Offering £900 legal fees for Post Office victims is laughable

It is glib to suggest that no amount of money will ever compensate for the humiliations, the family breakdowns, the decades of not working and the mental anguish inflicted on postmasters wrongly prosecuted and pursued by the Post Office over allegations of theft and false accounting.

One of the tragic elements of this scandal is we may never hear the full stories of every one of the estimated 700-plus victims, such is the sheer number of testimonies that might be available.

One person’s tale was heard yesterday, before the public inquiry set up to investigate all aspects of the Horizon IT scandal. Edward Henry KC explained how Janet Skinner had been a pillar of her community and a much-loved and respected figure among customers and her bosses. After the Post Office’s prosecution and her subsequent imprisonment, she turned from pillar to pariah, shunned by friends and neighbours and accused – entirely falsely – of stealing people’s pensions. She refused to let her teenage children see her in jail and when she was released the family could only secure condemned housing. She walks permanently with a limp due to a serious illness suffered shortly after her sentence finished. As Henry concluded: ‘These people have been changed in a way that not even you or I can see.’

People caught up in this saga have died prematurely. They have committed suicide. They have permanent physical and psychiatric health issues.

No amount of money will make any of that better but proper compensation will at least give the victims a semblance of restitution and the (albeit minor) restoration of faith in our tainted legal service.

Yet the reports coming out of the inquiry yesterday suggest that the process for compensating these people is once again failing them. As lawyers for the victims pointed out, the scheme is subject to inordinate delays already, offers are being made well under what is eventually agreed, and there are unresolved issues for people who were made bankrupt by their injustice and have ongoing commitments to pay off debts.

What is clear is that victims need legal representatives to fight their corner, no matter what assurances the Post Office makes about full and fair compensation.

The government announced this week – coincidentally timed the day before the inquiry was due to discuss compensation issues – that it would create its own scheme for those ineligible to receive compensation so far. These are the postmasters who fought the dam-bursting civil case but ended up with a relative pittance after litigation funders were paid off.

The government's intervention was welcome but laced with a caveat: it would pay legal fees of only £900 per claimant as part of ‘reasonable fees’ to prepare their claim.

This figure is laughably small. The preparation of heads of claim, evidence-gathering about physical and psychological trauma and advice on whether an offer is acceptable cannot be done for £900. The government must realise this, and must know there is the likelihood that many claimants will simply go unrepresented. It would be interesting, as an aside, to know whether the Post Office lawyers will work for £900 per claim.

If the Post Office could be trusted to compensate victims fully without lawyers being heavily involved, then this offer of ‘reasonable fees’ might hold. But trust is a commodity that has long since expired. We cannot properly compensate for this dreadful episode, but we can ensure that injustice stops now. £900 per claimant is not going to cut it.