The UK Law Society Gazette
The recently-departed chair of the Post Office has said there remained ‘lingering distrust’ of postmasters within the company even this year. Such sceptics, Henry Staunton told the Post Office Inquiry today, included lawyers still working for the organisation who were still commissioning investigations based on questionable data as recently as last year.
Staunton was tasked with oversight and governance at the Post Office and took office in December 2022 as the various compensation schemes were being put together and implemented.
He explained in his inquiry witness statement that he had assumed the case for earmarking substantial funds for compensating victims would be ‘overwhelming’, but he was told there was ‘little appetite’ in government for decisive action.
He held reservations from the outset that the scale of the scandal was not fully appreciated, and it became clear early on that exoneration of the 700-plus postmasters convicted on evidence from the Horizon IT system was ‘not on the agenda’. Indeed, Staunton said the ‘widespread view internally’ at the Post Office was that those who had not come forward to appeal were guilty, and that most of the convictions should still stand.
A triage process from January 2023 identified only 12% of the 552 cases reviewed as being likely to lead to the Post Office conceding. At the board meeting last November, the remediation committee reported that in 333 cases the conviction did not appear unsafe.
On compensation, Staunton believed there seemed ‘little recognition within the Post Office’s remediation team that this was an injustice on an ‘industrial scale’. He added that in-house and external lawyers for the organisation ‘made issues overly adversarial’.
Staunton recounted an internal report from January 2023 which gave an account of a former postmaster who was one of the first to formally reach settlement after their convictions were overturned. This woman had described feeling humiliated and said the remediation process was impersonal, adding that the Post Office’s lawyers had ‘demonstrated brutality and lack of trust in the process of recovering compensation’.
