clrcrmck

News

Subpostmasters won’t get financial redress until mid-2027 at current rate of progress

Campaigning former subpostmaster warns that some members of the group that took the Post Office to court might not receive financial redress until mid-2027

Published: 14 Jan 2025 14:20

At the current rate of progress, subpostmasters who took the Post Office to court and exposed the scandal won’t receive financial redress until mid-2027.

Sir Alan Bates, who along with others formed the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) in 2009, updated members in his latest circular.

The JFSA, which was set up following Computer Weekly’s investigation into the Post Office Horizon system, went on to defeat the Post Office in a High Court group litigation order (GLO), proving that the system from Fujitsu caused the unexplained account shortfalls they had been wrongly blamed and punished for. It was this that exposed the scandal that is well known today.

Only about half the GLO group, made up of about 500 former subpostmasters, have received full and final financial redress. It was about three years ago, after years of JFSA campaigning, that the government – under pressure from the statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal – agreed to pay fair financial redress to those in the GLO group.

In his latest circular, Bates told members there had been some “small steps forward”, with the majority of GLO claimants expected to receive 80% of what they are offered by the end of March. But he said progress towards reaching full financial redress was too slow and that at the current rate it would be mid-2027 before all claims were settled.

Bates wrote: “The underlying problem of the lack of speed and the approach being taken by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) in trying to bring a final settlement to all in the group is still there, and that is the problem that it looks like we are going to have to solve for the department as it seems to be incapable of doing it itself.”

Redress drags on

Bates explained that of the 243 claims that had been fully settled, many were small claims by those who took the offer of £75,000. The complex cases are taking much longer and derisory offers are being made to claimants.

The figures show slow progress. Between the last government figures, published on 24 November 2024, and the latest figures, dated 3 January 2025, only eight more claims have been fully settled.

In the three months from September to November last year, the number of claims fully settled were four, 17 and seven per month, respectively.

“If you go back too far, you will run into all those that accepted the £75k offer, which cleared out the bulk of those with smaller claims, but the majority of those still outstanding are probably of the complex case type,” wrote Bates, explaining the figures.

He said that going by the DBT’s figures, “it would seem it is going to take another 28 months for the department to fully settle all the cases, somewhere mid-2027”.

Bates advised members to keep highlighting the problems caused by the government in refusing to set deadlines on when redress should be completed. “Otherwise, as matters stand, some of us will have years to wait to receive final redress, and it may be that some or many of us will never accept our claim is resolved unless there is a fundamental change with the department’s approach to assessing them,” he said.

A DBT spokesperson said the Government does not accept Bates' forecast. "The facts show we are making almost 90% of initial GLO offers within 40 working days of receiving completed claims and we expect substantial redress to be paid to the majority of the GLO group by the end of March this year."

“We have doubled the number of payments under this Government and are settling claims at a faster rate than ever before to provide full and fair redress.”

Battle hardened

To put into context the JFSA’s fight, after the court victory in 2019, the 555 successful claimants received derisory financial redress once their legal costs were taken out. The JFSA called on the Post Office, and therefore government, to pay these costs.

On the back of the JFSA’s court victory, the Post Office set up a compensation scheme for subpostmasters affected, but excluded members of the JFSA because it said the court settlement was “full and final”.

At the beginning of 2020, Bates wrote to Kelly Tolhurst MP, then minister for small business, consumers and corporate responsibility, demanding the government pay the legal costs so the damages were more appropriate. The government refused.

In September 2020, Conservative peer Martin Callanan, then a UK government minister, reconfirmed that the government had no plans to pay the costs racked up by subpostmasters in the legal battle that led to their victory.

In January 2022, the JFSA was still fighting for fair compensation and met with government to discuss subpostmasters’ demands. At the time, Labour MP Kevan Jones, who has campaigned for justice for subpostmasters, said: “Without the 555 subpostmasters successfully taking civil action, we would not have discovered the lies, deceit and subsequent cover-up by the Post Office, nor would we have had unsafe convictions overturned or the current judge-led statutory inquiry.

“It is time for the government to look again at why this group is currently carved out of existing compensation schemes and recognise that appropriate compensation must be put forward.”

The following month, the public inquiry – by then statutory – made the compensation arrangements part of its remit, with inquiry chair Wyn Williams addressing the unfairness.

Following the JFSA’s withdrawal from core participation in the inquiry – in protest at the unfair compensation – the inquiry wrote to the campaign group to confirm it would include its members’ financial redress in the hearings.

It said: “On behalf of the chair, I can confirm that paragraph 183 of the inquiry’s list of issues is intended to consider whether all affected subpostmasters, subpostmistresses, managers, assistants, including the 555 claimants in the group litigation of Alan Bates and others vs Post Office case, were adequately compensated for the wrongs they had suffered.”

In March 2022, the government finally agreed to pay the 555 Post Office scandal victims fair compensation. That was nearly three years ago.

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).

Timeline: Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009

Read more on IT for retail and logistics