Every post office operator whose wrongful conviction over the Horizon IT scandal has been overturned will receive £600,000 in compensation from the government, ministers have announced.
The Horizon scandal, described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”, resulted in more than 700 post office operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.
To date 86 postmasters have had their wrongful convictions overturned and £21m has been paid in compensation. “This is about righting a wrong and providing some form of relief to those wrongfully caught up in this scandal,” said Kevin Hollinrake, the business department minister with responsibility for the Post Office.
The government said the new compensation offer was in addition to paying for all reasonable legal fees, and any post office operator who does not want to accept it can continue with the existing legal process.
Any post office operator who has already received initial compensation payments, or has reached a settlement with the Post Office of less than the £600,000 a head announced on Monday, will be paid the difference.
“Too many postmasters have suffered and for too long, which is why the government remains committed to seeing this through to the end until it is resolved and ensuring this cannot ever happen again,” Hollinrake said.
The IT system, installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu, resulted in postal operators filing shortfalls in their returns and led to the Post Office suing them.
Some spent time in prison, and the scandal has been linked to four suicides. It is the subject of an inquiry led by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, which was made statutory in 2021, and is expected to be completed some time next year.
In 2021, the government announced interim payments of £100,000, which were later raised to £163,000.
Hollinrake, who was appointed as Post Office minister last autumn, said raising the limit to £600,000 meant the government had “erred on the side of generosity” but admitted it cannot make up for the irrevocable impact the scandal has had on many lives.
“If you’ve suffered, if you’ve spent time in jail, if you’ve lost your house, if your marriage has failed, all those things – if those things have happened to you, no amount of money will ever be enough,” he said.
The overturned convictions process is one of three different compensation schemes that have been set up as the scandal has developed. The government said that the three schemes have paid more than £120m to 2,600 individuals affected by the Horizon scandal.
As the owner of the Post Office the government is responsible for funding compensation payments.
Last month, Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, said he would return a bonus of £54,400 linked to the inquiry into the Horizon scandal.
He apologised for “procedural and governance mistakes” made by the Post Office that had linked significant bonus payments to work carried out in relation to the inquiry.
After the scandal, it emerged that about £1.6m in bonus payments had been made to executives. The progress of the Horizon inquiry was one of four metrics on which bonus payments were awarded.
