It’s coming up to a year since ITV beamed the Post Office scandal into livings rooms up and down the country, forcing the plight of sub-postmasters to the top of the political agenda over two decades after the first issues with Fujitsu’s Horizon software were reported. Mr Bates vs The Post Office injected a sense of frenetic urgency to proceedings: after a public outcry, there were promises from a range of government ministers that sub-postmasters would finally receive justice and compensation. So where are we now?
The answer is phase 7 of the Post Office Inquiry. On Monday, attendees at Aldwych House heard evidence from three high-profile witness: Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, former Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, and chief executive of Fujitsu Europe Paul Patterson.
Reynolds evidence was the most straightforward: whatever went wrong in the past, the focus of the new Labour government is to get compensation paid as quickly and to as many sub-postmasters as possible, made more feasible after Rachel Reeves set aside £1.8bn in the Budget to cover all claims. Reynolds told the inquiry there had been a “significant increase” in the compensation paid out since the election, and said he would “consider” a deadline of March 2025 (as proposed by Alan Bates, the campaigner whose tireless work brought the scandal to light) if it was the only way to speed things up. For reference, the inquiry began in 2021, after a High Court ruling in the sub-postmasters favour in 2019. Since then, there have been six Post Office ministers, and seven Secretaries of State for Business under whom the Post Office brief sits.
You might think that finally, now everything has come to light, it will all be sorted once the 900 sub-postmasters wrongfully accused of financial mismanagement between the introduction of the Horizon software and the Hight Court judgment are properly compensated. You would be wrong. Patterson’s evidence session began late in the afternoon, when attention spans might have been flagging had his revelations not been so eye-popping. The director of Fujitsu’s European arm refused multiple times to say whether he considered the Horizon software still being used by sub-postmasters to be reliable. He also admitted he was “very worried” about the prospect of the software’s use being continued past its anticipated end-point next year. There was a very real suggestion that the errors and bugs will get worse rather than better. What the approximately 7,000 sub-postmasters currently operating in the UK will make of the fact the man in charge of the company providing the software needed for their accounts doesn’t seem to think it can be trusted isn’t hard to guess.
The headline witness, though, was Kemi Badenoch. This was not because she offered any particularly new or jaw-dropping information on the Post Office, but rather due to insight into how the UK government works and the mind of the new leader of the Tory party.
According to Badenoch, the reason so little progress on compensation was made during her 17 months as Business and Trade Secretary was “a cautious, risk-averse culture within the civil service, which is systemic and baked-in”. Officials, she argued, stalled plans to speed things up because of concern over inquiries and judicial reviews. It wasn’t that any individuals wanted to delay sub-postmasters getting justice, she was keen to stress. But everyone was so obsessed with process that took precedence over outcomes.
This is essentially the Badenoch assessment of government. “There is far too much going round and round in circles and avoiding taking serious real decisions because everyone’s worried about getting into trouble later,” she said – adding, in a flash of self-awareness, “This is something I tend not to worry about.” At another point she suggested “There is an absence of common sense in a lot of Whitehall, because people are afraid to trust themselves and trust their judgement.”
One of the most maddening questions about the Post Office scandal is why everything is still taking too long. This isn’t a party-political issue – no one in parliament is opposing compensation. Even the Post Office itself finally admit this was a terrible miscarriage of justice. Fujitsu has admitted faults with its software. So where is the resistance coming from? One suggestion was that it came from the Conservative government, in the hope of delaying payouts until after an election so as to make it Labour’s problem.
That accusation was hotly denied by Badenoch. In her worldview, the resistance comes from the “government machine” itself, which has been tied up in knots by endless rules and protocols that make it impossible to get anything done. This was the pitch on which she won the Tory leadership. She used her evidence session at the Post Office inquiry as a platform to expound her view of a civil service burdened by “too much vanilla”.
It’s a very Kemi argument – one she has used before when facing criticism as a minister. And maybe Whitehall red tape really is what’s delaying justice for the sub-postmasters. But slashing through that red tape means essentially bypassing the courts. At the very end of her session, Jason Beer KC challenged Badenoch on her impatience with the UK’s judicial system, asking: “Is it your evidence that the government’s accountability to the courts is that which prevents it from acting with speed?” She replied without hesitation: “It does slow things down”. Does that mean she takes issue with the rule of law? “The burden of regulation is not the rule of law.”
The government has little interest right now in going to war with the judiciary. Whether that changes if and when Labour ministers start to become as frustrated as Conservatives ones remains to be seen (although it’s hard to imagine Reynolds growing as radicalised as Badenoch if his own compensation efforts get stalled by the so-called “government machine”). For now, the question is how Badenoch can rebuild the traditional “party of law and order” when she sees the law itself – or, at least, some laws – as part of the problem. More In Common’s first voting intention poll since she took over as leader shows the Tories up three points, taking a narrow lead under Labour. That’s almost all down to Labour’s plummet in popularity, but it suggests Badenoch might have a small window of opportunity. Can she sell her throw-out-the-rules prescription to a rules-loving British public?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Kemi Badenoch is no philosopher-queen]
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