Over 250 Post Office scandal victims have died without justice

The Times can now reveal that 251 postmasters wrongly accused of stealing from their own tills have passed away before receiving final compensation. The number is a steep jump from April, when The Times found that 59 postmasters had died, and suggests that postmasters are dying at a rate of about three per week.

The figures were obtained under freedom of information legislation and interviews with postmasters’ lawyers. Four years after the scandal was exposed by a High Court judge, more than 1,900 postmasters are yet to receive compensation.

• Pictured: the Post Office victims who died without justice

One of the lawyers said the prospect of their elderly clients dying before seeing justice “keeps me up at night”, and damned the wall of bureaucracy that means only a seventh of the compensation budget has been disbursed.

Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss, was formally stripped of her honour on Friday. Vennells offered last month to hand back the CBE awarded to her in 2019, bowing to public pressure after the ITV dramatisation Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

A list published on the Cabinet Office website on Friday said Vennells had forfeited her CBE for “bringing the honours system into disrepute”.

Harrison, described by friends as an upbeat, outgoing and funny person with energy levels to match the demands of bringing up three boys, saw that money was going missing from her accounts shortly after she took over the one-counter office in the early 2000s.

“Our mum rang the helpline two or three times per week but they never helped,” her son Will said this week. “There was absolutely no support whatsoever from the Post Office.”

She continued to put the profits from her shop to ensure her accounts balanced until her desperate calls for help triggered an audit. The Post Office found £3,000 that was “missing”, and Harrison was suspended on the spot and barred from her branch.

One of Harrison’s sons said she rang the helpline two or three times a week — but got no help from the Post Office

The ordeal plunged her into a depression as friends witnessed “the sparkle go completely out of her”, according to evidence shared by her family. She became isolated, friends drifted away and gossips “had a field day”.

“The shame that came with the rapid closure was terrible,” her son added. “My brothers were asked at school if Mum had taken the money. It was a very small village so everyone was talking about it.”

More than a decade later Harrison was one of 555 victims to join the High Court claim led by Alan Bates, the postmaster campaigner played by Toby Jones in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

In December 2019, after two years of acrimonious courtroom battles, they won £58 million, which was almost entirely swallowed up in legal fees.

It was three more years until the government produced a fresh scheme to right this wrong, yet today only 41 have been fully compensated — a figure that does not include Harrison’s family.

“My mum was a proud, glamorous, and caring person, who filled her life with hobbies such as reading, crafting, knitting and baking, and she was loyal to her friends,” Will Harrison said. “It is incredibly sad she did not live to see financial redress and the end of the inquiry into what happened.”

Freedom of information requests lodged with the Post Office and the Department of Business and Trade, interviews with postmaster lawyers and other reporting have revealed how the roll call of postmasters who have died without compensation has grown.

There are 25 postmasters, whose claims have been judged eligible for the above scheme, known as the Group Litigation Order (GLO) Scheme, who have died. One of these quickly filed a claim but died before the money reached their bank account.

Some 36 postmasters who were wrongly convicted of crimes such as theft and fraud by the Post Office have also died before receiving a final payout and a further 148 died before they received a payout under the separate Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS).

Lawyers representing postmasters report that a further 40 families have approached them for help claiming since the ITV drama.

Out of four suicides of postmasters caught up in the scandal, two of their families are not captured by official figures as they have not applied for compensation.

The figures were published as Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, accused the recently sacked Post Office chairman of being “full of lies” after he made incendiary claims that the permanent secretary asked him to delay compensation payments to help Conservative electoral chances, by pushing the cost into the next parliament.

Henry Staunton himself admitted the row had “degenerated” into an “unseemly political spat”, after he accused Badenoch of sacking him with the words “well, someone’s got to take the rap for this”. The secretary of state made a boisterous defence in the House of Commons, accusing Staunton of lying and counter-attacking with a revelation that the former WH Smith chairman was the subject of a formal bullying investigation (which he said he had no knowledge of).

Sarah Munby, the civil servant at the heart of the claims, took the unusual step of going public to say that she had not “explicitly or implicitly” called for compensation to be delayed.

The MPs’ business select committee will hear evidence from Staunton on Tuesday to give his side of the he said/she said battle. Liam Byrne, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said the spat showed there was “confusion about the instruction to deliver compensation at speed”.

Neil Hudgell, a solicitor representing hundreds of postmasters, said he had seen no evidence of political interference in compensation, only “incredible levels” of bureaucratic inefficiency, too few staff to process claims and overly complex schemes. “There’s no rational explanation to why it takes up to five months to get a response to routine correspondence,” he said.

“What keeps me up at night is the clients who are going to die before they get compensation,” David Enright, another solicitor acting for postmasters, said. “We must sweep away bureaucratic nonsense that is holding up compensation.”

In an update to the Commons on Thursday, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said 2,270 cases of victims had been settled. This leaves more than 1,900 of the most serious cases, including most of Alan Bates’s group and hundreds of wrongfully convicted postmasters, still waiting for full compensation more than 15 years on.

Later the same day the government confirmed it would introduce a new bill to exonerate more than 800 postmasters wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office and the Crown Prosecution Service based on Horizon data. The new law, once passed, will unlock a minimum of £600,000 of compensation to be paid this year.

• Post Office scandal: victims could get £600,000 compensation

A newly released letter showed the Post Office chief executive cautioned against this, telling Alex Chalk, the justice secretary: “We would be [duty-]bound to oppose an appeal” on 369 cases, adding: “We consider it essential for you to understand the very real and sensitive complexities presented in each case.”

The Post Office’s external lawyers, Peters and Peters, were more forthright: “It is highly likely that the majority of people who have not yet appealed were guilty as charged … this is one point that cannot be made strongly enough.”

Alan Bates, who led the campaign, was offered a sixth of what he requested

ANTHONY DEVLIN FOR THE TIMES

The Bates group, paid out under a separate scheme with a minimum of £75,000 per victim, has been assured most claims will be settled by the end of August. Lawyers believe the deadline will be missed as the business department demands minute detail from each postmaster on the value of their claim, before offering a fraction of the amount.

Bates himself has rejected their initial offer, a sixth of what he requested, labelling the package “cruel” and “derisory”.

The message is clear from Will Harrison, who is taking his late mother’s claim forward alongside Bates: “The Post Office and government should stop wasting money on legal fees, and continuing to fight against the claims, and pay victims an appropriate amount of compensation for 20 years of misery.”

If you would like your loved one to be included in The Times and Sunday Times’s Post Office Horizon scandal memory wall, please contact tom.witherow@thetimes.co.uk.