The First Horizon IT Inquiry Report is out. It weighs in at over 80,000 words. That’s a PHD thesis length for those of you interested.
A detailed, dry, and yet sometimes moving document, the emotional core of heartbreak it conveys is captured I would say by one passage in particular:
3.44. A number of postmasters (some of whom being Core Participants) have died since the commencement of the Inquiry. Of that number there has been a significant percentage who died without having received the full and fair financial redress to which they were entitled. Without exception, the surviving spouse or a near relative of a Core Participant who has died has taken on the status of Core Participant and has closely engaged with the work of the Inquiry. My heartfelt thanks are due to them for their participation.
I will not labour the many layers of decency, love, and pain in that remark (or the gut-wrenching case studies in the report), but it shows I think that the Inquiry team understands the struggles postmasters, and mistresses, and employees and, importantly, family members have faced and continue to face. And that they take those struggles very seriously.
I will highlight some of the key parts of the report as I see it (bearing in mind that I am a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board and, whilst we on the Board are all independent, we have been part of the story for many years now and so in some ways the failures that SWW points to are not incapable of reflecting on us too).
Before I give you what I think are the headlines and the lessons, it is worth pointing out some of the more general things Sir Wyn’s report said by way of context with an eye on the next (and probably final) report which I think is probably coming towards the end of the year or early next.
There were a few interesting markers for what we can expect from the next report. Unsurprisingly, but importantly, Williams is
“satisfied …that a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error as described above. Yet, for all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate.”
He makes a barbed remark that suggests the view that the current version of Horizon is significantly more robust than earlier versions maybe flawed. And having reminded us all of the “many hundreds of people have been convicted, wrongly, of criminal offences, and many thousands of people have been held responsible, wrongly, for losses which were illusory, as opposed to real” he lays the blame for that on the, “wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu from time to time and by the Post Office and Fujitsu as institutions.”
Employed and/or associated with. Senior and not so senior.
I will resist the urge to paint the picture further other than to note, because Williams notes when discussing why postmasters were put in the most invidious of positions when charged with theft and false accounting, that:
Setting aside, at this stage, the propriety of charging the offences of theft and false accounting as alternatives, I have no doubt that most barristers skilled in the practice of criminal law would have advised their clients that a conviction for stealing from a Post Office would, almost inevitably, carry a more severe sentence than a conviction for false accounting.
It’s a notable comment because several lawyers associated with the Post Office, as those of you have read these blogs may recall, struggled to advise the PO with such clarity on this matter when asked to do so. It was, it seemed at that stage of the Inquiry, a litmus test for their professional independence.
One particularly important point he does make is that in describing “wholly unacceptable behaviour” he will not in his final report be “determining criminal or civil liability”. He cannot do so; indeed, he reminds us, the law on Inquiries precludes it. This may perhaps be signalling a thought about recommending the law on Inquiries might change (something Jason Beer KC has been noted as talking about recently).
Another point he makes, which has not been much highlighted hitherto is that quite a lot of postmasters were prosecuted but acquitted “probably somewhere in the region of 7.5%, the report says”, noting also, and something our own research agrees with, that this is “invariably disastrous even for those acquitted”.
Before providing you with flavour of what has gone wrong with the compensation and redress for the postmasters it is worth emphasising two particular positives in his report, to those who may lose the will to read on.
Firstly, is the one recommendation of Sir Wynn (and let me be clear I think his report and the recommendations contain a great deal to be welcomed) most likely to have the biggest impact. It is his recommendation that
“The Department shall devise a process for providing financial redress to close family members of those most adversely affected by Horizon. Such family members shall qualify for such redress only if they themselves, have suffered serious adverse consequences by reason of their family relationship with the person or persons directly affected by Horizon.”
Of all the heartbreaking stories I have heard, or read, many of the worst are stories about the children. If I had been hoping for one recommendation above all from Sir Wyn yesterday, it would have been this one. He perfectly captures the legal difficulties that have stood in the way of this; in essence the law would have made legal claims by the children very difficult if not impossible. For a variety of reasons, he says, fairness demands close relatives seriously affected by their loved onw’s treatment by POL be compensated. The Advisory Board has been urging this for some time, the PO Project Team’s work has evidenced the huge impact, and as Post Office Minister’s announcement in Parliament yesterday shows, the Government supports it and will implement a scheme.
The second point is good news for the Government but will not be accepted by all, for understandable reasons. It is that Williams accepts that the Government and POL “remain committed” to deliver compensation that is full, fair, and delivered promptly. Many postmasters have the strongest doubts about that commitment. I have fewer doubts but one can understand why those let down by delay and, sometimes, dithering, if one only looks at the many dates in the report. Over five years have passed since the first HSS was established, and in Sir Wyn’s eyes it is the scheme with the most problems.
This good news for the Government is rather modest comfort because Sir Wyn also explains how and why he thinks they have failed to deliver full, fair, still less prompt compensation, but at least partly explains why he is not tempted to rip the schemes up and start again, or indeed to take the administration of the HSS scheme off of the Post Office. The other reason, as he explained in his speech to the Inquiry yesterday, is that this would cause further substantial and intolerable delay.
For the postmasters there is though, I think I should speak plainly, some particularly bad news, amid the sensible recommendations. That is that Sir Wyn rightly sees the substantial challenges in delivering on the cases that remain to be submitted, assessed, and/or settled and/or reviewed/appealed. The work he thinks will be unlikely to be completed before the end of 2026. Many of the cases that remain are complex, and difficult.
Indeed, on the schemes as they are now working, he tends not point the finger of blame at DBT or POL or the claimants’ lawyers. His main suggestion on improving speed is for the HSS to have an independent senior lawyer responsible for driving forward progress on the many, many cases that will still need attention. The other schemes already have a similar figure and yet, he notes, there are substantial challenges of delay in those too. So this recommendation is not likely to be viewed by him as a panacea, but as something that might substantially assist in reducing delay. It is notable that he does not adopt some of the suggestions offered by the Business Select Committee for dealing with the problem.
The other ongoing issue which he reserves particularly withering remarks for is the refusal to fund legal advice for the early stages of HSS schemes. He views the DBT’s stance on this issue, which is in essence that the scheme was designed to be and can be run without the need for legal advice, as “indefensible” – it is out of step, he says, with the other schemes, and there are real benefits to claimants having legal advice at the point in the HSS scheme where they must choose between a fixed offer and having their claim assessed. He points also the Department continuing “to resist this as if its life depended upon it”. I should, in a spirit of full disclosure, note here the Advisory Board have on balance, so far accepted and supported the DBT view.
On whether the schemes have delivered full and fair compensation his finding is that often it is impossible to say without reviewing cases; he is precluded from doing so (and would of course take a very long time to do this in a weighty way).
His greatest worries on fullness and fairness are reserved for the HSS scheme, with the general absence of representation, and an overly legalistic or adversarial approach by POL and its lawyers, and perhaps, he seems to think, the independent panels driving much of that. I do not read him as attributing blame for that to POL (for the what they asked HSF to do) or for HSF advising in ways that led POL astray. Indeed there is no suggestion from him that they did the latter; the portrayal of HSF is of giving advice that is conventional for ordinary litigation but out of place in these schemes.
He has some interesting things to say about how and why the system might be improved to increase the likelihood of ensuring fullness and fairness. I am not going to rehearse them all, but you can read them in the report or its summary.
He points to a number of ways in which claims may have been undervalued by unrepresented claimants in particular (again in the HSS scheme) and how that was for some, perhaps many but not all, generously addressed by fixed level offers. There is a sense that he might be uncomfortable with the fixed offers (£75k for an HSS claim can be accepted even if actual losses were very low) but he is also very clear that fixed offers have had a powerful and positive impact on the ability of the schemes to function and in reducing delay. He is also conscious of the risk that, especially for the unrepresented, fixed offers might lead to unfair under settling.
On delay he becomes pointedly critical of early failures in the setting up of the schemes. By the time of the Bates judgment in 2019, he says, the range of different claims would have been reasonable apparent. The scale of the task should have been significantly clearer by the end of 2020 when it became clear there were going to be significant numbers of overturned convictions. In particular, early estimates of the scale of HSS claims, which woefully underestimated the number of such scales, would have been realised as hopelessly optimistic by then. POL and the Department failed, he says, to stop and think in the round about the range and scale of claims and how to address all eligible claims so they could be resolved in a consistent and expeditious way. Setting up three separate schemes rather than one caused, he thinks, considerable delay.
Other sources of delay he highlighted included the Government’s unwillingness to conclude a funding agreement with POL to fund ‘late’ HSS claims; the near year it took to agree the Advisory Board’s advice on, and the further 9 months to implement, the HSS appeals process; and the reluctance of HM Treasury to approve certain elements of schemes (which may explain other delays too perhaps).
There is much more detail. And as the Advisory Board will no doubt be advising the Government on many of the recommendations, I resist the urge to go through them all and provide my own views. That would fun but not entirely appropriate. There are, though, two other points I noticed worth mentioning now.
The first is Sir Wyn’s recommendation that there be a standing public body which can advise on administer and deliver similar schemes of financial redress in the future with significant independence from those public bodies.
The second is that:
By 31 October 2025, the Department, Fujitsu and the Post Office shall publish, either separately or together, a report outlining any agreed programme of restorative justice and/or actions taken by that date to produce such a programme.
That is, or should be, a substantial undertaking, and there is some way to go. We get some clue of the distance that needs to be travelled from this other remark from Sir Wyn in his report:
I understand that a meeting has now taken place between representatives of the Department, Mr. Patterson and Mr Takahito Tokita, the chief executive officer of Fujitsu Limited, following which a joint statement was issued as follows:
“Ahead of the completion of Sir Wyn Williams’ Horizon IT Inquiry, the Secretary of State and Mr Patterson agreed to progress discussions regarding Fujitsu’s contribution, acknowledging many parties are involved.”
What we cannot see is the end point that need to be aiming for here. The struggles of the postmasters and their families will carry on in the meantime, some labouring without their loved ones, but much more is needed than an agreement to progress. Whoever is responsible such a watery commitment from Fujitsu should, I think, be ashamed of themselves.
Understanding, agreeing, and actioning what a restorative justice plan could look like is a significant undertaking, and as Sir Wyn’s detailed dissection of the outstanding claimed, lodged and unlocked, shows so well, there is a great deal of work to be done on delivering full, fair compensation in anything like a timely manner from this point forwards. There is no turning away from it.
