Ministers will set out plans to fast-track appeals of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongfully convicted in the Post Office scandal “within days” in a bid to put right the “greatest miscarriages of justice in British history”.
Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk will shortly set out a range of options to overturn the convictions of more than 750 sub-postmasters who were prosecuted as part of the Post Office scandal over a period of nearly 20 years.
In a statement to the Commons, Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake told MPs that both he and the Justice Secretary have “devised some options for resolving the outstanding criminal convictions with much more pace”.
He added that Mr Chalk will take the proposals to be assessed by senior judges before putting the plans forward. But he insisted that he was confident the Government should be able to implement the measures drawn up on Monday, with MPs being updated on the options within the coming days.
Whitehall sources insisted that the Government was treating the issue with the greatest urgency, but pointed out the complexity around it, with different victims having different requests when it came to their appeals.
Mr Holinrake also said the Government will scrutinise the way in which private prosecutions are carried out, after the Post Office was able to convict hundreds of sub-postmasters for theft, fraud and false accounting off the back of data from faulty Horizon IT systems.
“There is clearly great concern about the role of the Post Office in prosecuting these cases. The Post Office quite rightly decided to stop undertaking private prosecutions in 2015,” he told MPs.
“If we are to make sure that a scandal like this can never happen again we need to look at the way in which private prosecutions like these have been undertaken.”
So far 93 convictions have been overturned, and of those 30 have agreed full and final settlements with the Government.
It was also announced that retired High Court judge Sir Gary Hickinbottom has agreed to chair an independent panel to oversee compensation claims of postmasters whose convictions have been overturned.
Piling further pressure on former Post Office boss Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE, Mr Hollinrake has said it is “perfectly reasonable” to ask her to give it back.
“As a CEO who’s overseen the Post Office during a critical time when things went so badly wrong, I think, as a former CEO myself, I would say it’s perfectly reasonable to ask somebody to voluntarily hand back an honour in that specific situation, but that’s a matter for the person concerned,” he said.
MPs heaped praise on the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office for bringing the scandal into the limelight, which has galvanised a response from the Government.
Rishi Sunak defended the Government’s response to the Horizon scandal but said he wanted to speed up the compensation process.
At a PM Connect event in Lancashire, he Mr Sunak said those caught up in it had faced an “absolutely appalling miscarriage of justice” and “we should do everything we can to make it right”.
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