Alan Bates rejects second compensation offer from Post Office

Former deputy postmaster and campaigner Alan Bates has rejected his second offer of compensation over the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

His first offer in January, which he called “cruel” and “paltry,” was about a sixth of what he had asked for.

The latest offer was around a third of what he had asked for, with Mr Bates telling the BBC “it’s frustrating for me, frustrating for everyone”.

Furthermore, the investigation into the Horizon IT scandal revealed that Jane MacLeod, former general counsel of the Post Office, “would not cooperate”, according to a lawyer in charge of the investigation.

Jason Beer KC said the inquiry would not hear from Ms MacLeod as planned because “she lives overseas and will not co-operate”.

Ms MacLeod was the Post Office’s lead in-house lawyer at the time of the Alan Bates v Post Office Ltd trial.

The BBC attempted to contact Ms MacLeod for comment.

Long campaign

Alan Bates’ fight for justice inspired ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software indicated money was missing from Post Office branch accounts.

Mr Bates leads the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, which is campaigning for a financial solution for the hundreds of victims who took part in the class action against the Post Office.

Their compensation was swallowed up by the enormous legal costs associated with the trial.

The government then created a specific compensation fund to grant these sub-postmasters the same financial compensation as everyone else.

But progress has been slow.

Mr Bates warns he will have to “look for other ways to progress the remedy” if the Department of Business and Commerce does not sort things out.

He also highlighted the most recent compensation data from Post Office Horizon.

As of 24 April 2024, 146 offers had been accepted and 138 of these had accepted offers of the fixed payment of £75,000.

Mr Bates says the vast majority of the largest and most complex cases, around 300 of them, have yet to be resolved.

“It’s just not working fast enough. People have lost 20 years of their lives and they’re still hanging on… We’ve also lost some 70 people along the way.”

“These delays cause all kinds of problems for the families involved.”

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“Waste of public money”

On Friday, the former chief financial officer of the Post Office investigation said the company had an “unacceptable relationship” with postmasters.

Alisdair Cameron said the relationship with postmasters was “selfish” and based on an imbalance of power.

He said he believed it was now established that the initial prosecution of the subpostmasters was “a deliberate miscarriage of justice”.

Mr Cameron said senior management should have resolved the claims, apologized and moved on years ago.

He said the Post Office had relied too much on its faulty Horizon IT system “even though we knew about its weaknesses”.

“We defended ourselves to avoid consequences. A waste of public money and a delay in justice.”

Mr Cameron, who joined the Post Office in 2015 and worked closely with then-chief executive Paula Vennells, served on the Post Office board subcommittee which oversaw its defense during the group litigation in 2018-19 led by Alan Bates.

At the start of his session, he apologized: “I am sorry that when I joined the Post in 2015, I accepted without challenge the evidence that there were no miscarriages of justice in the previous prosecutions that have caused so much devastation to the public. postmasters and their families.

“As a member of the GLO (Group Litigation Orders) subcommittee, I am sorry for not pressing against the lack of challenge and testing of Post Office’s legal case. If I had done better in these areas, perhaps we would have started the process of seeking justice for the postmasters sooner.

“I hope that my statement and evidence today will assist the inquiry in its investigation and in uncovering the truth, which is the least that those involved deserve.”

Mr Cameron was asked about a “strictly confidential” document titled “What went wrong?” », written by him in November 2020, which sets out the criticism that the Post Office faced after losing the dispute brought by 555 sub-postmasters.

In it, he said that at the heart of what was wrong, the Post Office’s “original sin” was “our self-centered and defensive culture,” which “prevented us from dealing with postmasters in a direct and direct manner.” acceptable”.

The document reveals that his estimate of the total cost of the scandal to the Post Office at the time was £1 billion to £1.5 billion.