Rules to prevent companies taking private prosecutions in the way the Post Office went after innocent post office operators are being considered by the government.
The move by the government to consider removing powers of prosecution from the Post Office and other entities is part of a response to the Horizon IT scandal that could also lead to companies involved, including the tech company Fujitsu, being asked to shoulder the financial burden of providing compensation, a cabinet minister indicated on Tuesday.
A cabinet meeting chaired on Tuesday morning by the prime minister is expected to discuss urgent plans drawn up by ministers to clear the names of hundreds of post office operators who were wrongly convicted of theft and fraud in the scandal.
The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, is also holding talks with senior judges to confirm how the convictions can be overturned as soon as possible, so victims can have speedier access to millions of pounds of compensation.
Options are understood to include blocking the Post Office from challenging appeals by hundreds of victims, allowing operators to appeal en masse, and passing legislation that would automatically quash convictions.
But the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, said during interviews on Tuesday that the government was also looking at changing the rules around private prosecutions by companies after the Post Office pursued its former employees during the Horizon scandal.
Stride stopped short of saying Fujitsu, the firm behind the faulty Horizon accounting software, should be barred from winning government contracts while the Post Office inquiry is continuing.
“My view is that we need to wait to see what the inquiry decides in terms of culpability,” he told Times Radio.
“Now in the event that it determines that Fujitsu made a number of knowing mistakes and caused all sorts of problems that wouldn’t have otherwise have occurred, then that would strike me as being quite a serious situation and I would expect some very serious consequences.”
But he indicated in an interview on Sky News, when asked if Fujitsu should help foot the bill from the scandal, that the government would look to others when it came to costs.
“I think it is certainly the case where we are not going to be in a position where we are saying: ‘Oh it’s the taxpayer who is picking up the bill here,’” he said.
Such cases should never again be prosecuted by organisations such as the Post Office on their own behalf, a former director of public prosecutions also said on Tuesday, calling it a “recipe for disaster”.
The scandal was a “system failure” that would not have happened had the Post Office not had the power to bring prosecutions against its own staff, said Ken Macdonald, who was DPP for England and Wales between 2003 and 2008 and is now a cross-bench peer.
There was “some burden of blame” on ministers who did not act, he told Times Radio, adding: “They should have been much more proactive in interrogating the Post Office and in satisfying themselves that this wasn’t going horribly wrong.”
However, there was also pushback on Tuesday morning against automatically quashing the convictions, an idea supported by figures including two former justice secretaries, the Tory MP Robert Buckland and the Labour peer Charlie Falconer.
Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general for England and Wales, said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was “not a particularly commendable approach”.
Like a royal pardon, it would not necessarily “get rid of convictions”, he said, warning that anything short of total exoneration for those convicted in the Horizon scandal would feel like a shortcut.
A former chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, Prof Graham Zellick KC, also said he did not believe legislation was the right approach. “I am pretty confident that given the necessary resources the CCRC could do this job very quickly and the court of appeal could respond with equal expedition,” he told BBC Radio 4.
The scandal was “deplorable” and “chiefly a political failure”, he added, saying it was only now that anyone was seizing on the issue with conviction because of the recently broadcast ITV drama that told the story of the wronged operators.
