Sir Alan Bates, the founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, has described the compensation schemes for post office operators affected by the Horizon IT scandal as an 'utter disaster' and insisted the government should not be involved in running them.
Bates, who fought for two decades to clear the names of thousands of post office operators falsely accused of theft and false accounting due to faulty software, previously accused the government of running a 'quasi-kangaroo court' for compensation. On Monday, he told the public accounts committee of MPs: 'I would have to say they were an utter disaster, to be quite frank. There are so many reasons why they were wrong and why they caused so much grief, even nowadays. There is a fundamental problem with all of these schemes. That is that the government should not be involved with them. That is the biggest mistake about the whole thing.'
Bates noted that initial discussions about the design and implementation of redress and compensation schemes 'started quite well' but became overly complex and 'legalistic' by the time they were implemented. He said: 'They did listen to a lot of our points. But the scheme that came out at the end seemed so different. The first thing the department did was go out and hire an expensive team of lawyers to put the scheme together. It got bogged down. It has got so legalistic, which turned it into this enormously complex and threatening thing for victims. Most victims just want a fair outcome. They just want to move on.'
Bates finally agreed to a multimillion-pound settlement with the government in November, more than two decades after he began his campaign. He said many operators failed to come forward for compensation, even when contacted by the government, because 'they had lost trust in the system'. He added: 'The civil service just grinds schemes into the ground. The government has to be involved at the highest level. It probably has to fund it – in our case until the real guilty parties cough up towards it as well – but it has to be run by an independent body. I think true independence would be very key. It has to be a totally independent body seen to act independently and have authority to do so.'
The latest UK government figures estimate that 1.48 billion pounds has been paid to at least 11,500 claimants as of 27 February. Thousands of compensation claims remain to be settled as the government begins winding down the schemes. More than 900 post office operators were convicted of offences including fraud, false accounting and theft between 1999 and 2015 after the faulty Horizon IT system falsely showed missing money in branch accounts. The convictions were overturned in 2024 by an unprecedented act of parliament.
