared of all wrongdoing.
The CPS offered no evidence when the case returned, this time at Southwark Crown Court.
In other words, a year into Sir Keir’s reign as DPP, the CPS had secured at least one conviction and the burgeoning scandal was already starting to surface.
In 2012, the CPS, according to evidence submitted to the public inquiry by Della Robinson, a sub postmistress wrongly convicted, “told me that if I pleaded guilty to false accounting, they would not pursue me for the money and would drop the theft charge. I then chose to do this”. Ms Robinson pleaded guilty to false accounting and was subsequently sentenced to 180 hours’ community service in January 2013.
The conviction was quashed in April 2021.
Sources close to Sir Keir are adamant that the Labour leader and prime minister-in-waiting has no case to answer. Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the recent ITV drama, had rightly angered millions of viewers and catapulted the Horizon scandal into the limelight, they said.
But the problem had taken a long time to play out, including through an ongoing public inquiry, and the scandal was created by the Post Office, which unfortunately had prosecutorial powers. One source said: “The fact is this was a private prosecution and he [Sir Keir] was public prosecutor.
“Nobody knew it was a problem because the Post Office had prosecutorial powers.”
In fact, a parliamentary briefing note written last year by Nick Read, the new Post Office Limited chief executive, detailed six cases prosecuted by the CPS that had gone to appeal.
Mr Read wrote: “One of these was conceded and the conviction overturned at Southwark Crown Court and five were opposed, with the safety of the convictions upheld by the Court of Appeal in two cases and the appeals abandoned in the remaining three.”
The Post Office only makes note of the cases that had gone to appeal so the true number of cases taken on by the CPS is unclear.
The CPS was struggling last night to work out how many cases it had prosecuted. Private prosecutions are relatively rare.
Some organisations have historically undertaken the role like the RSPCA, which for almost 200 years prosecuted people suspected of animal cruelty.
However, in recent years the RSPCA has found itself in the metaphorical dock for on occasion pursuing cases all too ruthlessly.
It was accused of being both investigator and prosecutor, prompting the charity to declare in 2021 that it would investigate allegations but hand over files to the CPS to prosecute.
The Post Office, as one lawyer explained, had a potential conflict that was even starker. “The Post Office,” said lawyer Nick Gould, “is investigator, prosecutor and victim.”
One of his clients, Seema Misra, was sentenced to 15 months in jail in 2010 despite being eight weeks pregnant.
When she went into labour, she was still wearing her probation tag.
The £70,000 shortfall in her account was of course caused by the Horizon computer system, her conviction quashed in 2021.
Ms Misra blames the Post Office fair and square, and its bosses who have never gone to jail.
“They didn’t realise they were playing with my life, a mum’s life, a wife’s life. Even someone with a heart of steel wouldn’t do that,” she said in an interview in the wake of her quashed conviction.
“They cannot be human, and yet they kept doing it. The bosses are still free, they have their families, while I was in prison.”