The government is slowly working toward compensating the subpostmasters who took on the Post Office and won in 2019. Right now, 70% of the remaining claims are disputing the offers they’ve received. So far, 432 out of 492 claimants have gotten offers, and 282 have settled fully. Out of those, 155 accepted the fixed offer of £75,000, which was launched last March to speed up payments due to mounting public pressure.
Now, let’s talk about the remaining claims. Out of the 150 still in the pipeline, 108 are under challenge. These are tricky cases that usually involve larger sums. The other 42 claims haven’t been settled for various reasons, like missing submissions or unanswered offers. Only 10 more claims have been resolved since the end of February.
The compensation scheme for these claimants was introduced in March 2022, more than three years ago, following intense pressure from victims, MPs, and campaigners. This came two years after the subpostmasters received shockingly low payments after winning in the High Court in 2019, and it was 13 years after Computer Weekly first exposed issues with the Horizon system, which had plagued these subpostmasters for over two decades.
Recent government figures show that the deadline for completing payments, set by Sir Alan Bates—who led the group litigation order—was by the end of last month. Bates warned Prime Minister Keir Starmer last October that if the government couldn’t finalize the financial redress by March 2025, they should appoint an independent organization to handle it, or face legal action.
Bates, along with MPs and lawyers, has urged the government to implement advanced dispute resolution meetings to sort out the issues, but the government hasn’t taken that option seriously. Bates remarked, “The department seems blind to the option of these meetings. I believe this is because they don’t want to meet victims face to face.”
On another note, the Post Office is also struggling to finalize its first compensation scheme related to the Horizon scandal, originally named the Historic Shortfalls Scheme. This was set up after the GLO proved that the unexplained accounting shortfalls—which led to subpostmasters being blamed—were due to errors in the Horizon system.
This scheme is specifically for former subpostmasters who weren’t convicted of crimes but had to cover losses caused by the system’s faults. After the ITV drama about the scandal, the scheme reopened to new applicants, leading to thousands of submissions. Claimants need to provide evidence that they managed a Post Office branch during the period when Horizon caused these unexplained errors. However, as revealed last week by Computer Weekly, over 1,000 claims are in limbo because the Post Office can’t find the necessary evidence, even as they push the government to be lenient with claimants.
Additionally, the government is looking to hire a team of lawyers to help respond to the Horizon scandal and advise on compensation. Computer Weekly first uncovered this scandal back in 2009, detailing the experiences of seven subpostmasters grappling with the Horizon software’s failures, which led to one of the largest miscarriages of justice in Britain’s history.