We'll never know how or why the honours committee reach a decisionpublished at 17:14 Greenwich Mean Time 8 January

17:14 GMT 8 January

Iain Watson
Political correspondent

We haven’t yet got clarity from the government on whether it favours mass exoneration of the sub-postmasters and mistresses or mass appeals against convictions.

But, aware of the strong feelings on the issue, Rishi Sunak’s spokesman was able to say the PM would "strongly support" a committee looking at the case for the removal of Paula Vennells’s CBE - explained in our previous post.

The question is - how likely is this to happen? Well, anyone can ask the committee to examine the case for taking away an honour. You just need to send an email.

There are grounds for re-examination of an honour which are automatic - if the recipient is given a jail sentence of three months or more, for example. But the committee has wide discretion to act if it is believed the recipient has brought the system into disrepute.

The Honours Forfeiture Committee is chaired by a senior civil servant and has four independent members. Its rules would allow them to recommend taking away Vennells’s CBE for actions which preceded the award - given in 2019.

Whether she loses or retains her CBE remains to be seen, but the committee will never tell us how or why they reached their conclusion.

As we've been reporting, there are calls for an award belonging to the former CEO of the Post Office to be withdrawn.

Paula Vennells received her CBE in 2019 "for services to the Post Office and to charity".

A CBE - Commander of the Order of the British Empire - is handed out for "achievement or service to the community, or a highly distinguished, innovative contribution in his or her area of activity," according to the government's website.

It can be revoked, but that decision lies with the reigning British monarch - King Charles III.

The award can be reconsidered when it's believed a person has brought the honours system into disrepute.

In that instance, a committee known as the Honours Forfeiture Committee submits the case to the prime minister, who then presents it to the King.

We reported earlier that Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey is under fire over his handling of the Post Office scandal - he was postal affairs minister from 2010-12 in the coalition government.

He's since been out speaking to reporters. "I wish I’d know then what we all know now," he says, repeating claims that the Post Office lied "on an industrial scale to me, and other ministers".

The Post Office "lied to victims, to judges, to the public, to me and other postal ministers for over 20 years", he adds. "This is a conspiracy by the Post Office to deceive people."

Davey also weighs in on the debate over former Post Office chief Paula Vennells's CBE, which she was awarded in the same year she stepped down from the role amid anger over the Horizon scandal. "It shouldn't have been given in the first place," he says, before urging the honours committee "to meet to make that decision" to review it.

A Post Office spokesperson has previously said it shares the "aims of the public inquiry to get to the truth of what went wrong in the past and establish accountability".

From 1999 all the way through to 2023, here's a rundown of some of the key dates in the Post Office Horizon scandal.

• 1999: The Horizon accounting system is rolled out in Post Offices across the UK
• 2000: The first issue with the system is reported by Alan Bates, sub-postmaster of a branch in Wales
• 2003: Bates loses his job after refusing to accept responsibility for missing funds in the branch accounts
• 2004: More sub-postmasters find themselves being asked questions about missing funds - at times in the tens of thousands of pounds. Jobs are lost, some are declared bankruptcy and some eventually sent to prison

• 2010: A high-profile case of wrongful conviction occurs - pregnant Surrey sub-postmaster Seema Misra is jailed after being accused of stealing £74,000
• 2012: Formal investigations into the Horizon software begin
• 2015: The Post Office halts private prosecutions of sub-postmasters
• 2017 Legal action is launched against the Post Office by a group of 555 sub-postmasters
• 2019: The Post Office CEO Paula Vennells stands down, before the company agrees to pay £58m to the 555 sub-postmasters
• 2021: The first inquiry into the scandal begins
• 2023: The government announces that every wrongly convicted sub-postmaster will be offered £600,000 in compensation

Let's hear now from another victim of the Horizon scandal - Susan Knight, from Cornwall, who was wrongly accused of stealing from the post office she ran in the village of St Keverne.

She says she owes her life to Alan Bates, the sub-postmaster who led the campaign to challenge the Post Office's faulty Horizon system.

"Our hero Alan was making a lot of waves parallel to when I was going through the courts," she tells the BBC. "I owe that man my life because I don't think... if not for them making waves, I would have a criminal conviction."

The 68-year-old explains how customers and residents of the small village threw their support behind her. "They put cheques and cards through the door, which I still have," she says, adding:

Yasmin Rufo
Culture reporter

It may have been 25 years since branch managers were convicted of theft and fraud, but the four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has renewed public interest in the scandal.

The mini-series centres on the story of sub-postmaster Alan Bates, played by actor Toby Jones, who led and won a legal battle, paving the way for dozens of convictions to be overturned.

Since the series aired on 1 January, 50 new potential victims have contacted lawyers, some of whom were former sub-postmasters who were prosecuted by the Post Office.

Alan Bates told the BBC that the mini-series has "made a huge difference to the campaign" while actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, who plays Alan Bates's partner Suzanne Sercombe in the programme, said she was "completely overwhelmed" by the response and "the outpouring of outrage over the scandal and cover-up".

Image source, ITV/REX/Shutterstock

"It's more than any of us dared hope that it would move the campaign along, but sometimes drama can do that. And now: JUSTICE for the thousands affected," she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Just a day after the final episode aired on 4 January, the Metropolitan Police confirmed it's investigating the Post Office over potential fraud offences committed during the Horizon IT scandal. And, as we've been reporting, PM Rishi Sunak has said the government's looking at how to speed up the compensation process.

In a four star review of the show, Carol Midgley wrote in the Times, external that the series made her “uncomfortable to the point of heartburn”. It seems many viewers shared her outrage and have forced this miscarriage of justice back to the top of the agenda.

Image source, PA

We've mentioned Paula Vennells, the former Post Office CEO, but what about the other big names involved in this saga? Here are a few:

Alan Bates

A former sub-postmaster, he was accused of theft and was contractually obliged to pay back the money from his own pocket. Despite first reporting issues with Horizon in 2000, he had his contract ended in 2003 when he refused to comply with Post Office policy.

He led the campaign group Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance to its High Court victory in 2019 and his story is the centre of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

Ed Davey

The Lib Dem leader is currently under fire over his role as postal affairs minister, from 2010-12, during the coalition government. He refused to meet Bates in May 2010, saying he did not believe it "would serve any purpose". He later met Bates and has since said he was "deeply misled by Post Office executives".

Adam Crozier

He was CEO of Royal Mail from 2003-10, when the Post Office was part of the organisation and sub-postmasters were being taken to court, before moving on to ITV. He isn’t in the cast list for Mr Bates vs The Post Office, sparking some debate about whether it's because he was CEO of the broadcaster until 2017.

ITV has responded with this comment:

Image source, PA Media

Tracey Felstead was just 19 when she was wrongly convicted in 2001 of stealing £11,500 and jailed - even though her family paid the Post Office the money she was accused of taking.

She worked in the Camberwell Green Post Office in London - her first job after leaving school in the late 1990s.

Her conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in April 2021.

Felstead, from Telford, told BBC Breakfast while the process of helping former sub-postmasters needs to be sped up, she cautioned against a mass exoneration.

"I think we need to be really careful that we're not just going to go and turn everybody's convictions over just in case you have that one person that has committed a crime and you've just turned over their conviction," she said.

Earlier, former minister David Davis called for workers involved in the scandal to be exonerated, saying they should be able to submit a "mass appeal".

Why ministers are so keen to act nowpublished at 14:07 Greenwich Mean Time 8 January

14:07 GMT 8 January

Harry Farley
Political correspondent

Image source, ITV

There is a sense of urgency among ministers to be seen to be doing something about the Post Office scandal.

But why now? None of the key facts are new. In many ways, not much has changed. Many dedicated journalists have highlighted what happened to the hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses over several years. And government knew all about it.

The one thing that has changed is public awareness. Many, many more people know about what happened, thanks to prominence that an ITV drama series brings.

And that means many, many more people are putting pressure on their MPs, expressing their concern and outrage at what happened. And so, suddenly, ministers are keen to be seen to act.

There is another possible factor why this ITV docudrama caught the public imagination - it is a problem that investigative journalists often face. Many of the victims of this scandal were traumatised.

They had their reputations ruined by being wrongly convicted. As a result, many were reluctant to talk on camera to journalists. So the true sense that lives have been ruined by what happened was more difficult to convey in documentaries and news articles.

That has all changed. The ITV drama meant the weight of what happened could be told on camera. For many people it’s the first time they’ve appreciated the full scale of the scandal.

Ministers are meeting today to consider ways of clearing the names of hundreds of sub-postmasters and postmistresses convicted in the Post Office Horizon scandal.

We've heard from lots of key players so far - here's a recap to bring you up to speed:

• Rishi Sunak would "strongly support" the Honours Forfeiture Committee if it decided to look at revoking the CBE given to the former Post Office boss, Paula Vennells
• The comments from the PM's spokesman come after an online petition calling for Vennells to lose her honour reached more than one million signatures

• Vennells, who oversaw the Post Office during a time when it repeatedly denied problems with its Horizon IT system, is participating in an inquiry into the scandal
• Earlier, Sunak defended the government's response but said he wanted to speed up the compensation process for victims
• Ex-minister David Davis has called for workers involved in the scandal to be exonerated, saying they should be able to submit a "mass appeal". He and Labour MP Kevan Jones are also pushing for an emergency debate on the issue in Parliament
• Justice Secretary Alex Chalk is meeting Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake this afternoon to discuss help for the 700 or so branch managers who were wrongly convicted because of a faulty accounting system

An ex-businesswoman, Paula Vennells worked for the likes of beauty brand L'Oréal and hospitality business Whitbread before moving to the Post Office in 2007.

She started as a group network director, then became managing director in 2010 before being promoted to the position of CEO in 2012.

Vennells held the top job until February 2019, when she stepped down amid anger over the Horizon scandal. During her tenure, the company repeatedly denied there were problems with its IT system, Horizon.

She took over as chair of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in April of the same year, but later stepped down when a group of post office operators won a high court case in which their convictions were ruled wrongful and Horizon to be at fault - their ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.

Vennells has said previously that she remains "truly sorry for the suffering caused to wrongly prosecuted sub-postmasters and their families".

She said: "I continue to fully support and focus on co-operating with the [public] inquiry and it would be inappropriate for me to comment further while it remains ongoing".

Image source, PA Media

A bit more from Rishi Sunak now.

His spokesman says the prime minister would "strongly support" the Honours Forfeiture Committee if it decided to look at revoking former Post Office boss Paula Vennells's CBE.

Earlier, it was reported that a petition calling for Vennells to lose her honour had attracted more than one million signatures.

She received her CBE - Commander of the Order of the British Empire - award in the 2019 New Year Honours List for services to the "Post Office and to charity".

But she's known for overseeing the Post Office between 2012 and 2019, during which time it routinely denied there were problems with its Horizon system.

Vennells is participating in the Post Office Horizon Inquiry.

We're hearing lots of opinions today about what the government should, or could, do to redress the Post Office Horizon scandal - particularly for the people convicted who feel they shouldn't have been.

Professor Chris Hodges, chair of the advisory group overseeing compensation to the victims, is one of those to have shared what he believes should happen.

"The obvious thing to do is the right thing to do, which is for parliament to pass a very simple act overturning all of [the convictions]," Hodges, who is an emeritus professor of justice systems at the University of Oxford, told Radio 4's Today programme earlier.

"The trouble is, otherwise, you get into the weeds of an enormously slow and complex system."

Hodges said the appeals system in British courts is designed for individual cases rather than groups - and without an act of parliament, there would need to be a "radical" overhaul of the judicial system to sort through the cases in a timely manner.

As we've been reporting, the justice secretary and Post Officer minister are due to meet this afternoon, and PM Rishi Sunak has said they'll discuss what the government can do to "speed up" the process of clearing people's names.

Harry Farley
Political correspondent

Image source, Reuters

The prime minister has just said the government will “do everything we can to make this right for all the people affected”.

Rishi Sunak was addressing an audience of businesses, MPs and journalists in Lancashire.

He defended the government's response to the Horizon scandal but said he wanted to speed up the compensation process.

Sunak described wrongful prosecutions of sub-postmasters and postmistresses as an “appalling miscarriage of justice” and said it was “simply wrong what happened”.

But he did not confirm whether the government would allow the victims to launch a mass appeal against their convictions - a key ask from campaigners.

He said the point of Justice Secretary Alex Chalk and Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake's meeting, which we mentioned earlier, was to see if there's "more we can do to speed up some of those processes".

"People should know that we are on it and we want to make this right, that money has been set aside," he told the crowd. "What we are now looking at is how can we speed all of that up."

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer - the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales before turning to politics - has been asked about the Post Office scandal this morning. He says all the convictions should be revisited.

"It might be possible to get these cases back before the Court of Appeal quickly - I've done that when I was a prosecutor - but whichever way it's done, these convictions need to be looked at," he tells reporters on a visit to Loughborough.

Starmer says to prevent this kind of situation happening again, the "prosecuting role" should be taken away from the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) - the principal public agency for conducting criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.

That way "you've got an independent prosecutor looking at these cases in future," he says, before calling on the Treasury to pay compensation to the victims - "because the human impact on them has been huge".

A bit of context: The Post Office used private prosecution in the Horizon scandal, which allows companies or organisations to investigate and appoint lawyers to present evidence in court. The company says it has not undertaken any private prosecutions related to this matter since 2015.

Horizon was introduced into the Post Office network from 1999. The software, developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was used for tasks such as transactions, accounting and stocktaking.

Sub-postmasters complained about bugs in the system after it reported shortfalls, some of which amounted to many thousands of pounds.

Some of them attempted to plug the gap with their own money due to contracts stating they were responsible for any shortfalls, even remortgaging their homes, in an (often fruitless) attempt to correct an error.

So far, nobody at the Post Office, or at Fujitsu, has been held accountable.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier, Treasury Minister Bim Afolami shared his thoughts on the government still having contracts with Fujitsu, saying such relationships should always be considered - but it isn't "appropriate" for there to be a "blanket ban across every single aspect of government".

• You can read more about this here

We've just heard a bit more from Lee Castleton, the former postmaster who we mentioned earlier had said his life was ruined by the Horizon scandal.

Castleton says he and his family started to run a post office in Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 2001 and he was suspended three years later over "supposed" losses.

His High Court case - which found him liable to pay £25,000 to the Post Office as well as the organisation's legal costs of more than £321,000 - has never been overturned, Castleton says.

Speaking to our colleagues on the BBC News channel, he describes not just the financial impact of being wrongly accused but the emotional toll the saga had on his family. "We were ostracised in the local community," he says, adding:

Image source, PA Media

Over the weekend, questions circled around Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey over his handling of the Post Office scandal when he was in the coalition government.

In May 2010, Davey, then postal affairs minister, refused to meet Alan Bates, the sub-postmaster who led the campaign to expose the scandal, saying he did not believe it "would serve any purpose". Bates is the titular character in the ITV drama we've mentioned already this morning.

Davey has since said he was "deeply misled by Post Office executives".

But Treasury Minister Bim Afolami this morning urged the Lib Dem leader to "be honest with people" and explain why "he didn't ask the right questions" when in the role.

Over the weekend, the Lib Dems said Davey did eventually meet Bates in October 2010 - and that he was the first postal affairs minister to hold such a meeting since campaigners began pressing for talks in 2003.

• You can read more on this here

Thomas Mackintosh
Live reporter

For those not familiar with the roles and responsibilities of a postmaster or postmistress, don't worry, you're not alone.

According to the Post Office, a postmaster or postmistress is the head of an individual post office - usually the main one in a district, town or city.

They are responsible for all postal activities in that specific office, including managing staff and ensuring efficient mail delivery and customer service. It is also "quite common" for people to run more than one Post Office, the organisation says.

Sub-Post Offices are smaller than main ones and serve as branch offices - they provide postal, financial and retail services and are run by sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses.

Sub-postmasters are self-employed and they're approved by the Post Office to act as their agents in running these smaller branches.

We said a little earlier that Tory MP David Davis praised Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama at the centre of this resurfaced interest in the Horizon scandal, for tapping into "the agony people were put through".

Lee Castleton, a former postmaster from Scarborough, told the BBC yesterday that his life had been ruined by the saga.

He was falsely prosecuted for fraud and was asked on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether he has confidence the issue might now get resolved.

Castleton said he wants people to "put pressure on [others] to help us", and that those affected have so far "had fantastic people help us, and continue to do so".

"We are just people from your village shop, your local post office. [It's] hard to get people to believe," he told the programme, adding: