Horizon: Compensation and Convictions

Debate between Tim Loughton and Kevin Hollinrake

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank the right hon. Member; he has contributed to every debate on this issue that I have been involved in as a Back Bencher and as a Minister, and he has paid close attention to this all the way through and demanded justice. As I said, the approach of the Post Office was brutal, gratuitous and shocking. Should people be held to account? Absolutely. I do not think we can start to dissuade people from taking these wrongful, disgraceful actions without a deterrent. Certainly, holding people to account by whatever means possible, including potentially prosecutions, would be a significant deterrent for people thinking of doing this kind of stuff in the future.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I very much welcome the Minister’s approach, but I also pay tribute to the work that he did to raise the profile of this issue before he took on that role. This is a scandal of historic proportions and heads must roll, with or without gongs attached to them. I am aware of only one sub-postmaster in my constituency who was pursued by the Post Office and not convicted, but it struck me that that is because I have very few sub-post offices left. Are there grounds for investigating whether the Post Office used this dodgy accounting to mismanage the profitability of individual branches to accelerate the closure programme of many of those branches, which left us, in many cases, with very few post office branches left for our constituents to use?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his work. He raises a very important point. The motivation behind the actions of the Post Office and executives and managers in the Post Office is something that Sir Wyn Williams is looking at as part of his inquiry, and I am very interested to see the results of that. There is no sense that I am aware of that this was just another method of trying to contribute towards the closure of a post office. Despite the closures that my right hon. Friend has experienced, that is principally about the general nature of the impact on high streets of changing shopping habits, which is causing difficulties for some of the network. We are determined to try to ensure that the post office network is more viable and more sustainable, including for individual businesses. A more generous deal on the banking framework between banks and post offices, in terms of the remuneration that they get to manage access to cash, for example, is one of the ways that we can make post offices more sustainable. We are fully committed to maintaining a significant network across the country, and it is currently set at 11,500 branches.