Post Office Horizon scandal: fast and fair financial redress - Business and Trade Committee

Note: Due to multiple divisions this recording has been edited to remove the breaks in the session.
In this session, the Committee will put the evidence it has heard on the problems in the operation of redress for victims of the Horizon scandal to government ministers and Post Office executives, including the first appearance of new Post Office Chair Nigel Railton.
In its first evidence session of this Parliament the Committee heard moving testimony from former sub-postmasters and their families about the impact of failures in the Horizon accounting system, and the subsequent mis-handling of the problems by the Post Office and Government over two decades. The scandal saw small businesspeople running local post office counters forced to pay out of pocket for significant but false shortfalls arising from systematic IT failures. In some cases they were prosecuted and even jailed for theft and fraud.
The Committee heard evidence of the sub-postmasters feeling effectively coerced to falsely admit guilt, and being prevented from raising legitimate concerns about the Horizon IT system in their own defence. Sir Alan was the lead claimant in a 2019 High Court case that helped expose how nearly 1,000 Post Office branch managers were convicted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft and false accounting, based on flawed evidence from Fujitsu’s Horizon system. Two decades after he first challenged the Post Office about the system, many of those affected are still awaiting redress, including people who were wrongly imprisoned.
In his evidence to the Committee on 5th November, Sir Alan raised the possibility of bringing fresh legal action against the Government if no deadline was set to bring the outstanding claims for redress. It has since been reported that his proposed March 2025 deadline was rejected.