Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has dismissed need for a March 2025 deadline for compensating Post Office Horizon scandal victim, saying "an arbitrary cut-off date could result in some claimants missing the deadline".
In a response to Sir Alan Bates' call for a March 2025 deadline, Sir Keir Starmer's spokesperson today (5) stated that there would not be a deadline imposed.
"What we don't want to do is set an arbitrary cut-off date which could result in some claimants missing the deadline," the spokesperson said. "We obviously don't want to put pressure on claimants and put them off contesting their claim."
However, victims involved in a landmark case against the Post Office that ended in 2019 "should receive substantial redress by the end of March and we are doing everything we can to achieve that goal", the spokesperson added.
Earlier today (5), Sir Alan was giving evidence to the Business Select Committee when he told MPs that he has twice written to the Prime Minister in the past month to say "it needs to be finished by the end of March 2025".
"I never received a response," Sir Alan said, adding, "Deadlines do need to be set. People have been waiting far too long."
Sir Alan first wrote to the PM on Oct 2 and again a few days ago, urging him to make sure victims get full financial redress by March next year.
“People have been waiting far too long, over 20-odd years, there’s over 70 that have died along the way in the GLO group. There are people well into their 80s now that are still suffering. They’re still having to put up with this as well. They shouldn’t. They really shouldn’t," he said.
Bates himself has twice declined compensation this year, saying the first offer in January was "cruel" and "derisory", and about a sixth of what he had claimed.
When asked today by Liam Byrne, the committee chair, whether he would consider crowdfunding to return to court, Sir Alan said, “I would never say never.”
Legal action was one of several options his campaign group was planning to discuss at a meeting in the coming weeks, he said.
“I know that if we decide to go down that route we are going to halt the current scheme, and it’s going to be at least six, 12 or 24 months before it moves forward in that direction," Sir Alan said, adding: "That might be a choice people are prepared to take."
More than 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 after faulty Horizon accounting software made it look as though money was missing from their shops.
Appearing alongside Sir Alan were former subpostmaster Dewi Lewis, who was jailed for four months after being wrongfully convicted of theft from his branch, and Jill Donnison, a claimant who worked in her late mother’s branch.
Donnison criticised some of the questions she had been expected to answer as part of her efforts to seek compensation as “long-winded and impossible to answer”.
She said claimants were expected to know how much they had lost even though key data was missing from the records, with documents provided by the Post Office “practically illegible”.
Hemandra Hindocha and wife Kirti
Hemandra Hindocha and wife Kirti