The problem with the whole Post Office Horizon scandal from day one has been that nobody listened to the postmasters.

Their initial complaints about the IT system’s shortfalls, their unsuccessful defences based on bugs in the software, the flaws they identified in the mediation scheme, the absurd tactics they faced in fighting the group litigation. At ever step these people were ignored, accused, vilified and ultimately exonerated. Now we risk forgetting their plight all over again.

That it took an ITV drama to get the mainstream media and political leaders to take notice will forever be a mystery and a source of deep regret, but victims could at least take comfort from the fact they were being heard.

But has the attention already turned away? The Post Office scandal is still centre stage but coverage of this week's session of the House of Commons business committee  appeared to have moved on from the victims’ stories to the soap opera that is the leadership of the Post Office itself.

One Sky News reporter wrote that while three victims including Alan Bates had given evidence, the ‘star turn’ was former Post Office chairman Henry Staunton.

Staunton’s submission that he was victim of a smear campaign led most of the news reports of the meeting as the row between him and the government escalated. He shocked MPs by revealing that Post Office chief executive Nick Read was under investigation and had wanted to resign because he was unhappy with his pay. The Post Office issued a statement denying this was correct.

All great knockabout stuff, and certainly the leadership of a British institution such as the Post Office is newsworthy fodder.

But none of this unseemly carry-on really makes a difference to the victims and their prospects of full and swift compensation.

Very little mention was given in news reports to the admission by Addleshaw Goddard, the firm advising the government on the group litigation compensation scheme, that just eight qualified lawyers were assigned to the task (for context, James Hartley from Freeths, representing some of the claimants, told the committee it had 23 lawyers on its own working on this).

Again largely unreported, Hartley predicted that it would take up to two years for all victims to get full and final redress, prompting committee chair Liam Byrne to call for new deadlines (and fines for missing them) to focus Post Office minds to the job. MPs were told that some offers were so problematic that there was no way they could be signed off by claimant lawyers. Many of the cases supposedly settled may need to be reopened because offers were so low.

These are ongoing issues that have a far greater effect than the circus in the Post Office boardroom. While executives and politicians argue, victims wait and in an alarming number of cases die without redress. The only story leading the coverage should be the failings of the compensation schemes.

As Tim Brentnall, one of the three victims who spoke so impressively before the committee, summed up: ‘I do not want interims or steps; I want to be able to not worry about the Post Office and not think about it nearly every day. I want to put it behind me and move on with my life.’

The trouble is the media and perhaps too the politicians are being distracted by the sideshow of boardroom clashes. They need to consider, as they failed to do for so long, that the end to this scandal lies with listening to wronged postmasters. Until they are given full and fair redress, everything else is irrelevant.

 

Topics