Sunak takes unprecedented legal action to exonerate Post Office victims

A scandal widely being described as the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern British history – and a long overdue attempt to right the wrongs of the past – has pushed Britain into unchartered legal territory today.

Rishi Sunak announced at PMQs that the government will bring in a new law to “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims” of Postmastergate.

Some 736 sub-postmasters and mistresses prosecuted between 1999 and 2015, based on the faulty Horizon IT system, will have their convictions overturned. The government aims to complete this process by the end of the year. Additionally, the former postmasters who brought a group lawsuit against the Post Office will be offered an upfront payment of £75,000. At present, this only applies in England and Wales since Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate legal systems. 

Sunak confirmed that there will be no consideration of individual cases. Rather, convictions will be quashed on a “blanket basis”. 

While this announcement will almost certainly feel like “too little too late” for postmasters who’ve been subjected to two decades of misery, make no mistake, this is radical legal action. 

For the first time in modern British history, parliament is overturning the verdict of judges, and seizing from the courts the power to decide who is innocent. 

What’s more, postmasters are being taken entirely at their word. They will simply sign a form declaring their own innocence in order to have their convictions overturned and to claim compensation. 

This is not action to take lightly. And inevitably it also means that a small minority of individuals who are genuinely guilty of theft will be acquitted. But such is the scale of injustice that ministers have decided that unjust acquittals is favourable to an even lengthier wait to overturn the cases of all those unjustly convicted. At present, only 93 post office branch managers have had their criminal convictions overturned. 

In an excoriating (and must-read) piece for Reaction today, Gerald Warner writes that the extraordinary details of the scandal leave one in no doubt that the Post Office acted in bad faith. 

One of its tactics was to tell every postmaster who was found to have incorrect accounts on the Horizon system: “You’re the only one having a problem.” Employees on its helpline were even instructed to tell this lie. “In this way, intimidated individuals became convinced their case was unique,” writes Warner. 

He also details how the Post Office wilfully ignored evidence of Horizon’s unreliability – brought to its attention by IT experts as early as 2003. 

Rather than admit that the Horizon system was flawed – and incur the expense of switching to a different system – it chose instead to ruthlessly destroy hundreds of lives. 

And ruin them it certainly did. Aside from handing totally innocent people prison sentences, even family members were ostracised from their local communities – with one former postmaster detailing this week how his children were spat at on the school bus. Bankruptcies proliferated and some individuals died before their convictions were overturned, with at least four taking their own lives. 

One of the curious aspects to Postmastergate is that most of these extraordinary aforementioned details have been known for years. 

No major new information has been uncovered especially recently. The only new development is a television drama aired on ITV. 

One week later, the government is taking decisive action to solve a 20-year problem. 

Undoubtedly, this is an incredible testament to the power of story-telling. But what does it say about our successive governments that it has taken a TV drama – and the public outrage is provoked – to spur them into action? 

Now, the public inquiry must establish how collective failure across so many institutions facilitated a miscarriage of justice of such epic proportions. 

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