My Lords, we have heard two extremely powerful speeches; I will follow in their wake but be very brief. For many years now, I campaigned on amending the Computer Misuse Act; the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, did similarly. My motivation did not start with the Horizon scandal, but was more at large because of the underlying concerns about the nature of computer evidence.
I came rather late to this understanding about the presumption of the accuracy of computer evidence. It is somewhat horrifying, the more you look into the history of this, which has been so well set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I remember advising MPs at the time about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. I was not really aware of what the Law Commission had recommended in terms of getting rid of Section 69, or indeed what the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act did in 1999, a year after I came into this House.
The noble Baroness has set out the history of it, and how badly wrong the Law Commission got this. She set out extremely well the impact and illustration of Mrs Misra’s case, the injustice that has resulted through the Horizon cases—indeed, not just through those cases, but through other areas—and the whole aspect of the reliability of computer evidence. Likewise, we must all pay tribute to the tireless campaigning of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot. I thought it was really interesting how he described computer evidence as hearsay, because that essentially is what it is, and there is the whole issue of updates and bug fixing.
The one area that I am slightly uncertain about after listening to the debate and having read some of the background to this is precisely what impact Mr Justice Fraser’s judgment had. Some people seem to have taken it as simply saying that the computer evidence was unreliable, but that it was a one-off. It seems to me that it was much more sweeping than that and was really a rebuttal of the original view the Law Commission took on the reliability of computer evidence.
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Apart from paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, I must also pay tribute to Computer Weekly. When I look back at an article by Karl Flinders, its chief reporter, from 2021, he got it absolutely right. Three years ago, he wrote a very good piece which quotes Paul Marshall, who is another hero of the hour. He was saying that, if the Post Office had been required to prove affirmatively that its Horizon system was working properly at the material time and if it had given a proper disclosure of Horizon error records, it would not have been able to succeed in its prosecutions, and its sub-postmasters, with perhaps some small exceptions, would not have been committed. He is quoted extensively in that piece, and that was three years ago. Alex Chalk, then a junior Minister in the Ministry of Justice, is also quoted. Both noble Lords have mentioned his part in all this.
What are we waiting for? We may need some changes to prevent the overload that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, mentioned, but it is not beyond our wit to come up with procedural changes that deliver future justice. This is urgent. In the meantime, as the noble Lord says, if we do not do something then it is going to impact on the Post Office cases. It is discredited, and will give rise to a huge amount of argumentation in court in any event. Sadly, we do not have an MoJ Minister here. We have had guest appearances by a number of Ministers from various departments, so it is a pity that we did not manage to inveigle the MoJ to come along. However, I hope the Minister will pass on a pretty solid message that we want to see action extremely urgently.