Hundreds of subpostmasters wronged in the Post Office scandal will have their names cleared under new legislation unveiled by the government.
The new law will come into effect by the end of July and follows Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement earlier this year that convictions would be quashed.
More than 700 Post Office branch managers around the UK were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015, after the faulty Horizon accounting software made it look as though money was missing from their shops.
Their campaign for justice was thurst into the spotlight in the TV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office with the issue sparking public outrage.
Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake on Thursday said the “unprecedented intervention” will “deliver long overdue justice to postmasters”.
He also said that victims of a second Post Office IT scandal are set to receive compensation with claims steming from an accounting software, called Capture, in the 1990s – before the Horizon software scandal.
Announcing some of the details of the law in a written ministerial statement, Mr Hollinrake said it will quash convictions defined by a “clear and objective criteria”.
The legislation will specify who the prosecutor was in relevant cases, and will “quash these prosecutions where the prosecutor is, in effect, discredited”, he said.
Most of the people were prosecuted by the Post Office. Others were prosecuted by agencies such as the Crown Proseuction Service and the Department for Work and Pensions.
Convictions will need to relate to alleged offences during the period that the Horizon IT system was in use and to offences which relate to the scandal – for example theft and false accounting.
Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake agreed that victims of the Capture scandal should be provided with compensation
The convicted person will need to have been working in a Post Office that used the software and be either a subpostmaster, one of their employees, officers, or family members, or a direct employee of the Post Office, in order to be eligible.
Mr Hollinrake said the Government’s legislation was likely to also clear the names of people “who were, in fact, guilty of a crime”. He said this was a “price worth paying” in order to quash convictions for many innocent people.
The minister added that victims of the Capture scandal should also be provided with compensation “where detriment has occurred”.
It came as he was questioned on the issue by Labour MP Kevan Jones, who said: “If we are going to overturn convictions, it can’t just be about the Horizon system.
“Evidence I’ve put into the public inquiry, which I sent to him yesterday, clearly indicates that the scandal predates Horizon in terms of Capture. They need to be included in both the compensation scheme and also in overturning convictions.”
Mr Hollinrake replied: “In terms of Capture, he’s regularly brought this up and it’s something we’re keen to engage with him on to make sure those are included within any compensation where detriment has occurred.”
A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said the Government wanted to see the legislation “introduced very soon”, with it “in place by the end of July” to ensure compensation can be paid by then to those postmasters still waiting to be exonerated.
