Post Office campaigner Sir Alan Bates has hit out at what he called “nonsense” from Sir Keir Starmer over slow compensation to sub-postmasters as he eyes fresh legal action in the New Year.
The hero former sub-postmaster wrote twice to the Prime Minister in October over the time taken for victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal to receive financial redress.
He received what he termed a “standard civil service” reply from Starmer in November on the day he addressed MPs at a public select committee over the scandal, which saw more than 900 sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted.
Sir Alan told The i Paper of Starmer’s reply: “It was just nonsense – ‘we’re doing everything we can, we’re working at pace’.
“It didn’t arrive until after I left the select committee. Funny that, isn’t it? The timing of his second response, I think I was working out, he must have been landing at the airport when he wrote it.
“I was going to write this month as well, but I thought it’s absolutely pointless because I’m just going to get the same junk answer from the civil service.”
The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance Sir Alan leads is battling for compensation for 555 former sub-postmasters who took part in landmark group legal action against the Post Office.
But five years on from winning an initial court battle, and a year after the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office sharpened the focus on one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, no deadline has been set for when they will receive redress.
It comes as campaigners who helped expose the Post Office scandal have said they would rather they had full compensation than recognition in the New Year Honours List.
Four former sub-postmasters – Lee Castleton, Jo Hamilton, Seema Misra and Christopher Head – are among the 1,203 people to have been recognised by King Charles in this year’s awards.
All have been made Officers of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of their “services to justice”.
But out of the four, only Mr Castleton and Ms Hamilton have so far received financial redress under the government’s Horizon compensation schemes, launched in March. Other victims who have already received compensation offers dispute the amount they have been told they can claim.
Veteran campaigner Sir Alan fears it could take years for Post Office workers to receive full compensation from the Department of Business and Trade.
Betty Brown, a 91-year-old former sub-postmistress and the oldest victim, was recently offered less than a third of what she had claimed in compensation, with Sir Alan among those offered a similar percentage.
Around 70 of the 555 workers in Sir Alan’s Group Litigation Order (GLO) scheme have died, and the campaigner fears more may not live to see justice served, with a new legal battle brewing over compensation delays.
“We are looking at something in the New Year, but we’ve got to get a bit further down the road than we are with matters,” Sir Alan said.
“But we’ve got to do something. We can’t let it go on like this. If it means us having to go back to law next year we’re going to have to look at that quite seriously.
“They’re just flatly refusing to set deadlines in anything, and that’s the real big problem.”
He added: “It’s action we’ve got to take, it’s as simple as that. That’s the only thing they understand.”
Sir Alan has called for an independent body to take control of managing the compensation claims, with four schemes for financial redress set up by the Government.
The 555 former postmasters won their group lawsuit in 2019 with a £42.5m settlement, but their payouts were swallowed up after legal costs, with the GLO scheme set up for them in 2022.
They have been offered £75,000, or they can go through a full appeal assessment if they believe their losses are more, with 221 claims in the GLO scheme paid as of 31 October 2024.
Sir Alan said: “There’s a pool of about 200 which are probably the more complex cases, some of which are being reviewed at the moment, and others which will have been submitted by this Christmas.
“And that’s the problem, and that’s what’s going to cause the real problems going forward.
“Because I think my claim went in October 22 or something like that. I think it’s been working its way through the system. If you’ve got another couple of hundred with similar problems to mine, this could be going on for years.
“At the moment the civil service is running everyone ragged. But it’s the victims that suffer.
“Quite honestly, we’d have been better off putting all the 500 victims up to run for parliament in the last election.”
Of the 555 members of the GLO group, 63 received wrongful criminal convictions and aren’t eligible for this scheme, but they can apply to separate schemes.
Ms Mistra, 49, was jailed while pregnant after being wrongly convicted of stealing £70,000 from her Post Office branch in the village of West Byfleet in Surrey.
Her conviction was overturned, but she described waiting for the issue of compensation to be resolved as “torture”.
“They are happy to spend on the solicitors, but then they’re not willing to give it to the postmasters,” Ms Misra said.
“People are losing their lives, not just the victims, even the solicitors, people who were fighting to get justice for us. So many people, we are losing them as well.”
The Government has previously said it is “settling claims at a faster rate than ever before”.
At the end of November, about £499m had been paid to more than 3,300 claimants across four schemes.
A Government spokesperson said: “We recognise the immeasurable suffering that victims of the Horizon scandal have endured.
“We are settling claims at a faster rate than ever before to provide them with full and fair redress. We have doubled the total redress paid since the end of June.
“We are also making almost 90 per cent of initial GLO offers within 40 working days of receiving completed claims.
“We encourage the 158 people who have not yet sent us complete claims to come forward as soon as possible to can claim back what they are owed.”
