Alan Bates rejects second Post Office compensation offer

Former sub-postmaster and campaigner Alan Bates has rejected his second offer of compensation for the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

His first offer in January, which he described as "cruel" and "derisory", was about a sixth of what he had claimed.

The latest offer amounted to around a third of what he requested, with Mr Bates telling the BBC "it's frustrating for myself, frustrating for everyone."

Separately, the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal heard that Jane MacLeod, the Post Office's former general counsel, "won't co-operate", according to a lawyer for the inquiry.

Jason Beer KC said that the inquiry would not be hearing from Ms MacLeod as planned because "she lives abroad and won't co-operate".

Ms MacLeod was the top internal lawyer at the Post Office at the time of the Alan Bates vs Post Office Ltd court case.

The BBC has tried to contact Ms MacLeod for comment.

Lengthy campaign

Alan Bates' fight for justice inspired ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office drama.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software indicated that money was missing from Post Office branch accounts.

Mr Bates leads the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, campaigning for financial address for the hundreds of victims who took part in the group legal action against the Post Office.

Their compensation was swallowed up by the huge legal costs in bringing their case.

The government went on to set up a specific compensation fund to give these sub-postmasters the same financial redress as everyone else.

But progress has been slow.

Mr Bates is warning he will have to "look at other ways to progress the redress" if the Department of Business and Trade does not sort things out.

He also highlighted the most recent Post Office Horizon compensation data.

As of 24 April 2024, 146 offers have been accepted and 138 of these have accepted offers of the £75,000 fixed payment.

Mr Bates says the vast majority of the bigger and most complex cases, some 300 of them, have still to be sorted.

"It's just not working quickly enough. People have lost 20 years of their lives and they're still hanging on... we've also lost 70 odd people along the way."

"These delays are causing all sorts of problems for the families involved."

'Waste of public money'

On Friday, the Post Office inquiry was told by its former finance director that the company maintained an “unacceptable relationship” with postmasters.

Alisdair Cameron said the relationship with the postmasters was “self-serving” and based on an imbalance of power.

He said he thought it was established now that the original prosecutions of subpostmasters were “a deliberate miscarriage of justice."

Mr Cameron said senior management should have settled the claims, apologised and moved on years ago.

He said the Post Office had been over-reliant on its flawed Horizon IT system “when we knew its weaknesses”.

“We have defended ourselves to avoid the consequences. A waste of public money and a postponement of justice.”

Mr Cameron, who joined the Post Office in 2015 and worked closely with then chief executive Paula Vennells, sat on the sub-committee of the Post Office board that oversaw its defence to the group litigation in 2018-19 led by Alan Bates.

At the start of his session, he gave an apology: “I am sorry that when I joined the Post Office in 2015, I accepted without challenging the evidence that there had been no miscarriages of justice in the earlier prosecutions which caused so much devastation to postmasters and their families.

“As a member of the GLO [group litigation order] sub-committee, I am sorry I did not push against the lack of challenge and testing of Post Office’s legal case. Had I done better in these things, we might have started the process of getting justice for postmasters earlier.

“I hope that my statement and evidence today assists the inquiry in its investigations and in getting to the truth which is the least that those affected deserve.”

Mr Cameron was asked about a ‘Strictly Confidential’ document titled “What went wrong?”, written by him in November 2020, which set out the criticisms faced by the Post Office after it lost the litigation brought by 555 subpostmasters.

In it he said that at the heart of what went wrong, the “original sin” of the Post Office was “our culture, self-absorbed and defensive”, which “stopped us from dealing with Postmasters in a straightforward and acceptable way.”

The document revealed his estimate of the total cost to the Post Office of the scandal at the time was £1-£1.5bn.