I thank the noble Lord for that searching question. Of course, this covers about three or four different Governments and more than half a dozen Ministers; that is just a fact. The reality is that the shareholder of the Post Office is the taxpayer. The share is owned by the Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade. Under the current structure, that is effectively subcontracted to an independent board. If that independent board had acted on an independent basis, this would not have happened. In fact, if Ministers had slightly more inquiring minds, this would not have happened.
I look at myself in my role as a Minister. I look at the advice that I am given and at the decisions I have to make. There is a lot coming through on a daily basis. I ask myself this question: if I had been in this role and prior to Horizon there had been an average of, say, 10 convictions per year in a bad year—maybe five on average—and that went up to 80, even though I was very busy, doing a lot of things, and even though I said I had an independent board looking at this for me, would not that raise some inquiry? This fundamentally is the shocking scale—we are all embarrassed about this—of the abuse here. The accountability piece of this will absolutely come through the Wyn Williams inquiry. That will then move us to the next stage of the lessons that we learn from it.
Next is the theme of legal process, brought up by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, as well as the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Weir, and also in relation to the Scottish angle. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, says that the lawyers have some disquiet about the idea of Parliament overruling courts, but we have had the counterbalancing argument from William Blackstone. I think the House agrees that that overrides that particular issue.
In Scotland and Northern Ireland we have different jurisdictions. There were 77 prosecutions in Scotland and 24 in Northern Ireland. To speak from a Scottish point of view, those prosecutions were brought not by the Post Office but by the Crown Office. That is a separate legal jurisdiction in Scotland. Yes, we are one United Kingdom, but in the UK we respect the legal jurisdictions of the devolved nations. The Lord Advocate has reported today to Holyrood, the devolved Parliament in Edinburgh, saying that she is not currently in favour of a blanket rescinding of convictions because, she says, not every case involving Horizon will be a miscarriage of justice. She wishes to go through the appeal court—the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. From a legal point of view, she is saying that these convictions were made by a court and therefore should be undone by a court.
We are at an early stage of that dialogue. There are letters and communication going between the MoJ in London and the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office in Scotland, and there is communication between the First Minister and the Prime Minister on this. That just highlights that there are some legal complexities here. The reserved matter remains reserved. Compensation
will be the same for all jurisdictions, but there are some issues to be resolved regarding the actual legal process—certainly north of the border.