Ed Davey has apologised for the first time for his role as a minister in the Horizon scandal, with the Liberal Democrat leader saying he was “sorry I did not see through the Post Office’s lies”.
Writing in the Guardian, Davey, whose business minister role from 2010 to 2012 involved oversight of the Post Office, said officials had initially advised him to not meet Alan Bates, who led the campaign into the unjust targeting of post office operators.
“The Horizon Post Office scandal is the greatest miscarriage of justice of our time, and I am deeply sorry for the families who have had their lives ruined by it,” Davey wrote.
“As one of the ministers over the 20 years of this scandal, including my time as minister responsible for postal affairs, I’m sorry I did not see through the Post Office’s lies – and that it took me five months to meet Alan Bates, the man who has done so much to uncover it.”
Davey has been repeatedly targeted by Conservative MPs since the return to the headlines, sparked by an ITV drama, of the unjust accusations against more than 900 branch owner-operators, over losses blamed on fraud that were in fact down to the faulty Horizon IT system.
He had previously said only that he felt “regret” over his role, saying he had been misled by a conspiracy from Post Office managers, and stressed that he was the first minister to meet Bates, albeit some months after Bates first asked.
Davey wrote: “The Post Office is owned by the government but not run by it, so the official advice I was given when I first became a minister in May 2010 was not to meet Mr Bates. He wrote again urging me to reconsider, and I did then meet him in October.
“But he shouldn’t have had to wait. When Mr Bates told me his concerns about Horizon, I took them extremely seriously and put them to the Post Office. What I got back were categorical assurances – the same lies we now know they were telling the sub-postmasters, journalists, parliament and the courts.”
While Davey is among a string of ministers who have had responsibility for the Post Office in the period since the Horizon scandal began in 1999, he has faced significant political and media targeting, primarily from the Conservatives, which the Lib Dems believe is a factor of the party’s targeting of dozens of Tory-held seats.
He had, however, been criticised for declining to apologise. An Opinium poll for the Observer last month found Davey’s personal rating had taken a hit, although it did not seem to have affected the Lib Dems’ overall polling.
On Wednesday, when he asked a question at prime minister’s questions for the first time in several weeks, Davey was loudly barracked by Tory MPs, in a sign the Conservatives still think this is fertile ground for them.
In his Guardian article, Davey argued that the Horizon scandal was a symptom of a wider “broken system”, one that made major institutions such as the Post Office “almost a law unto themselves”.
He wrote: “It may shock you that, even though the Post Office is owned by the government, there aren’t any MPs or ministers on its board. Instead, a single civil servant sits on the board.
“We owe it to the victims of this appalling scandal not just to overturn their convictions and pay fair compensation – though do that we must – but also to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.”
