Post Office scandal LIVE: Alan Bates reveals he’s still waiting for compensation and Jo

Watch live coverage from the Commons’ Business and Trade Committee today as the bosses of the Post Office and Fujitsu and Alan Bates are questioned:

Fujitsu’s Paul Patterson has conceded there is a ‘moral obligation’ for the technology giant to contribute to the compensation for subpostmasters.

He told MPs on the Business and Trade Committee: ‘I think there is a moral obligation for the company to contribute.’

He added that ‘it’s also important that the inquiry deals with these very complex matters’, and ‘in that context, absolutely we have a part to play and to contribute to the redress, I think is the words that Mr Bates used, the redress fund for the subpostmasters’.

Earlier, Alan Bates revealed his own compensation was submitted around the start of October and he is still waiting for his first offer – but does not expect to receive one until the end of this month.

He added that cases ‘hit a dead end once they go into the department’.

Earlier this morning, Jo Hamilton (pictured arriving in Westminster) described how trying to secure compensation from the Post Office has felt ‘like being treated like a criminal all over again’.

She added: ‘They want you to justify every item and then there are forensic account reports and then you have to put everything into the machine and then months later it comes back and it just goes on and on. It’s like being retried.

Ms Hamilton also said: ‘They convinced me it was my fault. I wasn’t tech savvy 20 years – they convinced me I’d made a hash of it. They literally gaslit me for three years. I know a lot of the group and they are literally falling apart.’

The European boss of Fujitsu has also told MPs the company gave evidence which was used to send innocent people to prison during the Horizon scandal.

When asked if the Japanese technology firm’s evidence was used for this evidence, Paul Patterson (right), chief executive of Europe for Fujitsu Services, said: ‘Yes, there was evidence from us.

‘We were supporting the Post Office in their prosecutions. There was data given from us to them to support those prosecutions.

‘The information shared with the Post Office as part of our contract with them was very clear – the Post Office also knew there were bugs and errors.’

Fujitsu Europe director Paul Patterson has apologised to subpostmasters as he appeared before MPs.

He told the Business and Trade Committee: ‘To the subpostmasters and their families, Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice.

‘We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors in the system. And we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of subpostmasters. For that we are truly sorry.’

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, a former member of Fujitsu’s fraud and litigation support office has said a draft witness statement sent to her defending the software now causes her concerns her because ‘obviously we had bugs in the system’.

The inquiry heard Rajbinder Sangha was sent the draft statement on July 14, 2010 shortly after joining the company but was copied into an email chain a week later which saw colleagues discuss issues regarding duplicate transactions on the system.

The statement sent to Ms Sangha read: ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief at all material times the system was operating properly, or if not, any respect in which it was not operating properly, or was out of operation was not such as to affect the information held within it.’

Here is the exchange at the inquiry today:

• Counsel to the inquiry asked the witness: ‘Did it not cause you any concerns about the reliability of the statement?’
• Ms Sangha replied: ‘At the time, no, because I was not involved in producing a witness statement for going to court proceedings.’
• The counsel continued: ‘Does it cause you any concern now?’
• The witness replied: ‘Yes, it does.’
• Asked why it caused her concerns now, Ms Sangha said: ‘Because obviously we had bugs in the system.’

Attention has turned to the Horizon software at the heart of the scandal in recent days, with Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office, and Paul Patterson, Europe director at Fujitsu, both due to appear in front of MPs later.

Kevin Hollinrake, the Post Office minister who has argued that Post Office figures found responsible for the scandal should be jailed, is to appear in the afternoon.

MPs will interrogate what Fujitsu and the Post Office knew about problems with the Horizon system and when.

Mr Read took over at the Post Office in September 2019, after the scandal emerged, and last year handed back around £54,000 in bonus payments linked to the firm’s co-operation with the public inquiry into the crisis.

Mr Patterson has been in his current role since 2019 but has worked for Fujitsu since 2010.

Jo Hamilton (pictured arriving in Westminster this morning) said it was ‘sickening’ to think the money she repaid to the Post Office was being ‘played with’.

She was wrongfully convicted in 2008 of stealing thousands of pounds from the village shop in South Warnborough, Hampshire.

Ms Hamilton said she believed the cash she paid back was ‘hoovered into profit and loss’ by the Post Office, and that ‘it’s gone’.

Asked how she would feel if some top Post Office executives potentially received some of her money in form of bonuses, she told MPs: ‘It’s sickening really, to be honest.

‘The fact that we were shouting so loud at one point and everything was known, and yet our money was just being played with. You know, they look profitable at one point and it was our money.’

Alan Bates said ‘everyone’s going to be surprised about how much was known’ early on by the Post Office and the Government about what was going wrong with the Horizon system.

Appearing before the Business and Trade Committee, the former subpostmaster who has led the campaign for justice said it is for the inquiry to establish the level of Fujitsu’s culpability.

‘My gut feel on this, having looked at lots of paperwork over the years, is how much did the Post Office really know in the early days and how much did government really know in the early days about what was happening at Fujitsu?

‘I think everyone’s going to be surprised about how much was known.’

Fellow campaigner Jo Hamilton added that if the inquiry finds Fujitsu is culpable, ‘they should pay their share’ of the compensation.

Earlier today, Jo Hamilton appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and spoke about how she began her fight for justice after meeting Alan Bates in 2009:

Here is a video of Post Office campaigner Alan Bates saying this morning how he is ‘frustrated’ with the Horizon scandal compensation schemes:

Subpostmaster campaigner Alan Bates has told MPs the Horizon scandal is ‘madness’ and has demanded cases are sped up. Here is the story on MailOnline:

Leading Post Office campaigner Alan Bates has also slammed the bureaucracy involved in the Horizon scandal compensation schemes.

Mr Bates, who is part of the Group Litigation Order Scheme, said it was ‘bogged down’ in red tape.

Appearing before the Business and Trade Committee, he also agreed with the description by chairman Liam Byrne that officials processing compensation schemes were ‘not busting a gut’.

On his own claim, he said: ‘I think it was 53 days before they asked three very simple questions. It’s madness, the whole thing is madness. And there’s no transparency behind it, which is even more frustrating. We do not know what’s happening to these cases once they disappear in there.’

Jo Hamilton, the wrongfully-convicted former subpostmistress, has also now begun giving evidence to the Business and Trade Committee this morning.

She criticised the red tape and bureaucracy involved in the Horizon scandal compensation schemes.

Ms Hamilton told MPs: ‘It’s almost like you’re being retried … it just goes on and on and on.’

Over at the inquiry which is happening simultaneously, there has now been evidence that in 2010, Fujitsu employees reported issues of ‘duplicate transactions’ not being removed on Post Office electronic point of sale service (EPOSS) machines operated by the Horizon system.

Responding to the issue flagged by his colleague, software developer Gerald Barnes said in a peak incident management system shown to the probe: ‘Duplicate transactions are listed in the spreadsheets produced and presented to court for prosecution cases.

‘These can give the defence team grounds to question the evidence.’

Mr Barnes added: ‘If we do not fix this problem, our spreadsheets presented in court are liable to be brought into doubt if duplicate transactions are spotted.’

Alan Bates, the campaigning former subpostmaster on whom the recent ITV series centred, has now begun giving evidence via videolink to MPs at the Commons’ Business and Trade Committee hearing into the Horizon scandal.

The Horizon scandal could be ‘in the tens of thousands’ if the families of affected subpostmasters are taken into account, lawyer Neil Hudgell said.

He told the Business and Trade Committee: ‘It’s not just the subpostmasters here that suffered greatly. There’s another class of people that cannot be compensated in a way. That’s the spouses, the children, the parents.

‘The spouses that have miscarried because of the stress of things, spouses that have committed suicide because of the stress of things.

‘The kids that have got behavioural disorders that ended up out of school early and whose adult life is now shattered because of that.

‘Parents that have died estranged from family members.

‘And that’s another strand of this scandal that needs to be looked at. In the same way as people that were not subpostmasters, but suffered financial loss directly, they are not compensatable at the moment.

‘So, the scandal is in the thousands, but it could be in the tens of thousands.’

Lord Arbuthnot has said there needed to be scrutiny of Post Office auditors in the wake of the Horizon scandal.

He told MPs on the Business and Trade Committee: ‘The auditors either did or should have noticed that there was a potential liability building up within the Post Office that was likely to give rise to costs of, we now see, £1 billion. If the auditors failed to realise that, was it because they weren’t looking at the right things?

‘Or was it because they were ticking boxes? Or did they realise that and not bring it to the right people’s attention with sufficient oomph? I don’t know.’

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told MPs that while his clients overwhelmingly welcomed plans to exonerate convicted subpostmasters, there was concern about the ‘cheapening of exonerations’ over the fact some guilty people could also end up benefiting from the process.

‘The devil is in the detail of how it all unfolds,’ he said.

Before today’s hearings, a whistleblower claimed the Post Office could change accounts on the Horizon system remotely and without postmasters knowing from as early as 2001.

A source claimed senior managers would have had to be ‘pretty stupid’ to not know the Horizon systems could be altered.

The former employee of the Post Office, who worked in a Yorkshire call centre during the 2000s, said their helpdesk team could edit cash and stock on live terminals using the system. Here is the full story on MailOnline:

Over at the Horizon IT inquiry, a Fujitsu software developer has described issues with Post Office sale systems as ‘endemic’ in 2008.

Gerald Barnes logged a response to a complaint from an employee at a helpline in which he said there seemed ‘little point’ attempting to fix the Post Office’s electronic point of sale service (EPOSS), which was run by Horizon software, because there would be ‘many other’ issues to ‘catch you out’.

Mr Barnes recorded his response on a ‘peak incident management system’ – a system used to record and manage fault incidents.

The inquiry heard that on December 20, 2007, an employee of the National Business Support Centre flagged an issue of ‘discrepancies still showing’.

On January 2 the following year, Mr Barnes recorded his response to the issue raised, saying: ‘The fact that the EPOSS code is not resilient to errors is endemic.

‘There seems little point fixing it in this one particular case because there will be many others to catch you out.’

Dr Neil Hudgell said the mental health of many subpostmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal has suffered and can be improved through accountability,

The lawyer for subpostmasters told the Business and Trade Committee: ‘This isn’t about the flawed IT system and, in many senses, it’s about decisions made on the back of that flawed IT system. So, who made those decisions, who was responsible for that? Fujitsu are certainly part and parcel of that.

‘I think that it links back in a sense to why we need closure this year, because part of that for the good people here is accountability.

‘We, and the Post Office have seen this, we’ve got in excess of 100 psychiatric reports for people diagnosed with all sorts of depressive illnesses, post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, everything that you can possibly think of.

‘There are two things that come out with those reports that the Post Office are aware of. One of them is to bring about an improvement in mental health is accountability. And Fujitsu a part of that.

‘The other thing is closure to this litigation, closure to this compensation.

‘So, there is clear medical evidence that draws a link between the mental health of subpostmasters and this ongoing trauma around the whole Horizon scandal.’

Pictured below: Former post office workers celebrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in April 2021 after their convictions were overturned.

The role played by Fujitsu in the scandal is also coming under the microscope today as the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry returns.

The probe is now hearing evidence from staff at the technology giant who assisted the Post Office with prosecutions.

Rajbinder Sangha, a former member of Fujitsu’s fraud and litigation support office, is facing questions this morning from the public inquiry’s counsel.

Dr Neil Hudgell, executive chairman at Hudgell Solicitors, told MPs that only three of his former subpostmaster clients who had been criminally convicted had received compensation.

He said: ‘Within the convicted cohort of clients that we have, of the 73, three have been fully paid out.’

He told the Business and Trade Committee: ‘It sounds perverse to say this, but I’m not sure that enough resources are thrown at it in terms of the right results into the right areas.

‘For example, routinely with the overturned conviction cases it’s taking three to four months to get a response to routine correspondence.’

Asked by committee chairman Liam Byrne if government bureaucracy was ‘dragging its feet’, he replied: ‘That’s the only logical conclusion that that I can come to.’

Lord Arbuthnot, a member of the Horizon compensation advisory board and a long-time campaigner on the Horizon scandal, said he would like redress for subpostmasters to be finalised by the end of the year.

Appearing before the Business and Trade Committee, he said: ‘This has gone on for more than 20 years. And if we can sort it out by the end of the year, that would be a welcome change. Let’s hope we can get it sorted out before August.

‘It’s essential for these people who are living hand to mouth, and some of them still bankrupt, that there’s money to be paid as soon as possible.

‘I hope it is a matter of weeks, rather than months. In some cases it will be a matter of months. But it must not be a matter of years, it mustn’t spill into next year.’

Wrongfully-convicted former subpostmistress Jo Hamilton has been photographed arriving in Westminster for the hearing today. She is set to give evidence later.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is facing calls to resign over links to disgraced Post Office boss Paula Vennells, who he is said to have supported for the Bishop of London role – despite the Horizon scandal.

Queen Elizabeth II’s former chaplain, Rev Canon Jeremy Haselock, has called for Archbishop Justin Welby to resign after claims emerged that he had endorsed Vennells for the position.

Church sources have claimed the Archbishop was supportive of Vennells when she was shortlisted to become Bishop of London in 2017, which is the third most senior role in the Church of England.

This was despite the suggestions that postmasters had been wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting. Here is the full story on MailOnline today:

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week announced that the wrongly prosecuted in England and Wales could have their names cleared by the end of the year under fast-tracked legislation after growing pressure to take more serious action.

Those whose convictions are quashed are eligible for a £600,000 compensation payment, while Mr Sunak offered £75,000 to subpostmasters involved in group legal action against the Post Office.

The Prime Minister has faced calls to go further and bar Fujitsu from securing Government contracts and pursue the firm for compensation payments.

The Horizon scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses handed criminal convictions after Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon software made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.

The Government has been scrambling to exonerate them and pay out compensation to those affected.

The long-running battle for justice accelerated dramatically after the public outcry provoked by the ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.

The Horizon software started to be rolled out in Post Office branches across the UK in 1999 and over the subsequent years a series of subpostmasters were prosecuted over missing funds.

In 2019 the High Court ruled that Horizon contained a number of ‘bugs, errors and defects’ and there was a ‘material risk’ that shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.

The scandal has been labelled one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

The Work and Pensions Secretary has said it was important to await the outcome of the inquiry into the Horizon scandal, ahead of the questioning by MPs today.

Mel Stride told Sky News: ‘We have moved so swiftly to make sure that we bring justice, that we exonerate those people as quickly as possible, that we have the right compensation schemes in place so that we’re able to compensate people as quickly as possible.

‘As to justice and what may follow, I do think it’s important that we have a thorough, independent process and we set that up some couple of years back to make sure that we have a really thorough investigation.’

Bosses from the Post Office and Fujitsu are being grilled by MPs as recriminations for the Horizon scandal continue. Read today’s full preview on MailOnline:

The following people are giving evidence to MPs on the Commons Business and Trade Committee over the Horizon scandal today:

• 10am: Dr Neil Hudgell, executive chairman of Hudgell Solicitors
• 10am: Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom.
• 10.30am: Alan Bates, founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance
• 10.30am: Jo Hamilton, former sub-postmistress.
• 1130am: Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office
• 11.30am: Paul Patterson, director of Fujitsu
• 12pm: Kevin Hollinrake MP, Minister for Enterprise
• 12pm: Carl Cresswell, director of business resilience at the Department for Business and Trade

Good morning and welcome to MailOnline’s live coverage as the bosses of the Post Office and Fujitsu and the former subpostmaster who has led the campaign for justice in the Horizon scandal are being questioned by MPs today.

The Commons’ Business and Trade Committee is examining what more can be done to deliver compensation for victims of what has been labelled one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office, and Paul Patterson, Europe director at Fujitsu, are both due to appear.

Alan Bates, as well as wrongfully-convicted former subpostmistress Jo Hamilton, are set to give evidence from 10.30am, followed by Mr Read and Mr Patterson from 11.30am.