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The Government will introduce unprecedented legislation on Wednesday to quash all convictions in England and Wales relating to the Post Office scandal, one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
The bill, which the government hopes to pass into law by the end of July, will exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters who were unfairly prosecuted using faulty evidence from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system.
It will cover alleged crimes committed between 1996 and 2018 involving sub-postmasters, their employees, family members or direct employees of the Post Office, the government said.
Sub-postmasters can accept a “fixed and final offer” of £600,000 compensation or have their claims assessed under existing processes, where the size of the payment is uncapped, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said.
More than 700 sub-postmasters have been convicted of alleged crimes, including theft and fraud, in lawsuits brought by the Post Office using data from the faulty Horizon IT system developed by Japan’s Fujitsu.
The legislation is controversial because it will make a clean sweep of anyone who has broken the law. The Post Office, which is state-owned, told ministers privately that it would oppose the appeals of almost half of the 700 convicted sub-postmasters, arguing that evidence not provided by Horizon supported the convictions.
The judiciary also rejected the mass exoneration proposal because it feared it would compromise the independence of the courts.
The government has said it will make “all efforts” to ensure the law targets those who have been wrongly convicted. It would require any deputy postmaster general to sign a statutory declaration “in which he swears that he did not commit the crime of which he was originally convicted” before receiving financial compensation.
Hundreds of innocent victims were sentenced to bankruptcy and prison. Although the convictions of some have been overturned on appeal, courts have been slow to deal with cases, leaving many in limbo and unable to seek compensation.
The Government’s intervention follows Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to take action to exonerate sub-postmasters after a television drama in January last month sparked a public outcry.
“We owe it to the victims of this scandal, whose lives and livelihoods have been callously destroyed, to provide the justice they have fought so long and hard for and to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” he said . Separate legislation will be needed in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The Government said it would also offer a fixed payment of £75,000 to sub-postmasters who were never convicted or involved in a case against the Post Office but who “have nevertheless suffered considerably” as a result of the Horizon scandal.
The government said it has so far paid around £179m in compensation to 2,800 claimants.