Victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal who settled their financial redress claims without legal advice have received £137,000 more on average after appealing.
Former subpostmasters, who had already settled through the Horizon Shortfalls Scheme (HSS), but believed they were underpaid having received no legal support, were permitted the opportunity to appeal through a scheme managed by the government in September.
Lawyers representing these victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal, which saw thousands of subpostmasters wrongly blamed and punished for unexplained shortfalls, said their original claims were “worryingly undervalued”.
Hundreds were wrongly convicted of crimes, even jailed, and many more were made bankrupt after being blamed. The new government scheme meant 2,228 former Post Office branch subpostmasters could appeal if they believed the settlement did not reflect their losses and suffering.
More than six months after the government announced the appeal process, Hudgell Solicitors has released details of appeal outcomes, revealing huge increases in compensation payments. A sample of 30 appeals reviewed by Hudgell Solicitors collectively saw the total paid grow by more than £4m, averaging about £137,000 extra per claim.
For example, former subpostmaster Bob Stevenson, who was suspended from his position in 2002 over an alleged shortfall of £10,000, received £51,200 compensation in May 2023. This has been increased to £502,000 on appeal.
Hudgell Solicitors said the Post Office initially only offered compensation for the money Stevenson, now 81, had paid into accounts to make up for shortfall losses, distress and inconvenience. “There was no award for the impact of his suspension and termination of contract, the loss of his business, house and subsequent bankruptcy,” it said.
Stevenson said: “It was only when I had the full legal advice that I began to appreciate the full financial impact of what happened to us had on our lives. We lost our business, which we’d bought for more than £100,000; we’d lost our house; and my son lost everything as he’d given up a managerial position to come and run our shop, which we also lost.”
Other examples include compensation offers being increased, following legal advice, from £4,400 to £133,700; from £17,700 to £253,900; and from £21,690 to £238,000.
Lawyer Neil Hudgell said the new appeals process has been “absolutely essential”, adding: “Overall, on the evidence of what we have seen from the cases we’ve seen the details of, it’s very likely many of those HSS cases, which completed without sub-postmasters having had legal advice, will have been undersettled.”
Campaigning former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates recently called for advanced dispute resolution meetings to overcome delays in settling complex claims in another compensation scheme for group litigation order (GLO) redress. These are the subpostmasters who successfully sued the Post Office in the 2018/19 GLO, proving the Horizon system was to blame for account shortfalls.
Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
