HORIZON scandal victims are to get more compensation, Downing Street suggested today after campaigning former subpostmaster Alan Bates rejected a “derisory” offer from the government he said was only a sixth of what he had requested.
Mr Bates on Wednesday said that he would be turning down the “offensive” and “cruel” offer.
Today, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Mr Bates is a distinguished campaigner and deserves the right level of compensation for the suffering he’s been through, that’s the same for all subpostmasters.”
Labour has said it is “hugely concerned” that former subpostmasters wronged in the scandal were not getting the financial redress to which they are entitled.
Hundreds of Post Office branch managers were convicted of swindling money based on evidence from Fujitsu’s flawed Horizon accounting system, with Mr Bates among more than 500 people who received an average of about £20,000 after the High Court ruled the Horizon contained “bugs, errors and defects,” in 2019.
His two-decade fight for justice inspired the ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
It came as Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey apologised to the Post Office scandal victims as he accused the government of using the scandal to attack political rivals.
Sir Ed, who has faced fresh scrutiny over his role as postal affairs minister in the coalition government, wrote in the Guardian that he is “deeply sorry” for the families who have had their lives ruined by “the greatest miscarriage of justice in our time.”
At the Horizon scandal inquiry today, former Post Office financial investigator and casework manager Graham Ward admitted demanding evidence to discredit Horizon victims was doing the “opposite” of his legal duties.
In March 2006, he argued that it would be in the Post Office and Fujitsu’s “interests” for the Japanese company to produce evidence to refute Fujitsu’s tech expert Gareth Jenkins’s suggestions that balance issues in branches could be “some sort of system failure” and that such failures were “normal occurrences.”
Mr Ward agreed that his email was the “opposite” of what counsel suggested he should have said: “We have separate duties that we owe under the law and to the court: properly and fairly to investigate.”
In late 2012, after independent investigators raised concerns over Horizon, Mr Ward described “watering down our approach to prosecution & recovery, a sad, short-sighted and disastrous move if I’m right!”
