The government’s failure to compensate postmasters is shameful

There it comes. Whenever there is news of a police investigation into a murder or serious crime, we are assured by a spokesperson, that inquiries are continuing ‘at pace’.

To which you want to reply, well so they should be. It is meant to somehow reassure but instead that phrase is patronising. Rather than instil confidence the description serves to suggest they are not proceeding at pace at all. It is empty, vacuous, something to chuck out there that sounds good but isn’t really.

So, when the identical two words are uttered in connection with payouts for the wrongly prosecuted Post Office sub-postmasters, the heart sinks. Here is a government spokesperson: “We pay tribute to all the postmasters who have suffered due to the Horizon software and past behaviour of the Post Office management.

“[We] are continuing to work at pace to ensure all postmasters receive the financial redress and justice they deserve.”

This was in response to complaints about the slowness of the compensation adjudications and the warning from Sir Alan Bates, who so heroically led the campaign on the more than 900 sub-postmasters’ behalf, that all the payments will not be made until the end of 2027. Bates is suggesting the victims should take legal action to unlock the delays, they are so pronounced. Going to court, he said, was “probably the quickest way to ensure fairness for all”.

Look at that government answer again. First, we get the meaningless guff about paying tribute to the victims of the scandal. Then there is the stuff about working at pace. After that, the spokesperson says: “We have trebled the number of payments under this government and are settling claims at a faster rate than ever before to provide full and fair redress... and expect to settle all claims by the end of the year.”

Again, more unspecific blather. Trebling the number is supplied without detail. Besides, the anger is about ensuring that all those who were so appallingly pursued receive adequate sums for the pain and hardship they and their families endured. The authorities are ‘settling claims at a faster rate than ever before’ – more twaddle – ‘to provide full and fair redress’ – the same. And they ‘expect’ to complete them all by the end of 2025.

Funny word, ‘expect’. Useful if you can’t and won’t commit, if you’re unable to provide any certainty. Expectations can be dashed, which is not as bad as breaking a guarantee or promise. That is what you would get if the government said will rather than expect. It’s carefully chosen, like everything else in this statement, designed to obfuscate and falsely calm.

Somewhere in Whitehall there must be a playbook for this sort of occurrence. If he were real, Sir Humphrey Appleby himself would have taken great delight in drawing it up, because the Post Office script might as well have come straight from his classic TV comedy Yes Minister.

Like all good satire, Sir Humphrey’s behaviour carried more than a grain of truth; it was entirely believable, given the track record of officialdom even back then. Except today’s genuine example is not remotely humorous. It is embarrassing and shaming, just like the very bleak episode in our recent history, Britain’s most widespread miscarriage of justice, the damages scheme is supposed to be addressing.

You would think that having treated the sub-postmasters so badly – 700 were taken to court by the Post Office itself between 1999 and 2015, accused of stealing, when the fault lay with the organisation’s Fujitsu Horizon computer system – the authorities would move heaven earth to ensure they received the quick and adequate reimbursement they fully deserved.

Oh no. Process must be observed and that necessitates falling back on to lawyers and form filling and submitting to interrogation. Part of the reason for the template you suspect is to procrastinate for as long as possible, with the intention that the claimant will blink first, that they will agree to a lower sum than they might otherwise have been entitled. That represents a result for the other side, keeping down the cost in public funding. String them out, see what you can get away with.

How else to explain the dawdling? The government could commit more resources to dealing with the poor sub-postmasters, it could more than treble the number of payments but it chooses not to.

Absence of pace, to use that word again, where the Post Office debacle is concerned is not confined to handing over hard cash. We have still not received the final report of the public inquiry which began in February 2021. Until then, police cases against Post Office and Horizon employees directly involved in hounding the sub-postmasters and covering up wrongdoing at their end cannot proceed.

Meanwhile, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the accounting regulator, has only this week got around to announcing an investigation into EY over the firm’s auditing of the Post Office in relation to the affair from 2015 to 2018. The watchdog will assess whether EY met its standards. We are informed that EY takes its responsibilities ‘extremely seriously’ and will be ‘fully cooperating’ with the FRC. So that is alright then. Like all those who endured great anguish and loss in this sorry saga, we should not hold our breath.