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The government will introduce unprecedented legislation on Wednesday to quash all convictions in England and Wales relating to the Post Office scandal, one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
The bill, which the government hopes to pass into law before the end of July, will exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted using flawed evidence from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system.
It will cover alleged offences carried out between 1996 and 2018 involving sub-postmasters, their employees, family members or direct employees of the Post Office, the government said.
Sub-postmasters can either accept a “fixed and final offer” of £600,000 in compensation or have their claims assessed under existing processes, where the size of the payout has no limit, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said.
More than 700 sub-postmasters were convicted for alleged offences, including theft and fraud, in cases brought by the Post Office, using data from the faulty Horizon IT system developed by Japan’s Fujitsu.
The legislation is controversial because it will wipe the slate clean for any who may have broken the law. The Post Office, which is state-owned, has privately told ministers it would have opposed appeals by nearly half of the 700 sub-postmasters convicted, arguing that non-Horizon evidence supported the convictions.
The judiciary has also pushed back over the proposed mass exoneration because of concerns it would cut across the independence of the courts.
The government said it would make “all efforts” to ensure the law was targeted at those wrongly convicted. It would require any sub-postmaster to sign a legal statement “vowing they did not commit the crime for which they were originally convicted” before receiving financial compensation.
Hundreds of innocent victims were condemned to bankruptcy and imprisonment. Though some had their convictions quashed on appeal, the courts have been slow to process cases, leaving many in limbo and unable to claim compensation.
The government’s intervention follows a pledge by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to act to exonerate sub-postmasters after a television drama in January last month triggered a public outcry.
“We owe it to the victims of this scandal who have had their lives and livelihoods callously torn apart, to deliver the justice they’ve fought so long and hard for, and to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” he said. Separate legislation will be required in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The government said it would also offer a fixed payment of £75,000 to sub-postmasters who were never convicted or part of a lawsuit against the Post Office but “still suffered considerably” as a result of the Horizon scandal.
The government said it had so far paid around £179mn in compensation to 2,800 claimants.