‘Utter disaster’: Alan Bates attacks schemes compensating post office operators

Sir Alan Bates has said that the schemes set up to compensate post office operators over the Horizon IT scandal have been an “utter disaster” and that the Government should not be involved in running them.Bates, who led a two-decade fight for justice for thousands of post office operators falsely accused and wrongfully convicted for theft and false accounting, has previously accused the Government of presiding over a “quasi-kangaroo court” system for compensation.“I’d have to say they were an utter disaster to be quite frank,” he told the Public Accounts Committee of MPs on Monday. “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 shouldn’t be involved with them. That is the biggest mistake about the whole thing.”Bates said that discussions about the design and implementation of schemes for redress and compensation “started quite well” but ultimately became too complex and “legalistic” by the time they were implemented.“They did listen to a lot of our points,” he said. “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 a multimillion-pound settlement with the Government in November, more than two decades after he began the campaign for justice for post office operators over the Horizon IT scandal.He said that many operators failed to come forward to seek redress and compensation, even when contacted by the Government, because “they had lost trust in the system”.He said: “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 £1.48bn 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 that money was missing in branch accounts.The convictions were overturned in 2024 by an unprecedented act of parliament.