PRESSURE mounted on the government today to take action to fully exonerate — and compensate — postmasters and mistresses prosecuted in the Horizon computer scandal.

MPs returning to the Commons this week are demanding an emergency debate, with Labour calling for the Post Office to be stripped of its power to mount its own prosecutions.

An online petition calling for former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to forfeit her CBE has gathered more than a million signatures.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak bounded onto the bandwagon of public anger, backing the call and declaring that the government was “keen to do everything we can, because this was absolutely appalling” and should “never have happened.”

Mr Sunak would strongly support an honours committee if it chose to look into revoking Ms Vennells’s CBE, Downing Street said.

Ms Vennells oversaw much of the debacle as Post Office chief executive from 2012 to 2019.

She received the CBE for services to the Post Office and to charities when she quit the job.

The Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) said: “That Vennells can retain an honour for services to the Post Office is an insult to every worker who suffered under her.

“This is recognised clearly by millions of people across the country: it’s about time the relevant authorities caught up with them.”

After the recent ITV drama Mr Bates v The Post Office, starring Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondalgh, brought the scandal back to public attention, Labour MP Kevan Jones and Tory backbencher David Davis are pushing for an emergency debate.

Mr Davis said: “This is such a big issue. There are now tens of millions of people who care about this and care about it a lot.

“It did take a docudrama in this case, I’m afraid, and many of us have been struggling for a long while to try and elevate it.”

Labour called for the Post Office to be stripped of its power to prosecute its own staff in criminal courts with no reference to the police or Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service.

“And these convictions, the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse. 

"The government could pass legislation, so obviously we’d support that if they did.”

Police are now investigating potential fraud during the Post Office prosecution process and into what happened to hundreds of thousands of pounds “returned” to the Post Office by postmasters and mistresses wrongly accused of fraud and theft.

Dozens more victims of the Post Office’s unjust prosecutions are believed to have come forward after the broadcasting of the ITV drama. At least 50 are reported to have newly broken their silence, joining more than 700 others who have fought for years to prove themselves innocent of false accusations of theft and fraud caused by the Post Office’s faulty computer accounting system.

The Post Office first conducted tests of the Fujitsu Horizon computer system in 1996. Faults emerged even at that early stage, but in 1999 the Post Office forked out £1 billion in public cash to have the system fully installed, covering 18,000 post offices.

As the system threw up thousands of false discrepancies in individual Post Office accounts, bosses turned on postmasters and mistresses, wrongly accusing them of theft.

Huge amounts were alleged to have been stolen by individual postmasters and mistresses. One was prosecuted for the “return” of £75,000.

A public inquiry into the scandal is continuing.

Ms Vennells was rewarded with a £400,000 bonus, the CBE and chairmanship of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London after standing down as chief executive in 2019.

In December 2020 she quit that job but continued working as a non-executive board member of the Conservative government’s Cabinet Office.

Ms Vennells stood down as a Church of England minister in 2021.

Since the scandal became public, no action has been taken against any senior bosses who oversaw the wrecking of hundreds of lives, bankruptcies, unjust imprisonments, suicides and public ostracisation suffered by postmasters and mistresses.