Post Office considered charging victims of Horizon scandal to access compensation, investigation finds

Post Office lawyers talked about charging victims of the Horizon scandal a fee just to access compensation schemes, the inquest has heard.

Portfolio manager Mark Underwood emailed Solicitor-General Ben Foat and In-house Solicitor Rodric Williams in January 2020 to say the Post Office could not request payment for the bidders “however small and regardless of the reason for this”. Underwood went on to say that paying deputy postmasters would be “extremely difficult and would be a position that I think the company would struggle to maintain under political and media pressure.”

The email was revealed to the inquiry during the questioning of Post Office chief executive Nick Read last week. Ed Henry KC, representing a group of postmasters, described the proposal to charge fees to anyone accessing compensation as an “outrageous line of thinking”. Read agreed that the idea seemed “odd”.

Underwood’s email said that instead of charging fees, the post office could “achieve the same desired result” through a “very narrow and clearly communicated set of eligibility criteria and requirements for the documentation that applicants must provide to be accepted into the scheme’.

Henry suggested that the “desired result” being discussed was to restrict access to the program and deter applicants. Read replied, “Possibly.” Henry said this attempt to set a high bar for claims was a “more subtle and insidious method” of reducing compensation claims, particularly as it was accepted at the time that postmasters had found impossible to obtain documents related to your case.

“Those who advised you all knew, when this demand for a contemporary document was hatched, that the Deputy Postmasters would have great difficulty in meeting it,” said Henry. “The people in this email, one of whom of course was Mr Williams, Rodric Williams, would have known the difficulties for deputy postmasters in obtaining contemporary documents, when it came to historical events that had happened many, many years before and where they had been subjected to so much injustice.’

Read replied: “That’s a disturbing conclusion, yes.”

The Post Office says £363m has now been paid out to more than 2,900 people affected by the Horizon IT scandal. But some postmasters have said they must produce evidence of losses and documents dating back decades.

At the inquiry, Read agreed he would be “deeply concerned” if the compensation process mutated into a legalistic or adversarial process.

He agreed that the process had been “over-bureaucratic”, saying: “I think there are a lot of examples where bureaucracy has gotten in the way, things have gone wrong. I don’t think that’s necessarily borne out because people are malicious in any way. I just think it’s a bad process, rather than anything more than that.”

He added: “When there are disputes or when there are problems associated with technical reasons, we have reached a position where we make interim payments and try to figure out how we resolve those particular disputes.”

The query continues.