Post Office: GLO Compensation Scheme

Richard Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I again pay tribute, as I think the whole House does, to the right hon. Gentleman’s extraordinary work on this issue. He is right not only to highlight my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam, who I have engaged with this morning over this, but to pay tribute to Alan Bates and all the work that he and his team have done. I was talking to him earlier. It was not until he got going in 2009 that this really started to unravel for the Post Office.

To the right hon. Gentleman’s main point, he is absolutely right to say that we cannot allow an injustice such as this to not meet justice. Of course, we have a free legal system in this country, and Alan and his colleagues were saying to me earlier that if it were not for democracy and the freedom of our courts, we would never have got this far. To really get to the nub of the right hon. Gentleman’s point: I agree with him, and we will not allow any process or shyness of what it might uncover to prevent the legal process from being able to run its full course.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

As a former chair of the all-party parliamentary group on post offices, I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, the compensation scheme announcements—particularly on the benefits disregard—and the comments on the timing of what will happen, but I think there are going to be some shocking lessons from all this that we will need to learn. These revolve around who knew what, and when, and what the role of the Federation of SubPostmasters was in standing up or not standing up for its members during this crisis. I hope the Secretary of State will agree that when the inquiry is finished there should be another debate in this House to make sure that we really do learn those lessons, including, as two or three Members have said, the crucial point about how technology cannot be wrong.

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I had not realised that he was a former chair of the APPG, so I thank him for his work on this issue. On his central point, the lessons absolutely have to be learned. As I said earlier, anyone who has watched this just as a bystander, not having had their life turned upside down, can still feel their blood boiling, but what it was like to be involved in this must have been unimaginable. I hope this will be a salutary lesson for the idea that a computer can never be programmed in an incorrect way, or have a loophole or a problem, not just with regard to the Post Office or even Government procurement but for every walk of life and everything that computers are now involved with.