I feel a little talked out. That too, your Lordships will be pleased to hear, will shorten this speech dramatically.
This Bill is with us at the request of the chairman of the public inquiry to ensure that the Government do not run out of time to pay compensation or, as Alan Bates has often said, to give redress. He says that it is redress rather than compensation because this is money that the Government owe the sub-postmasters; some of it is money which has always, in law, belonged to the sub-postmasters. Let us acknowledge that point and move on.
The name of the Bill is the Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill, which suggests that it is about a faulty computer system. But this dreadful story only started as a story about a faulty computer system. It became something else, as we have seen from the evidence at the public inquiry: it became a matter of human behaviour; of oppressive contracts; of Post Office investigators prioritising asset recovery
over justice; of useless helplines with Post Office and Fujitsu staff telling sub-postmasters that they were the only people suffering these problems and then telling them to do things which made matters worse; of senior managers at the Post Office and possibly, although I do not know, Fujitsu, lying about what their technical staff could do by way of remote access; of Ministers of all parties failing to exercise the responsibilities of ownership; and of the courts ignoring the requirements of justice in order to accommodate the most trusted brand in the country. The background of this saga was a computer system, but compensation, as we have heard from the public inquiry, is payable in respect of so much more. So, frankly, I do not much like the name of this Bill, but having questioned its name, I shall move on to its substance.
Money is to be payable to compensate people affected by the Horizon system, or to compensate persons in respect of other matters identified in High Court judgments. The expectation at the beginning of the group litigation was that it would be split into five different cases. Because the Post Office—I assume with the backing of the Government, although we shall find that out soon—decided to spend the sub-postmasters into submission with taxpayer-funded litigation, the sub-postmasters were forced, as we saw in the drama, to settle after only two of those cases had been decided. The consequence was that many issues were left undecided. Does the Bill cover these issues?
What about issues arising out of the public inquiry, rather than out of High Court judgments? We have been listening over the past few days to some pretty dreadful stories of behaviour by the Post Office investigators, who have been confronted with their bullying behaviour. We have heard the evidence from Duncan Atkinson KC about the shortcomings of the Post Office prosecutors and their prosecutions. I hope that these issues will be covered by the Bill as well as what has come out of the High Court judgments.
I feel a bit churlish, frankly, attacking both the name and the contents of a Bill that I welcome, but I do welcome the idea that the Government should not run out of time to pay the redress that we as taxpayers—with the help of Fujitsu, now that it has recognised its moral obligation; I hope that soon it will recognise its legal obligation to contribute to the cost—owe to the sub-postmasters. The very fact that it should be necessary to have the Bill in the first place suggests that the three compensation schemes have been slow and bureaucratic —and they have been. We must get a move on and do our utmost to make sure that the Bill is not, in the event, needed, because full compensation, or redress, is paid before August.
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