Post Office Horizon IT Scandal: Compensation Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business and Trade
James Sunderland
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Post Office Horizon IT Scandal: Compensation
James Sunderland Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake
The hon. Lady is one of the Members of Parliament I engage with more often than not in this place and she does a fantastic job, not least in chairing the all-party parliamentary group on post offices, so I thank her for her work. I agree with everything she said about the pace of delivery, the quality of delivery from the Post Office and making sure it meets its obligations. We have this constantly under review and we are driving this issue. We are determined to look at creative ways to accelerate compensation for all those affected by this, so we can finally draw a line under the matter. I accept we will not draw a line under it until we have held people to account for what has gone wrong, so that is something we are extremely keen to do.
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
Where there has been such a grave miscarriage of justice, it strikes me that we should be pulling out all the stops to ensure that justice is done and in a timely fashion, so perhaps the Government might consider bringing criminal charges against the Post Office and its IT advisers as a way of accelerating the process.
Kevin Hollinrake
On pulling out all the stops, I could not agree more, and that is definitely what we are doing in the Department. My days are never without one or other post office issue, which is not the situation we want. On bringing forward criminal charges, of course the Government do not do that, but when our enforcement agencies determine that there have been criminal actions, wherever those criminal actions have emanated from, we would of course expect them to take action.