My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for the attention he has brought to convictions prosecuted by the Department for Work and Pensions. Amendment 1 would result in convictions for relevant offences in England and Wales that were prosecuted by the DWP being quashed at Royal Assent. I reiterate the Government’s view, which I set out in a certain amount of detail in Committee earlier in this Chamber, that the cases prosecuted by the DWP were of a very different nature from those prosecuted by the Post Office and the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Government’s view is therefore that it is right that they remain excluded from the scope of the Bill and that these convictions should not be quashed through this legislation. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beith, for his question; I can assure him that DWP prosecutions had nothing to do with the Horizon system. There are no instances that we are aware of where someone committed an offence prosecuted by the DWP because they were accused of Horizon shortfalls. With that, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.