Rishi Sunak has announced a plan to pass a law that would quash the convictions of all the hundreds of post office operators wrongly convicted in the Horizon IT scandal.
Speaking at prime minister’s questions, Sunak said the government would introduce new primary legislation “to make sure those convicted are swiftly exonerated and compensated”.
“This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history,” he told MPs. “People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation.”
He added: “We will make sure that the truth comes to light, we right the wrongs of the past and the victims get the justice they deserve.”
More details would be announced by Kevin Hollinrake, the business minister, when he responded to an urgent question on the issue directly after PMQs, the prime minister said. Responding to Sunak, Keir Starmer said Labour would examine the details of the plan, but welcomed the proposal to right what he called a “huge injustice”.
The widely trailed idea, which would involve parliament overturning the verdicts of multiple courts, is unprecedented in its scale and comes in response to alarm at the slow pace at which the staff have been exonerated by the criminal review process.
While a public inquiry into the scandal was set up in 2020, it has shot into political prominence with the broadcast of an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which highlighted the case of one post office operator turned campaigner, Alan Bates.
The Post Office, which has the power to instigate prosecutions, prosecuted more than 900 branch owner-operators who were wrongly accused of taking money from their businesses between 1999 and 2015, based on information from the faulty Horizon accounting software, installed by Fujitsu.
While the Post Office eventually conceded fault, as of December just 142 appeal case reviews had been completed. Of these, 93 convictions were overturned, with 54 upheld, withdrawn or refused permission to appeal.
Speaking on Wednesday morning, Hollinrake told BBC Radio 4 that the government had always been operating with a “sense of urgency” over compensation, rather than suddenly acting after the ITV drama.
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However, he added, since the broadcast at least 130 people affected by the Horizon scandal had come forward directly to him or via solicitors.
When asked if there was evidence that the government had been working to quash convictions before the ITV drama, Hollinrake said: “It’s not something we’d put in public, the kind of deliberations we have in government about different options, and clearly this is not an option where the postal affairs minister can make a decision on his own.”
He added that if legislation was brought forward to overturn convictions “en bloc” it could be seen to be “interfering with the independent courts process”.
