Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether officials in his Department have been notified of any payments to individual sub-postmasters following the settlement of the group litigation on the Horizon IT system on 12 December 2020.

It is impossible to ignore the financial and emotional suffering that the Horizon litigation process has caused for affected postmasters and their families. The Post Office has accepted – on the Horizon Accounting System – that it got things wrong in the past in its dealings with a number of postmasters and has apologised. This apology is only the start of a process of real change in the Post Office so that this situation is never repeated again.

The Post Office has notified the Department that they have settled two long-running and complex disputes with sub-postmasters who had declined to join the group litigation. As an operational matter for the Post Office, the Government was not party to the discussions.