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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said the TV dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal brought “urgency” to compensation payouts, as she blamed the civil service for “going round and round in circles”.
Badenoch, who oversaw the Post Office as business secretary from February 2023 to July 2024, told a public inquiry into the affair on Monday that a hit ITV series pushed the scandal up the government’s list of priorities.
It was Mr Bates vs The Post Office “that made things happen”, she said. “It suddenly turned [compensation] from a value-for-money question to a public perception question.”
The new opposition leader said civil servants had wanted “legal cover” for their decisions on sub-postmaster compensation and that there was “far too much going round and round in circles . . . because everybody is worried about getting in trouble later.”
Around 983 Post Office branch managers were convicted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft and false accounting using evidence from Japanese technology company Fujitsu’s flawed Horizon IT system.
Others were not convicted but used their personal savings to make up erroneous shortfalls.
The previous Conservative government announced in January, shortly after the ITV series aired, that it would legislate to exonerate victims en masse and offer a fixed sum of £75,000 as an alternative to a full claim for participants in a group litigation that revealed the extent of the scandal.
Roughly £440mn has been paid so far to more than 3,100 claimants across four compensation schemes. Chancellor Rachel Reeves set aside a total of £1.8bn in Labour’s first Budget to cover the cost of compensation.
Victims have complained that the compensation process is slow and bogged down in administration, while they receive offers that are below expectations and require formal appeal.
Badenoch blamed bureaucracy and “the government machine” of the civil service for delays in getting compensation to sub-postmasters.
Sir Alan Bates, the lead campaigner in the scandal, told the Financial Times the Department for Business and Trade had adopted a legalistic approach that had resulted in wrangling between lawyers and delays in compensating victims.
“It should be down to the sub-postmaster to determine what is a fair result,” he said.
Bates has rejected two offers of compensation from the government with the most recent representing around one-third of his initial claim.
Giving evidence to the House of Commons business and trade committee last week, the former sub-postmaster said he would consider taking legal action to seek a deadline for payouts.
Jonathan Reynolds, the current business secretary, told the inquiry earlier on Monday that he was reluctant to set a cut-off for payout claims for fear of excluding late claimants from compensation.
However, Reynolds said he would “consider” a deadline if “we go into next year frustrated at a lack of claims coming in”.
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