Falsely convicted postal workers must be ‘fully compensated’, says committee
The Post Office and the government need to speed upcompensation payments to workers who were victims of the Horizon IT scandal, according to a report by an influential group of MPs.
MPs from parliament’s Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) committee have expressed concerns about the time taken to make settlements to former Post Office operators who were wrongfully convicted as a result of errors in the company’s computer accounting system.
They have warned that compensation needs to be concluded urgently, as many of the former Post Office workers affected by the long-running scandal are elderly, some have already died while awaiting redress, while others remain at risk of losing their homes.
The committee began holding hearings in 2020 about the Horizon IT scandal, one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, and has now published an interim report. The committee has paused its hearings as the public inquiry into the scandal has got under way.
In recent days, the inquiry has heard the moving testimony of people prosecuted by the Post Office about the impact of their wrongful convictions on their lives, and the resulting financial hardship.
The public inquiry, chaired by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, is part of an investigation into the scandal.
Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 post office operators – an average of one a week – based on information from the Horizon IT system, which was installed and maintained by Fujitsu.
A group of 555 former workers won a high court battle against the Post Office in December 2019, when a high court judge ruled that Horizon’s system contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “material risk” that
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