Questions the Labour leader must answer
Sir Keir Starmer has called for the Post Office to lose its powers to bring private prosecutions as the scandal deepens over the wrongful pursuit of hundreds of sub-postmasters for fraud. The Labour leader said responsibility should be transferred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), ending the Post Office’s long-standing independence.
In view of the way the Post Office and its legal team handled these cases, this must be the correct approach. In some instances, prosecutions for false accounting were brought only after theft accusations were dropped. But since they had no evidence of theft in the first place, they had no power to seek guilty pleas for the lesser offence, let alone demand that money be repaid.
As Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the powerful ITV drama which has brought the cases properly into the public eye, demonstrates, the lives of scores of decent, honest people were wrecked by obfuscation, cover-up and mendacity.
There are now demands for the mass exculpation of an estimated 700 retailers caught up in what has been called the most widespread miscarriage of justice in recent British history. MPS and the police are now proposing fresh investigations for possible fraud and malfeasance, not against the subpostmasters but the Post Office and its legal teams.
But the question that needs to be asked is: why so late? Sir Keir was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 when many of these innocent people were being arraigned.
Was any interest shown inside the CPS as to what was going on? Although the Post Office was not obliged to inform them, it is hard to believe there was no curiosity. Moreover, if the Labour leader thinks the Post Office should lose its prosecutorial role, why has he waited for a TV dramatisation before saying so? The role of Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader who was postal affairs minister in the Coalition government, is also coming under scrutiny since he was alerted to the problems around faulty computer software.
Had the programme not provoked the anger of millions of viewers at the treatment of people who are often stalwarts of their local communities would there now be such a political brouhaha?
The public inquiry into the failures of the Fujitsu Horizon IT system which led to mistakes in the accounts has been running for more than three years. The Government cannot in all conscience await its outcome before making amends to these deeply wronged people.