Hundreds of people wrongly convicted in the Post Office Horizon scandal are set to have their names cleared thanks to a new law.
The new piece of legislation should come into effect by the end of July and will apply to those convicted in England and Wales.
The government said there is a risk that some people who were genuinely guilty of crimes could also be cleared under the new law – but this was ‘a price worth paying’.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak earlier this year announced blanket legislation to clear their names after TV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, thrust the saga into the spotlight and sparked public outrage.
More than 900 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.
Incorrect information provided by Horizon, software by Japanese firm Fujitsu, meant that subpostmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for stealing money. Many went to prison and were financially ruined.
Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake on Thursday said the ‘unprecedented intervention’ will ‘deliver long overdue justice to postmasters’.
Announcing some of the details of the law in a written ministerial statement, he 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’, Mr Hollinrake said.
There were 700 people prosecuted by the Post Office, while another 283 cases were brought by other agencies including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Prosecutions by the DWP won’t be quashed under the new law.
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.
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.
Ministers say they will work with the Scottish and Northern Ireland governments to ensure compensation can be paid to victims there too.
Mr Hollinrake said the government’s legislation was likely to also clear the names of people ‘who were, in fact, guilty of a crime’, but said this was a ‘price worth paying’ in order to quash convictions for many innocent people.
To mitigate this, people will be required to sign a statement to the effect that they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted in order to receive financial redress – and could be convicted of fraud if it’s discovered that they lied.
Mr Hollinrake added: ‘We are keen to ensure that the legislation achieves its goal of bringing prompt justice to all of those who were wrongfully convicted as a result of the scandal, followed by rapid financial redress.’
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