Alan Bates has suggested post office operators could take fresh legal action if the government fails to set a deadline for compensating them.
The campaigner revealed on Tuesday that he has written twice to Keir Starmer requesting an end of March deadline for post office operators to receive financial redress. Bates told MPs he had received no response from the prime minister, and that he and other campaigners wrongly accused of fraud in the Horizon IT scandal were considering legal action.
Speaking to the business and trade select committee, Bates said that “if deadlines are not set for the schemes to be finished then there’s every chance … it might be quicker for us to go back to court”.
He added: “Deadlines do need to be set. You can’t have an endless piece of string on this. People have been waiting far too long, over 20-odd years. There’s over 70 [who] have died along the way … there are people well into their 80s still suffering.”
Asked if he might go back to court with a crowdfunded campaign, he said: “I would never say never. It is a consideration. I would not say I haven’t spoken to people about this.”
Bates said taking legal action would mean halting the current compensation scheme, but added: “That might be a choice people are prepared to take. We’ve got a group coming up in a few weeks’ time and that’s one of the options that we’re going to discuss.”
Asked whether the government’s schemes were intended to serve the best interests of post office operators, Bates told MPs: “Initially, I think there were thoughts that it was going to be of benefit to the subpostmasters, which is why we engaged with the process right at the start.
“How it’s turned out is it doesn’t seem to be for the benefit of … it does seem to be for the benefit of the department more than anything else, to run it through at their speed and their say-so.”
Bates said he wrote to Starmer a month ago, and again a week ago. In January, when asked in an LBC interview about delays to compensation payments, Starmer, then opposition leader, urged Conservative ministers to “get on with it. Do at least that bit right.”
The prime minister’s official spokesperson said he had replied to Bates earlier on Tuesday. “It was right that we took the time to consider the issues raised in the letter to the prime minister, consider our response, make sure it was accurate and substantial, and obviously we engaged with relevant departments to ensure that the prime minister’s response was as full as possible,” he said.
Also on Tuesday, at an evidence hearing of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, the civil servant formerly in charge of the business department denied that she had told a Post Office executive to delay compensation payments until after the election.
Henry Staunton, the former Post Office chair, had alleged that Sarah Munby told him to “stall on spending on compensation and on the replacement of Horizon” and to “limp … into the election” with the lowest possible financial liability.
Munby, who held the role of permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from July 2020 to February 2023, told the inquiry on Tuesday that she was “shocked and astonished” by his allegation.
“His claim that I told him to stall compensation payments is completely false,” she said in evidence provided to the inquiry. “I never told Mr Staunton, directly or indirectly, expressly or by implication, that the Post Office should stall on compensation or otherwise delay or reduce compensation payments to subpostmasters. I did not say anything that could sensibly have been understood to convey that implication.”
Munby said that there was a “significant set” of contemporaneous documents about the alleged conversation with Staunton, including a note written by the former chair, which “do not support the accusation in any way”.
She added that she had neither seen nor heard any evidence that any member of the civil service, or minister, ever held had a conversation with Staunton or any other Post Office executive indicating that compensation to post office operators should be “deliberately delayed” in order to save money.
Munby, who said she only had one meeting with Staunton – who was fired by the then business secretary Kemi Badenoch in January – before moving government departments, did say that there was a “longstanding debate” with the Post Office about what government and Treasury saw as “excessively high spend on their own lawyers”.
In one quarterly update in November 2022, Munby said, she was briefed that the Post Office had spent about £80m on one law firm alone. “Nobody within the Post Office could possibly have interpreted my ask for management of these costs as a request to slow down compensation payments to subpostmasters,” she said.
Staunton has said that a note he wrote referred to his recollection of Munby saying that in the run-up to the election, there was no “appetite to ‘rip off the Band-Aid’” and that “now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues”.
“Mr Staunton was describing major changes at the Post Office, as his note records,” said Munby at the inquiry on Tuesday. “He was discussing the potential closure of over a third of branches and a total change to the Post Office’s status and constitution.”
