Wrongly convicted sub-postmasters continue to be dogged by the ‘abyss’ of compensation negotiations, one of their lawyers has told MPs. Neil Hudgell, executive chairman of Hudgell Solicitors, said that of more than 70 people represented by his firm who have had their convictions overturned, just three have agreed a full and final settlement.
Around 30 individuals have accepted in principle the government’s offer of a £600,000 settlement and most of the others have had interim payments, he told the business select committee today. A further 150 of his clients were not convicted but were affected by the Horizon IT scandal, with 200 more people coming forward in the past two weeks.
But with hundreds more people set to be exonerated by primary legislation announced last week, Hudgell said the process of securing redress is already proving to be slow and is adding to victims’ suffering.
He pointed out that in comparison to the Post Office spending £100m on ‘defending the indefensible’ in civil proceedings, his clients were being asked for heads of loss such as proof of travel expenses for attending probation meetings from 15 years ago. Red tape was holding up the ‘over-engineered’ process, he suggested.
‘We have good relations with the Post Office at face value but [agreements in principle] seem to go into this machine, this abyss, and morph out later in a different form,’ said Hudgell. 'We now have a really good opportunity to change that dynamic and that is on the back of the mass acquittal process [where] someone can self-certify they are not a criminal.
‘If it is good enough in that forum it is good enough for innocent people who have been badly wronged to self-certify [what] it has cost and therefore that forensic trawl should be relaxed.’
Hudgell questioned whether the Post Office, which insists it is fully committed to the compensation process, has allocated enough resources to administer the various schemes on offer. He said that it took three to four months to get a response to routine correspondence and in the historic shortfall scheme - set up for victims who were affected by the scandal but not convicted of any crime - there is a six-month wait for a panel decision on awards.
‘There are too many layers of bureaucracy', he added. ‘We have had examples of situations where decisions have needed to go through four layers of decision-making to get an outcome.’
Hudgell also pointed out that the current compensation schemes do not take any account of the suffering caused to relatives of wrongly convicted people. These include spouses who have had miscarriages or taken their own lives linked to the stresses caused by the scandal, children who have developed disorders and not been able to finish school, and parents or grandparents who died thinking their child or grandchild was a criminal.
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