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The UK government on Thursday set out the terms of unprecedented legislation to quash all convictions in the Post Office Horizon scandal to be delivered before the end of July.
Kevin Hollinrake, postal affairs minister, said the government’s legislation would exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters in England and Wales, who were wrongly prosecuted using flawed evidence from the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.
The legislation is controversial as it will wipe the slate clean for those who have broken the law. Hollinrake said this was a “price worth paying” to right one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
More than 700 sub-postmasters were convicted in cases brought by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 using data from the faulty Horizon IT system developed by Japan’s Fujitsu.
Measures announced on Thursday will cover prosecutions brought by the Post Office and about a dozen cases led by the Crown Prosecution Service for offences such as theft and false accounting.
Legislation will exclude cases where the Department for Work and Pensions had been the prosecutor. Separate legislation will be required in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Hundreds of innocent people who ran the Post Office branches were condemned to bankruptcy and imprisonment. Though some had their convictions quashed on appeal, the court has been slow to process cases, leaving many in limbo and unable to claim compensation.
“The judiciary and the courts have dealt swiftly with the cases before them, but the scale and circumstances of this prosecutorial misconduct demands an exceptional response,” Hollinrake said.
The intervention follows a pledge by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to act to exonerate sub-postmasters, after a television drama last month triggered a public outcry.
Neil Hudgell, a lawyer acting for more than 100 convicted sub-postmasters, said victims’ expectations had been raised by Sunak but they had adopted a “wait and see” approach until legislation passed.
There had been pushback from the judiciary over the proposed mass exoneration due to concerns it would cut across the independence of the courts.
Senior members of the judiciary met with ministers earlier this month to advocate an approach that would have seen appeals grouped in batches and waved through the Court of Appeal, according to two people briefed on proposals.
The government previously said that plans were discussed before being dismissed because they would have introduced a degree of uncertainty over exonerations.
Hollinrake said on Thursday that the government’s plans recognised the “constitutional sensitivity and unprecedented nature” of the legislation.
Mike Schwarz, a solicitor acting for sub-postmasters, warned that
a rush to fix the problem could pose difficulties. “It may exonerate sub-postmasters, but by blanket legislation, it may still leave the taint that not all exonerated sub-postmasters are wholly innocent,” he said.
Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office, has previously warned the government that the number of convictions that also used evidence unrelated to the Horizon system was “very much more significant” than the number of cases where it would concede on appeal.
Read said the Post Office would be “bound to oppose” 369 convictions based on the current evidence. That number has since grown closer to 400, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The Post Office denied it had sought to “persuade government against mass exoneration, we remain firmly committed to supporting faster justice and redress for victims”.
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