It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), who has done fantastic work in this area; on occasion, we have been joined at the hip in our approach to the Post Office. I thank the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) for opening the debate, which is very timely. I agree with the hon.
Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) that it is disappointing that there are not more Members here. Like him, I remember when Thursdays were full days, but now they seem to be optional extras for Members of Parliament—that is showing both my age and his. I declare an interest as a member of the Horizon compensation advisory board.
I congratulate the APPG on producing the report, which identifies the unbalanced power relationship when the citizen comes up against the mighty state or corporate world. We have compensation schemes when things go wrong, but to get to the truth in the first place usually takes a number of years—the Post Office Horizon scandal is a good example—so the victims have already fought to try to reach that point. In many cases, the victims—certainly those of the Post Office scandal, and others too—want compensation, but most of those I speak to also want the truth and an acknowledgment that they have been damaged, through no fault of their own, in the case of the Horizon scandal by the Post Office, and in the case of some of the banking scandals by the disgraceful activities and greed of corporations.
As I say, it is regrettable that in most cases the victims spend years trying to get redress. When there is public acknowledgment that something has gone wrong, they are usually at the back of the queue and forgotten about when compensation schemes are produced, which is one of the issues that the APPG report highlights. When we are designing compensation or redress schemes, we should put the victims at the centre. They are mainly over-bureaucratic and complicated, not just for the victims but for those trying to administer them, who in many cases are trying to do a good job but get bogged down in the detail, even when we try to take the lawyers out of the process.
One of the hurtful things for many individuals is that legal costs usually take up more of the financial pot than what goes to the victims. I will talk a little later about the Horizon compensation scheme, but the postal services Minister, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), is trying to cut through that knot by having single pots with fixed sums. That would not only make it easier for victims to understand the scheme, but cut the duration and expense of legal proceedings, both for the victim and for the Government. The Minister has been criticised by some parties for doing that, but I think it is a good step forward.
However, even when we get schemes that we think should be easy to administer, we get the greed of certain lawyers. As the hon. Member for Christchurch did, I am going to give a historical example: the mineworkers’ compensation scheme. In the end, I think that scheme paid out over £3 billion for victims of vibration white finger and coal dust. It should have been quite simple to administer, because it had basically a chart with the number of years that someone had worked and the effect, in terms of the amount of damage that had been done, but we saw a feeding frenzy of lawyers, who, not content that they were getting their legal costs paid by the Government, preyed upon the victims to deduct money from their compensation. People might think that I am a bit of an anorak on this subject, but that was one of my earlier campaigns: Lord Mann, who was the hon. Member for Bassetlaw at the time, and I exposed the greed of not only the lawyers but, sadly, some trade unions—in my case, the Durham area of the National Union of Mineworkers.
These schemes should be quite simple to operate, but every time we have a scandal we go back to the drawing board and reinvent the wheel. That, I think, is the problem. I am not sure that we could design a scheme that could cover every single instance, but we could certainly have some foundations on which to build. I have seen this at first hand on the advisory board. I give credit to the civil servants in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy who are trying to administer the scheme, but they have gone back to square one. In the early days of the advisory board, I was actually referring back to the mineworkers’ compensation scheme as a way of trying to simplify the system. I think that we need from the Government, in response to this report, some work to look at getting in place a bare framework for compensation schemes that could be adopted when we get these types of scandals.
I understand that in all this there are worries about the financial implications, and I sympathise with the Minister, because he has the Treasury hovering in the background. However, if we get to a situation where we are paying out more in legal fees than to victims, surely it would be simpler to cut out the middleman and pay the money directly to the victims. That framework, which I think the APPG refers to, needs to be put in place as a matter of urgency.
There is another thing that always strikes me, which I have seen in the Post Office scandal. Frankly, I do not blame the victims. Do they trust the Post Office one iota? No, they do not. Would I, if I had been through what they have been through? No, I would not. It seems that, every time, it is the people who were involved in the system who determine not only how the scheme is designed, but how it is administered. I find that appalling. That is not just the case with the Post Office scandal; it was true of some of the banking scandals too. That has to change. We cannot have the people who created the problem trying to administer the redress scheme, because then victims do not trust what is going on.
I will come to the historical shortfall scheme for the Post Office scandal in a minute, but my feeling, looking at how it has been administered by the Post Office, is that it was designed in the early days to try to reduce the amount of compensation so that the Post Office did not have to go to the Treasury to fill the gap. That is the complexity that we have generated. We have a fragmented and inconsistent system, which leads to a waste of money and frustration for the victims, and slows things down.
I want to touch on a couple of schemes. I will start with the Post Office Horizon compensation schemes, which I know more about than some of the others. We have three separate schemes. I and my fellow members of the advisory board asked, “Why would we start here?” We all agreed that we would not want to, but we all felt that we could not unpick it and have one scheme, because it had already been put in place.
We started off with the historical shortfall scheme, which was designed by the Post Office to try to get redress for some of the cases that came forward, but there were serious issues. The first was with disclosure of evidence by the Post Office. I do not mind putting it on record that on occasion I thought, “Has it been lost or are they just frustrating the system?” I think that it in
some cases it was just frustrating the system. The second issue was that the Post Office was administering the scheme. Many individuals were asked to make applications without any legal advice at all and, lo and behold, the advisory board—to be fair to the Minister, he has taken on board our recommendations—now has to look at some of those cases again because of the way the scheme was administered. Right from the start, it was not fit for purpose.
We then have the group litigation order scheme—the famous 555 including Alan Bates, who took the Post Office to court and secured the landmark 2019 judgment. That is a completely separate scheme from the HSS. The GLO scheme was initially resisted. At first, the Government’s line was that the postmasters had settled the case in the High Court—basically because they were outgunned by the Government and the Post Office, who used a tsunami of public cash to spend £100 million on lawyers, but it is now coming out of the inquiry that they never had a case to defend. They were trying to defend the indefensible. Just think: £100 million spent on lawyers. We could have paid the victims out of that. We could have covered at least part of one of the schemes through that alone. We understand victims’ anger when they see that happening.
We then have the overturned convictions scheme, which came out of the 104 or 105 individuals who have already been through the Court of Appeal and had their convictions overturned. That will be the redress mechanism for all the other victims who will have their convictions quashed when the legislation passes Parliament. That, again, will be a different scheme from the others. Very early on, the postal affairs Minister introduced the £600,000 one-off payment to people, and he has now introduced a £75,000 payment in other schemes for people to accept as a final offer without going through the evidence or anything like that. People might say that that means that some people will get more money than they lost. That does not really bother me, given the trauma they have gone through, when the alternative is going through a long, laborious administration process. We would pay as much as that out for lawyers anyway; why should it not go to the victims? Credit to the postal services Minister, he has brought these payments forward. We must try to have such payments in other compensation schemes.
We are in danger of having a fourth scheme. I had a meeting with the postal services Minister last night and, as I have previously told the House, we are now looking at the pre-Horizon scheme, Capture. To be fair to him, he is determined to get to the bottom of what the Post Office did in prosecuting and bankrupting people. If the Government accept that victims were wrongly prosecuted and, in some cases, bankrupted, which scheme do they fit into? Do they fit into one of the three existing schemes, or will we have to generate yet another scheme? That shows the complexity of these arguments when compensation is needed. I would resist coming up with a fourth scheme—we have to try to adapt some of the other schemes, and we on the advisory board will obviously work with the Minister.
Lessons need to be learned from how the Post Office has handled this, and that could be the basis for the Cabinet Office’s work in looking at the pillars that are needed. All schemes, and certainly the Post Office scheme, have to disclose information. The Post Office has been
notoriously slow in disclosing the information needed to progress a claim. Has some of that been deliberate? In the past, I think it possibly has, but what do we do where the records no longer exist? I am sure some of the records no longer exist in the example raised by the hon. Member for Christchurch. Do we just say that no one has a claim? No, I think we need to take quite a generous view. If it can be proved, for example, that people have lost out because of the damage from a scheme, and if it can be proved that they are not just making it up, we need a mechanism to deal with that. Otherwise, victims are going to feel that they will not get justice.
Interestingly, I have more information on the pre-Horizon system, Capture, than the Post Office does. I have a full set of documents, all the software and all the floppy disks from the early Capture cases. When I put this to the Post Office, I was asked where I got it from, and I said that one of the victims who contacted me had a very assiduous wife—sadly, Mrs Tooby is no longer with us—who kept everything. It says something that I have more evidence than the Post Office.
The hon. Member for Christchurch talked about litigation. Well, how would a person litigate that? It is a pretty one-sided argument. The Post Office had no evidence at all in those cases. It knew that the evidence existed, but it did not have the boxes of evidence that I have. Again, trying to avoid litigation should be part of the process because, as the hon. Gentleman said, it is costly. People do not have access to that kind of cash. Even if they do, it is also costly to the Government. Who wins? The lawyers, and we do not get the swift redress that is needed.
Other schemes have been mentioned, and evidence on the Windrush scheme has been lost. Landing card records and other such things have all been destroyed by the Home Office, so how do we do it? We have to take a sensible approach and, to be fair to him—I know I keep praising him—the postal services Minister has. Where the information does not exist, we should err on the side of victims. We should not say, “We cannot move forward because we have no evidence.” That has been one of the problems with the Windrush scandal.
I have also worked with LGBTQ veterans who were dismissed from the armed forces because of their sexuality, which is a great example of the Government setting the parameters of an inquiry before it is set up. Lord Etherton did a very good job with his inquiry, but we had a ridiculous situation in which the Government said in advance that the compensation had to be capped at £50 million. I kept asking, “Why £50 million?” Apparently the only reason, apart from the Treasury wanting to keep control on expenditure, was that the Department saw what the Canadian scheme cost and said that it was roughly the same thing. The Government did that before setting up the inquiry. To be fair to Lord Etherton, he had no choice but to recommend £50 million.
I have looked at the cases and met some of the individuals concerned—Fighting With Pride is a great organisation—and there is no way that that compensation is going to be enough. I told the Minister for Defence People that, if he thinks he is going to get away with £50 million, it is completely for the birds. People have lost wages, pension entitlements and other things that need to be taken into consideration. If we are not careful, people will say, “Actually, it’s not worth going
through this scheme. We’ll just litigate and go all the way.” That is another example of how the Treasury, or somebody else, setting limits beforehand is not a good idea.
The other example is the infected blood inquiry. The Government argue that we have to take time to make sure we do it properly. I agree with all that but, bluntly, we know it is about saving money, and it is possibly about kicking the inquiry until after the election in the hope that it will be somebody else’s problem. Is it going to be costly? Yes. No amount of compensation will address the damage done to the contaminated blood victims and their families—I have read their testimony—but it will help to right some of the wrongs.
The Government need to stop kicking this football around and work on a cross-party basis to agree the way forward. I got into this through my constituent Tom Brown, who was a fantastic individual who fought very hard and with determination because he had not stolen £84,000, but he passed away before Christmas. As the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton said, it is sad that people are dying before they at least get some redress for the harm that was done. That cannot be right. Many more infected blood victims will pass away before they get compensation.
Following the APPG’s excellent report, we need to build the pillars of a framework that can be put in place for such scandals. That should apply not only to the Government but to the corporate world, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) chairs the Public Accounts Committee, which is looking at this, and we need to change the Treasury’s mind on accepting that we will have more of these scandals in the future, whether we like it or not. We should be mindful of that in the accounts by putting consolidated funding aside for these types of compensation schemes. If we had that framework and that Treasury thinking of keeping that money aside, we could at least then not keep reinventing things, which is what we are doing.
The sadness is that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, which is unjust for the victims, inefficient for Government and just feeds those in the legal profession—sorry to keep having a go at lawyers—to a point where they get more than the victims, which cannot be right. We have to approach this issue, as the all-party group did, on a cross-party basis, as it is going to affect not just this Government but future Governments. Most people across the House would want us to have a system that ensures that people get compensated when things go wrong, so some consensus across the House in designing such a system or framework would be worth getting. If we could do that, we would show the public something. That goes to the point the hon. Member for Christchurch made—people may say that the Government and Parliament cannot do things, but we can if we get our act together and work across the parties to get what we all need, which is redress for the these individuals.
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