Payment to subpostmasters ‘not happening fast enough’, says Business and Trade Committee chair

The embattled Chief Executive of the Post Office is stepping down after five years in the role.

Nick Read’s tenure has been dominated by the Horizon IT scandal, and there’s been growing criticism over the speed at which compensation has been paid to subpostmasters wrongly convicted of stealing.

Mr Read had already temporarily stepped back from the role to focus on the final stage of the inquiry, but will leave the Post Office for good in March.

We spoke to Liam Byrne, who’s chair of the Business and Trade Committee, and started by asking him what he wants to hear from Nick Read when he addresses the Post Office Inquiry next month.

Liam Byrne: Nick has been the captain of a very difficult ship, at a very difficult time. He has got to be candid about what is the unfinished business, how do we get the Post Office fit for purpose on a 21st century high street? And crucially, what is it really going to take to make sure that these poor subpostmasters that still haven’t been paid do get paid – fast?

Cathy Newman: Under his leadership, nearly £300 million of compensation has been paid to nearly 3,000 subpostmasters. Does he have an argument that he had started to turn the organisation around? The current post office chair says that cultural change is happening.

Liam Byrne: I mean, there has been progress. There is now, as you say, about 300 million that’s been paid out. But remember, the budget for redress is about 1.3 billion. And when you look at some of the victims of the Post Office scandal, if you look at those that were wrongly convicted, for example, only about 7% of the budget for their redress scheme has been paid out. So there are still lots and lots of victims here who still do not have what they deserve.

Cathy Newman: Do you think ultimately he’s carried the can for misjudgements, such as paying himself and his senior leadership team a fat bonus for appearing in front of the inquiry? He’s since repaid that bonus, but was that one of the errors that he’s carried the can for?

Liam Byrne: I don’t think that helped. But the truth is that there has been a turbulent leadership at the Post Office for some years. I’m afraid that past politicians do bear some of the responsibility for that. Frankly, I think he’s taken the right decision and we now need fresh leadership at the top.

Cathy Newman: Your party is now in power. What are you, as chair of the business committee, going to be doing to ensure that compensation, that remaining compensation, does get paid?

Liam Byrne: So the new committee doesn’t get formed until the end of October and so I can’t bind what a future committee will examine. But this remains the biggest unsorted scandal in British legal history. And so I am 99.9% confident that we are going to want to be all over the acceleration of the redress schemes. We need cheques for redress landing on the mats of subpostmasters who were the victims of this scandal. And for me, that process is just not happening fast enough yet.

Cathy Newman: So now we’ve had this clearout at the top, does the Post Office itself need to be disbanded? Does it need to be a sort of radical rethink?

Liam Byrne: I don’t think the Post Office itself needs disbanding, but there are definitely some big questions that it’s got to confront about how it is going to thrive on the 21st century high street.

Cathy Newman: Do you think that executives should be going to jail in future?

Liam Byrne: I think there is a really strong case for that. And what we don’t want, as a parliament, is to see the kind of stories that we’ve heard in the wake of the Grenfell inquiry, where it may take years and years for prosecutions to be brought. One of the things, for example, that I want parliament to move forward with quite quickly is an examination of whether Paula Vennells committed a contempt of parliament by providing misleading evidence to MPs that we’re investigating – not on one, but on two different occasions. That is something that I’ll have to discuss with the new committee when it is formed. But, there have got to be consequences for people at the top of organisations in this country that make huge mistakes. The impact on thousands and thousands of people. The Post Office scandal is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history. Surely someone has got to pay a price for overseeing that debacle?