Hi All,

You may remember back on the 1st January 2025 the Business and Trade Committee released a report with 17 recommendations to help speed up and deliver full & fair redress to victims of the Post Office Horizon Scandal.  The government has 8 weeks to provide a response to that report.  I tweeted a week ago that the response was rapidly approaching 3 weeks late.  Yesterday afternoon I wrote to the Committee asking where the government response was, because I knew it had been drafted and sent to interested parties, it just had not been made public.  

At midnight last night the committee published the government response as an appendix to their own update report.  Well I have to say the response from the government was absolutely woeful and a disgrace to all those so horribly impacted by the scandal.  The disdain the government and especially the Department still holds Postmasters in is beyond contempt.

The committee have taken the unusual step of asking the government to re-consider and re-draft its response and provide it back to the committee in due course.  Committee Chair, Liam Byrne MP said :- 

"The new government has made extremely important progress in accelerating redress payment to the victims of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. But too many are still waiting too long, and former sub-postmasters are still dying before they receive justice. That is wrong. 

People who were, over years and years, disbelieved, bankrupt, criminalised, sent to prison, had their lives completely upended for wrongs that they did not commit, have experienced something akin to a second trial as they sought to clear their names and receive redress. 

The Government’s response to our recommendations is a start. But we respectfully ask ministers to listen harder to what the Committee has recommended, reflect again on what we proposed and re-submit its response to the Committee. 

We look forward to receiving a clearer signal for all those affected that meaningful justice will be served, and to seeing the plan from Government that will deliver it.”

You can read the full committee report including the government response here :-

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/47183/documents/244700/default/

Following that release and several emails later to a number of interested parties I sat down to draft yet another letter to the Postal Minister Gareth Thomas to implore him and his Department to get this sorted.  The Postmasters, their families and the public's patience is wearing extremely thin on a failure to deliver justice.

The tweet which includes my letter can be found on X here :-

https://x.com/chrish9070/status/1904565627810947367

I have included full contents of the letter below for ease of viewing :-

25th March 2025

Dear Minister Thomas,

I write to you further following my letter dated the 20th of February 2025 which was acknowledged by your team but no response has yet been received. I attach a copy of that letter for reference purposes.

This afternoon I sent an email to the Chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board in response to his email to me, to which you were copied into. Again, I expressed my concern as to the inconsistency of the various redress schemes. Although I accept these are complex schemes compromising complex claims that does not mean they have to be inconsistent and unfair.

I understand the difficulties involved in making changes to the various processes that may or may not impact settled cases. The reality is many have chosen to walk away for various reasons, either that they could not tolerate the delay and adversarial nature of the process, that they may have been in ill health or in a state of desperation so
therefore decided to bring the process to an end. Others who remain in the process should not be punished or penalised for doing so, just because others have settled.

It was extremely disappointing and deeply frustrating to read the government’s response to the Business and Trade Committee report from the 1st of January 2025. As the Chair of that committee has said it is an unusual step for them to call on the government to re-consider and re-draft its response. That to me is damning of the failure by government to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and the ongoing suffering and delay faced by many claimants.  To accept only three of seventeen recommendations is unacceptable. This further erodes trust in both the Government and the State that recommendations by a Select Committee, a Public Inquiry or Parliamentary Ombudsman can be so easily and readily ignored. If the government are to learn the lessons of the past, the findings of independent investigations and reports must be accepted in full. I implore you and your department to reflect on the committee’s comments and re-submit its response urgently.

Can you confirm that if the Fixed Sum Awards of £75,000 and £600,000 were discounted from the statistics, how many claims have been settled across the schemes as this would be a truer reflection of the reality of the situation?

The number of original claims in the HSS that were in dispute prior to your government coming to power remains relatively static. On the 31st of July 2024 there were 352 original HSS claims from 2020 in dispute, whereas per the governments statistics on the 28th of February 2025 that number is 315. Just 37 claims resolved in 8 months. To put that into context, there are over 4,000 claims outstanding in that scheme alone. If we then look at the Overturned Convictions cohort, as of the 31st of July 2024 there were 55 offers accepted, whereas of the 28th of February 2025, 68 have been accepted, an increase of just 13 in 8 months, and I would suggest that some of those have accepted the FSA of £600,000. Many of these claimants have been waiting since their convictions were overturned in December 2020 and April 2021, that doesn’t strike me as prompt redress.

With regards to the roles of adjudicators and panels, it just cannot be right in some of the schemes, claimants are able to attend a full hearing chaired by a retired judge and provided the opportunity to then make further written submissions, without having any monetary risk of doing so. Whilst in another scheme (GLO) they are invited to make three pages of A4 submissions with a few minutes of oral submissions if they choose to do so. That is clearly going to cause a lack of understanding and unable to grasp all the complexities within the claim and with no way for the claimant to address those errors or judgements. There is a severe lack of input into that independent process by the claimant. The only way a claimant can address those errors or misunderstandings is to potentially take a monetary risk by proceeding back to a 2nd binding assessment. 

When the GLO group helped setup this scheme, we as claimants were led to believe that the Department for Business and Trade would act in good faith and that the other schemes setup for the other cohorts of the scandal would operate in an equitable way. Sufficient evidence has come to light (for example the full day hearing chaired by retired Judge Sir Gary) that suggests the schemes are operating with very different policies and procedures.  People will and can accept that different outcomes will be reached on individual claims due to the merits of the case, but that can only be achieved with processes in place which are equitable. 

If every claimant were able to go before a court of law, they would at least be able to say they had the benefit of an independent Judge and although the outcomes would differ due to the merits of each case, they had all had an equitable process. What we have here within the redress schemes is some claimants having access to full hearings
with a panel which is chaired by a Judge, other schemes limited to three written sides of A4 before a panel with no hearing, some schemes having binding panel assessments, whilst the others do not, some schemes having monetary risks of progressing to the next stage of the dispute process in order to have their case heard by a retired Judge whilst others do not. That is the overall issue here that people are not on an equal footing. Any inconsistency will always mean unfairness.

As I said earlier in this letter, I appreciate it is an extremely complex and difficult situation but there are further steps that can be taken to ensure processes are much more consistent and therefore fairer for all concerned.

Yours Sincerely,

Christopher Head OBE

Please as always keep pressure on your local MP's to help Postmasters and their families deliver the justice that has been promised.  Any help to drive this petition towards the 1 million mark will also be greatly appreciated.  Sign, share and we can deliver.

Thank you