Bring this Horizon injustice to an end

Under questioning on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, the minister for the Post Office, Kevin Hollinrake, objected to what he called “trial by media” in the Horizon IT scandal. A few hours later, Rishi Sunak told MPS that the Government would introduce emergency legislation to overturn the wrongful convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters and to speed up the compensation due to them.

Had it not been for the media’s interest in this story over the years, the Prime Minister would not have made that statement. Indeed, were it not for the ITV dramatisation, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, charting how the retailers were persecuted, the whole saga would still be mired in bureaucratic hold-ups and legal delays.

It is not the media who should be criticised for bringing this dreadful state of affairs to light but successive occupants of Mr Hollinrake’s department, senior Post Office executives and managers of the Fujitsu IT company. Successive governments have known about this injustice for years and have only now summoned up the political will to bring matters to a close.

At every turn, the Post Office has seemingly sought to avoid proper scrutiny. Mr Justice Fraser, in finding for 555 claimants against the Post Office in 2019, also subsequently wrote to Scotland Yard about potential offences committed in the trial. The Met set up Operation Olympus to investigate but as with so much in this tale, little has happened.

Mr Sunak’s proposed Bill aims to exonerate all the sub-postmasters convicted through Horizonbased evidence by the end of the year. Some jurists fear this is a slippery slope leading to greater political involvement in the legal process. But the sub-postmasters have been let down at every turn by the political, corporate and legal establishment and deserve an exceptional response.

The justice system, dealing with a backlog of thousands of cases, would not be able to handle so many unsafe convictions, so a one-off, blanket exoneration is the fair approach. In the meantime, there will be a £75,000 upfront payment for those who won the group action in 2019 and £600,000 for those whose convictions were overturned as part of an expedited compensation scheme.

This must now be followed through. After so many postponements and disappointments, it needs to be sorted out before the general election at the latest. Mr Hollinrake can rest assured that the media will be watching.