The Post Office has paid out a quarter of a billion pounds in legal fees in relation to the Horizon IT scandal, almost equal to the amount that has been given so far to victims, states a recent report.
According to a freedom of information (FoI) request submitted by the Lawyer magazine and published by The Guardian, the state-owned body paid out £256.9 million to 15 law firms and two barristers chambers between September 2014 and March 2024.
The largest amount shown in the FoI was £163.6m paid to the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, which said its work had been “complex and wide-ranging, involving hundreds of our staff over a number of years, and working with millions of documents in relation to the inquiry”.
It is also reported that Herbert Smith Freehills had no role in prosecuting post office operators and its work for the Post Office in relation to Horizon began long after the state-owned body stopped the prosecutions. Its work has included helping the Post Office settle the high court lawsuit in December 2019 and supporting the financial redress to victims.
The figure for legal fees is almost the same as the £261m of financial redress that has been paid out to victims of the scandal as of the end of last month. The official figures show that the £261m has been paid so far to 2,800 claimants across three separate schemes. These include £54m for people who have had their criminal convictions overturned, as well as £126m for post office operators who had financial shortfalls in their branches, and £80m for claimants in the high court lawsuit brought by the campaigner Sir Alan Bates and 554 branch owner-operators against the Post Office.
A public inquiry into the Post Office is looking into what was known by its executives about problems in the IT system after it was rolled out to branches. The inquiry is due to start its seventh phase later this year.
More than 900 post office operators were wrongly convicted in the courts using IT evidence from the Horizon computer system, including 700 convictions secured by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015. New legislation quashing hundreds of convictions of branch owner-operators was passed before the general election in July.
Simon Hannah
