Victims of Post Office IT scandal still awaiting compensation one year on
Post Office workers implicated in the Horizon IT scandal have said they are no closer to gaining compensation a year after the first convictions were overturned.
Neil Hudgell, the lawyer leading compensation negotiations, has called for cases to be settled by the end of the year to prevent the victims facing further financial ruin.
Thirty-nine long-standing convictions were quashed at the Court of Appeal in central London on April 23 last year, and the number has since risen to 73.
Mr Hudgell said: “We need to bring these cases to a close in the course of this calendar year so these decent, honest people can move on with their lives and finally enjoy some peace of mind.
“Many feel strongly that their ongoing suffering continues to be used as a lever to make derisory settlement offers.
“For some poor subpostmasters time has beaten them, they have died or lost capacity. For others the clock is ticking quickly too.
Anglesey
Noel Thomas, 75, of Gaerwen, Anglesey was among the former subpostmasters wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting due to the Post Office’s defective Horizon accounting system.
He told Nation.Cymru last year that he had lost over £250,000 following his arrest in 2005.
“I worked and I am still working.
“I worked for the post office for 42 years and at the time, when I left, I was earning in the region of £30,000 a year as a postmaster and between £11-15,000 as a councillor.
“To get that swiped away from you and your lifesavings and everything gone – and luckily I sold my house or else I would have lost that as well,” he said.
Interim payments
Mr Hudgell said that although most subpostmasters have received interim payments from the Post Office, they feel that these payments have only been given so the institution can feel like “they have been doing them a favour” instead of handing back money wrongly taken.
He called for another round of interim payments to settle agreed losses, and an early dispute resolution with Post Office lawyers to resolve ongoing issues, adding: “We are poles apart in how we value some of the losses suffered by the subpostmasters.”
The Court of Appeal has previously heard that many subpostmasters’ lives were “irreparably ruined” as they lost their jobs, homes and marriages after they were prosecuted by the Post Office – which knew the Fujitsu-developed Horizon system had “faults and bugs from the earliest days of its operation”.
Hundreds of people who ran Post Office branches were convicted of offences – including theft and false accounting – during the period of time the system was being used.
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Most definitely a scandal of massive proportions perpetrated by a Government agency or corporation. Not seen many politicians pipe up about this, is it beneath them to stand for the rights of a group of people who have had a massive wrong, indeed crimes, committed against them. Meanwhile people who were in senior executive positions at the time of these crimes are still drawing fat cat salaries and index linked pensions, the rewards of an incompetent elite who think they are protected from penalties. Time our parliament started proceedings and if they don’t shift then Opposition politicians should get on… Read more »
Seeing the Conservatives were the ones responsible for the privatisation of Royal Mail , and I might add losing billions in the process when they sold off a national asset too cheap, Boris Johnson’s government are equally culpable in the suffering of all those falsely accused of stealing money due to a catastrophic IT failure.
I had the privilege to know Noel Thomas when I chaired Postwatch in north Wales.
As a leading Ynys Mon cllr and community leader he was and is well respected.
What he had to endure from a computer 💻 system that many in the Royal Mail , Consignia and the Post Office had their concerns about must never happen again.
The power to prosecute should lie with the judiciary and the legal system in liaison with the police so standards of proof and evidence are adhered to.