I beg to move,
That this House recognises the challenges faced by individuals and businesses in accessing effective dispute resolution and obtaining redress in cases of injustice; believes that the Government needs to address these specific challenges, namely a fragmented and inconsistent redress landscape; considers statutory guidance to be an essential measure to ensure compensation and redress schemes follow common principles and lead to fair and independent outcomes; and calls on the Government to create statutory guidance with common principles for setting up and operating a redress scheme.
It is my honour to move the motion that stands in my name and that of the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. I also thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), for her recent correspondence with the Comptroller and Auditor General, calling on public bodies to have redress schemes that are effective, timely, proportionate and fair.
Samuel Beckett famously wrote:
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
What if we learned nothing from our previous failure? What if we simply failed, failed again and approached the failure as in the past, only to fail a bit differently and with many of the same mistakes as before? That is the situation we face with compensation and redress following scandals.
I imagine that every Member of this House will have received correspondence from a constituent who has been failed and treated unfairly in the wake of a scandal. Rather than being able to access swift and fair redress, they have instead been subjected to further hardship, delays and unfair treatment. Sometimes that mistreatment can be as devastating as the pain caused initially by the scandal. There has rightly been significant attention nationally in recent months on the Post Office Horizon scandal, and in particular on the various schemes set up to provide redress to the victims of what was the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
A sub-postmaster of a post office in my constituency was one of the hundreds wrongful convicted. Janine Powell was wrongfully accused of stealing £74,000 from her post office branch in Tiverton. She was subsequently sacked and arrested, before being convicted at a trial in Exeter in 2008. She described feeling “confused; dismayed; numb”. That is because Ms Powell was sentenced to 18 months in prison, serving five months. She was sent to prison just two days after her daughter’s 10th birthday. She said that the hardest part of her wrongful imprisonment was leaving her children. She said:
“I’ve missed out on doing things with them—I can’t get that back.”
No amount of money could ever make up for what happened to Ms Powell, but compensation can at least try to make up for some of the loss they faced. Sadly, the various Post Office compensation schemes that have existed have failed to provide swift and fair redress, as I know from another constituent case that I am dealing with.
According to the law firm Howe and Co, which represents 150 sub-postmasters, the compensation scheme
“continues to be exceptionally slow…and refuses to entertain applications from persons who are plainly entitled to apply”.
This afternoon, I hope to outline that the Post Office case is but one example of a wider problem. No guidance exists on when and how compensation schemes should be established or what an overseeing body should look like. That means that each scheme has its own unique and dysfunctional set of rules. Reinventing the wheel each time a scandal emerges means that victims are failed by the very system that is meant to right the wrongs of the past.