COMPENSATION for postmasters victimised in the Horizon scandal can no longer be the responsibility of the Post Office, leading campaigner Alan Bates said today.

He also told a committee of MPs looking into the scandal that payouts to sub-postmasters were going too slowly.

“It’s very disappointing, it’s been going on for years and I can’t see an end to this,” he said.

Mr Bates also advocated the sale of the Post Office in the wake of the false prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters and the cover-up in the flaws of the Horizon IT system.

“My personal view about the Post Office is it’s a dead duck and it has been for years and it’s going to be a money pit for the taxpayer for years to come,” he said.

“And you should sell it to someone like Amazon for a pound [and] get really good contracts for all the serving sub-postmasters.”

The Communications Workers Union has suggested it is open to mutualisation of the Post Office, as proposed by Co-operatives UK.

Mr Bates, who for years led a lonely battle to secure justice for the persecuted sub-postmasters, said that he would not be surprised if allegations that the Post Office had been told to slow down payments to the wrongly convicted were true.

He added that responsibility for running the compensation scheme should be taken away from the Post Office, with binding deadlines set for payments and fines imposed for failure to meet them.

The current Post Office boss Nick Read “categorically” denied that the government had asked it to stall payments to sub-postmasters, a claim insisted upon by ousted chair Henry Staunton.

“Nobody in my team or myself has received that instruction,” Mr Read told the Commons business and trade committee, adding that Mr Staunton may have “misunderstood or misinterpreted the conversation he had” with top civil servant Sarah Munby, in which she allegedly gave the order.

Mr Read did acknowledge that he had sent a letter to the Ministry for Justice opposing overturning the conviction of sub-postmasters in 369 cases, but claimed he was merely passing on a legal opinion to make the government aware.

Mr Staunton, sacked by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch this month and embroiled in a row with her ever since, however insisted that Ms Munby had indeed told him that “money was tight” and suggested delaying payments with “a nod and a wink.” 

He dismissed any possibility of a misunderstanding.