A Moral Debt To 900+ Postmasters MUST Be Paid. NOW!

Alan Bates attacks ‘quasi kangaroo court’ Post Office payouts system.

The campaigner has called for an independent body to administer payouts for public scandals, including Horizon, tainted blood and Windrush

Harry Yorke

, Deputy Political Editor

Saturday May 24 2025, 10.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

Sir Alan Bates at home near Colwyn BayANTHONY DEVLIN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

Sir Alan Bates has accused the government of presiding over a “quasi kangaroo court” system for Post Office scandal compensation and revealed he has been handed a “take it or leave it” offer of less than half his original claim.

Bates, who led the 20-year campaign for justice for sub-postmasters, has accused the Department for Business and Trade, which administers the compensation schemes, of reneging on assurances given when they were set up. Writing for The Sunday Times, the 70-year-old, who was knighted last year for his campaigning, said a promise they would be “non-legalistic” had turned out to be “worthless”.

Bates, whose contract was terminated by the Post Office in 2003 after he began raising concerns about the Horizon IT system, has now exhausted his attempts to secure the compensation he feels he is owed.

• Alan Bates: The state is still failing sub-postmasters

He has been given a final “take it or leave it” offer, which he said amounted to 49.2 per cent of his original claim, despite appealing and being referred to the scheme’s independent reviewer, Sir Ross Cranston, a retired High Court judge.

He has previously said his original compensation offer, made in January 2024, was “derisory” and just a sixth of his claim, with the second offer rising to a third.

Having lost confidence in the process, Bates is calling for the creation of an independent body that would administer compensation schemes for public sector scandals, including Horizon, contaminated blood and Windrush.

He believes a new framework for assessing compensation would deliver more consistent and fairer outcomes for victims, with the new body involving the judiciary, claimant groups and their legal representatives, as well as independent specialists, who would all have a stake in drawing up redress schemes and how claims are assessed.

The government would have limited involvement but would refer scandals to the new body and provide funding for administration and compensation.

Celebrations outside the High Court in 2021 after judges quashed the convictions of 39 former postmasters

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE

However, Bates fears it will never happen, writing: “I can already hear the sharpening of goose quills across Whitehall as the civil service prepares to snow politicians under with reasons it would not work.”

More than two years after Rishi Sunak’s government vowed to deliver justice, Bates said subpostmasters were being asked to provide evidence the government knew they did not possess, often because their claims date back 20 years. The department had “conveniently forgotten” that many sub-postmasters were “instantly locked out” of their offices when they were wrongly terminated by the Post Office, meaning that any documentation they could have relied on within that office was “lost”.

“The subpostmaster compensation schemes have been turned into quasi-kangaroo courts in which the Department for Business and Trade sits in judgement of the claims and alters the goal posts as and when it chooses,” he said. “Claims are, and have been, knocked back on the basis that legally you would not be able to make them, or that the parameters of the scheme do not extend to certain items.”

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software indicated money was missing from Post Office branch accounts. The Post Office continued to prosecute sub-postmasters even after it was alerted to potential issues with the Horizon system.

Toby Jones played Alan Bates in the ITV drama series

STV/ITV

Their plight and Bates’s efforts to secure justice were chronicled in the ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. He is one of 555 sub-postmasters who won a High Court legal action with the Post Office in 2019. That ruling paved the way for compensation, with Sunak’s government announcing a new scheme for the High Court group in March 2022.

There are now four schemes, which as of January this year had paid out about £633 million to more than 4,300 claimants.

Financial redress for Bates and the other 554 High Court claimants, via the group litigation order scheme, has been slow. It opened for registration in February 2023 and is intended for those who had their damages in the High Court settlement reduced by huge legal fees.

Claimants can opt for a fixed sum of £75,000 or to seek an individual settlement of their losses, probably requiring a much higher payout. The claims are assessed by the department initially but if there are disputes the cases are referred to an independent panel for review. It comprises a number of barristers, as well as experts from the fields of forensic accountancy, medicine and retail.

Those claimants unhappy with the panel’s determinations can ultimately be referred to Cranston.

As of March, 287 of the 446 claims made had been paid, although 155 of the claimants who have settled accepted the £75,000 fixed payment. A number of other sub-postmasters, like Bates, are deeply unhappy with the process.

They include Christopher Head, who at 18 became the UK’s youngest postmaster when he took over his local branch near Sunderland in 2006. He was suspended from his job in 2015 when he was wrongly accused by the Post Office of stealing more than £80,000.

After being offered 35 per cent of his original claim, Head was referred to the independent panel, which, rather than side with him, reduced his offer to 23 per cent. Head described his situation as “ridiculous”, adding: “I should not be going to an independent panel and coming out of it worse.”

Head fears that he is now trapped, because to have his case heard by Cranston, he must first go before the independent panel for a second time. He said that a second verdict by the panel would be binding — meaning he risked losing his original offer “for good”.

A Department for Business and Trade spokesman said: “We pay tribute to all the postmasters who have suffered from this scandal, including Sir Alan for his tireless campaign for justice, and we have quadrupled the total amount paid to postmasters since entering government.

“We recognise there will be an absence of evidence given the length of time that has passed, and we therefore aim to give the benefit of the doubt to postmasters as far as possible. Anyone unhappy with their offer can have their case reviewed by a panel of experts, which is independent of the government.”

Sunday Times.