00:00 MPs returned to the Commons this week after the Christmas recess. The best of the festive
00:06 season's TV viewing might make for pleasant small talk in the corridors of power, but
00:11 tends not to dominate parliamentary debate.
00:14 The computer system the Post Office spent an arm and a leg on is faulty.
00:18 That is, until ITV's four-part series on the largest miscarriage of justice in British
00:24 history. The brilliant and blood-boiling Mr Bates vs. the Post Office, which aired last
00:29 week, tells the story of the Post Office's Horizon scandal.
00:34 Between 1999 and 2015, more than 700 Post Office branch managers were given criminal
00:41 convictions for fraud and theft after faulty Fujitsu accounting software Horizon made it
00:47 look like money was missing from their accounts.
00:50 The docudrama has prompted MPs to push for an emergency debate in Parliament to correct
00:56 the injustice and pay compensation to the hundreds of sub-Postmasters who were wronged.
01:02 People don't actually imagine what it's like to be the victim, you know, to have your money
01:07 taken away, lose your house, lose your job, lose your reputation, sometimes lose your
01:13 life. But what that docudrama did was crystallise all that for people. So now we've got tens
01:19 of millions of people who probably knew about the thing in the first place, because there
01:22 have been other programmes about it, but now they're furious about it. All of them fail
01:28 as convictions on the same single lie, and that is that nobody else had access to their
01:36 computers. It's a lie, and once you've corrected the lie, the conviction falls away.
01:41 Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey served as Postal Affairs Minister for over a year
01:46 in the Conservative Lib Dem coalition government. He has received criticism over his handling
01:52 of the scandal, refusing to meet the sub-Postmasters' campaign leader Alan Bates in May 2010.
01:58 Well I wish I knew then what I know now, what we all know now, that this was a conspiracy
02:04 on a huge scale, with the Post Office lying to the victims, to judges, to ministers of
02:09 all political parties, over decades. This is quite a national scandal, and I think at
02:15 the front of our minds should be those people, those sub-Postmasters who've had their lives
02:19 ruined.
02:20 Of the 736 sub-Postmasters who were prosecuted, only 93 have had their convictions overturned,
02:28 whilst 54 have been upheld, withdrawn or rejected.
02:32 Pauline Stonehouse had her conviction for false accounting quashed in November 2021,
02:38 but is still waiting to receive her compensation in full after a decade of trauma.
02:43 It's a lot of stress for me and my husband. And then obviously the knock on effect with
02:50 the children, having to move schools, especially for the older one. It's a big impact, and
02:56 then not being able to get a job because I've got to declare that I had a criminal record.
03:03 So yeah, a big impact with health and many, many problems connected to that as well.
03:11 The Prime Minister says he wants compensation to be paid out much faster.
03:15 Now what we are now looking at is how can we speed all of that up. Understandably, I'm
03:21 very clear, we want to get that out the door as quickly as possible. There are legal processes
03:26 that people have had to go through, but the Justice Secretary today is meeting with the
03:30 relevant ministers to see is there more we can do to speed up some of those processes.
03:34 But people should be rest assured, the money is there.
03:37 Meanwhile, the Labour leader has called for prosecution powers to be taken away from the
03:42 post office.
03:43 I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the post office and given
03:47 to the Crown Prosecution Service. I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service. We've prosecuted
03:53 for other departments. We can do it here. That should be done straight away. And these
03:57 convictions, the remaining convictions, need to be looked at en masse.
04:01 Both Rishi Sunak and Sakhir Starmer have joined calls for Paula Venels to be stripped of her
04:06 CBE. She was the post office's CEO between 2012 and 2019, when the company routinely
04:14 denied there was a problem with the Horizon IT system. A petition calling for Ms Venels
04:19 to hand back her honour has surpassed one million signatures.
04:25 They've suffered decades of anguish, but the victims of the scandal will hope that new
04:29 impetus will finally deliver them justice and compensation.
04:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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