LONDON — Sir Alan Bates testified before the UK Parliament's public accounts committee on Monday, criticizing government-run compensation schemes for victims of the Horizon IT scandal as overly legalistic and lacking independence.
“I’d have to say they were an utter disaster to be quite frank,” Bates said. He added, “There is a fundamental problem with all of these schemes. That is that the government shouldn’t be involved with them. That is the biggest mistake about the whole thing.”
Bates, founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, said discussions about redress “started quite well” but the final schemes became bogged down in legal processes that victims found intimidating. He noted that many affected post office operators refused to engage with compensation efforts even when contacted directly by officials because “they had lost trust in the system.”
He urged that future schemes be administered by a fully independent body. “The civil service just grinds [schemes] into the ground. The government has to be involved at the highest level. It probably has to fund it – in our case until the real guilty [parties] cough up towards it as well – [but] it has to be [run by] an independent body. I think true independence would be very key. It has to be a totally independent body seen to act independently and have authority to do so,” he said.
More than 900 post office operators were convicted between 1999 and 2015 based on faulty data from the Horizon IT system. Their convictions were overturned in 2024 by an act of Parliament. As of 27 February, the UK government has paid £1.48bn to at least 11,500 claimants through Horizon-related compensation schemes. Thousands of claims remain unresolved as the government begins winding down the programs.