UK government sets out plans to exonerate Post Office scandal victims

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The UK government on Thursday set out the terms of unprecedented legislation to quash all convictions in the Post Office Horizon scandal to be delivered before the end of July.

Kevin Hollinrake, postal affairs minister, said the government’s legislation would exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters in England and Wales, who were wrongly prosecuted using flawed evidence from the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.

The legislation is controversial as it will wipe the slate clean for those who have broken the law. Hollinrake said this was a “price worth paying” to right one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were convicted in cases brought by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 using data from the faulty Horizon IT system developed by Japan’s Fujitsu.

Measures announced on Thursday will cover prosecutions brought by the Post Office and about a dozen cases led by the Crown Prosecution Service for offences such as theft and false accounting.

Legislation will exclude cases where the Department for Work and Pensions had been the prosecutor. Separate legislation will be required in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Hundreds of innocent people who ran the Post Office branches were condemned to bankruptcy and imprisonment. Though some had their convictions quashed on appeal, the court has been slow to process cases, leaving many in limbo and unable to claim compensation.

“The judiciary and the courts have dealt swiftly with the cases before them, but the scale and circumstances of this prosecutorial misconduct demands an exceptional response,” Hollinrake said.

The intervention follows a pledge by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to act to exonerate sub-postmasters, after a television drama last month triggered a public outcry.

Neil Hudgell, a lawyer acting for more than 100 convicted sub-postmasters, said…