Chamber and committees

So, you would not look at a simple allegation of assault. You would just send it up to the PIRC.

In other words, some evidence that there was an assault.

What is the right point in time?

I am sorry—yes. She has had many jobs.

Before we get to stage 2, would it be possible to get some information about the cases that have been before the criminal appeal court and any information about what is in the pipeline? It would be useful to know how many cases we might be dealing with.

The chain of wrongdoing that we have discussed today is a long one, indeed. It goes beyond the Post Office to include the Fujitsu engineers and officials who knew that they were abusing the system in order to get accounts to balance.

James Arbuthnot played a pivotal role in helping sub-postmasters to achieve justice. He never gave up and was never brushed off. Katy Clark and other MPs at the time were well aware of the controversy, so why were others unaware of it?

Fergus Ewing and Jamie Greene are correct to say that lessons must be learned. As Alasdair Allan highlighted, for hundreds of otherwise law-abiding people—who ran small businesses up and down the country and were important figures in their communities, helping people with their pensions, savings and benefits—the very role that they played in those communities was the one that hurt them, because of this unlawful scandal.

Sub-postmasters signed contracts to make good any losses. Why would 800 or so of them then defraud themselves of thousands of pounds, knowing that they would face criminal proceedings? That does not make a great deal of sense.

Even the helpline that was set up to help sub-postmasters to deal with the Horizon computer system was said to be an utter nightmare. People were kept on hold for hours on end when they were trying to learn how to use the system and could not get the money to balance. That was a tell-tale sign, in itself.

I appreciate that the cabinet secretary is going to consider that, but one other thing to consider is that, in the case that I raised, in which the person was not a sub-postmaster, the evidence that was used to convict him was still the same evidence, and there was no stealing of any money. Therefore, it amounts to the same principle.

This is a very important week in the Post Office inquiry, with Paula Vennells giving evidence for three days from tomorrow. As others have said, this is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. I agree with Keith Brown that the result should be criminal proceedings, and I hope that there are such proceedings.

The cover-ups, the lies that were told and the dysfunctional nature of the Post Office’s internal investigation and prosecution functions led to many lives being ruined—not just the lives of sub-postmasters but their families’ lives—suicides, financial ruin and families leaving the country due to the talk of scandal in small villages.

It must never be allowed to happen again. Politicians, including Government ministers, should take note of the role of those who did not listen to sub-postmasters or did not question things when there was an obvious sniff about the reliability of Fujitsu’s Horizon computer system.

We owe Alan Bates a great deal for having the strength to take on an institution that did everything to intimidate, bully and make criminals of sub-postmasters. In 2019, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance won a High Court case. Bugs, errors and defects were found in the Horizon system, which had caused discrepancies in postmasters’ branch accounts. However, despite that case winning compensation for victims, the question of compensation has still not been dealt with satisfactorily.

As far back as 2009, Computer Weekly wrote an article questioning the Horizon issues, so they have long been known about.

What we have heard during the public inquiry in the past few weeks has been quite shocking. Following news that sub-postmaster Martin Griffiths, who had suffered huge unexplained losses, was critically ill after attempting to take his own life, Post Office chief communications officer Mark Davies’s actions were to hire a specialist media lawyer, while he bragged about his political connections and how he might steer MPs away from looking closely at the Horizon issues. Thankfully, however, many MPs did not turn away.

Dr Alisdair Cameron, the chief finance officer, said that, when he joined the Post Office in 2015, there was an attempt to shut down the work of the forensic accountancy organisation Second Sight, which had been hired to independently review Horizon. There was unease that it was, in fact, doing its job. Second Sight was sacked after completing its damning report. Surely by then alarm bells must have been ringing up and down the United Kingdom. Second Sight revealed that the Post Office had prosecuted some postmasters for theft and false accounting without investigating claims that the Horizon system was to blame for the shortfalls.

Last week, Jarnail Singh, an in-house lawyer who had saved an attachment about discrepancies to his hard drive, claimed in his evidence not to know how to save a document. What we are hearing is incredible. That was the man who led the team to which Russell Findlay and Fergus Ewing referred, which came to Scotland after panic set in that the Crown Office in Scotland was about to recommend that all cases involving Horizon be terminated. By 2013, it was clear that the Post Office had a secret agenda to prevent that policy from happening. We can imagine the implications of Scottish authorities saying that they would terminate all cases, and the ripples that that would have caused in England and Wales. If that had happened, I believe that things would have been different. That is why I think that the Scottish Government was wrong to pursue legislation at Westminster. I believe that there would have been less scrutiny of the role of our Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. There must be accountability for such decisions, but we still do not have full accountability for them.

Another example that has been mentioned involved a Gorbals post office that was run by sisters Jacquie El Kasaby and Rose Stewart, where the accounts were beginning to show deficits to the tune of £34,000, which we know now did not exist. In 2014, the sisters handed over £10,000 of their own money to settle the case, as many others did in their own cases. That was despite the Second Sight report being available for all to see.

In 2014, prosecutor Angus Crawford became unconvinced by the Horizon evidence, which he thought was too weak to stand up in court. I believe that other cases were not proceeded with, and I would like those to be clarified.

As has been mentioned, following the meeting with Jarnail Singh and senior procurators fiscal, the guidelines for the Crown Office appeared to change from recommending that cases using Horizon for corroboration be terminated to one of assessing matters on a case-by-case basis. That was on the basis of a full report. I assert that if the Post Office had not lied to procurators fiscal and the Crown Office had stuck to its original recommendation, and—as I said at First Minister’s question time a few weeks ago—had been a little less naive, those four cases would not have proceeded.

It is the duty of all procurators fiscal to disclose, if they uncover the fact, that there have been unsafe convictions, and we still require an answer from the Lord Advocate as to why, from 2019 to this day, no victims were written to. It is not acceptable.

I will, in a minute.

As the Lord Advocate said in her letter to me, in those four cases there was a plea of guilty when the people concerned were obviously innocent—a plea of convenience, it would be called—and it is obvious that those victims pleaded guilty in order to get a way out of prosecution.

Exactly. If I may paraphrase, the dogs in the street knew that there was a sniff around Horizon, as did Computer Weekly in 2009, so why was that not enough at least to halt cases at that time?

I maintain that, if the Crown Office had stuck to its recommendation and its officials had even contacted Second Sight forensic accountants, they would at least have had a conversation, as I have done in my office, with Ron Warmington, the director of Second Sight, who said that Second Sight could have explained why it said in its report that there were bugs and defects and that 76 branches had unreliable accounts.

I have other questions about the four cases that were proceeded with using Horizon, where there was a plea of guilty.