Post Office lawyers discussed charging victims of the Horizon scandal a fee just to access the compensation schemes, the inquiry has heard.
Portfolio manager Mark Underwood emailed general counsel Ben Foat and in-house solicitor Rodric Williams in January 2020 to say that the Post Office could not seek payment from applicants ‘however small and regardless of the rationale behind it’. Underwood went on to say that charging sub-postmasters would be ‘extremely challenging and would be a position that I believe the business would struggle to maintain under political and media pressure’.
The email was revealed to the inquiry during questioning of Post Office chief executive Nick Read last week. Ed Henry KC, representing a group of postmasters, described the proposal to charge fees to anyone accessing compensation as an ‘atrocious line of thinking’. Read accepted that the idea seemed ‘bizarre’.
Underwood’s email outlined that, instead of charging fees, the Post Office could ‘achieve the same desired outcome’ through a ‘very tight and clearly communicated set of eligibility criteria and requirements in terms of the documentation applicants have to provide in order to be accepted into the scheme’.
Henry suggested the ‘desired outcome’ being discussed was to restrict access to the scheme and deter applicants. Read replied: ‘Possibly.’ Henry said this attempt to set a high bar for applications was a ‘more subtle and insidious method’ of reducing compensation claims – particularly because it was accepted by that time that postmasters had found it impossible to get hold of documents related to their case.
’Those advising you all knew, when this demand for contemporaneous document was hatched, that subpostmasters would have great difficulty in complying with it', said Henry. ‘The people in this email, one of whom, of course, was Mr Williams, Rodric Williams, would all have known the difficulties for sub-postmasters of obtaining contemporaneous documents, when these were historic events that had occurred many, many years before and where they had been subjected to such unfairness.’
Read replied: ‘That’s a disturbing conclusion, yes.’
The Post Office points out that £363m has now been paid to more than 2,900 people affected by the Horizon IT scandal. But some postmasters have said they are required to provide evidence of losses and documents from decades ago.
At the inquiry, Read agreed he would be ‘deeply concerned’ if the compensation process mutated into a legalistic or adversarial process.
He accepted the process had been ‘overly bureaucratic’, saying: ‘There are many examples, I think, where bureaucracy got in the way, things have gone wrong. I don’t think that is necessarily borne out by people being malicious in any way. I just think that is a poor process, rather than it being anything more than that.’
He added: ‘Where there are disputes or where there are issues associated with technical reasons, we have got ourselves to a position where we pay interim payments and we try and work out how we resolve those particular disputes.’
The inquiry continues.
