Sir Alan Bates has accused the ministers of presiding over "quasi-kangaroo courts" and altering the "goal posts" on their judgements after he was made a "take it or leave it" offer of compensation amounting to less than half of his claim.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software indicated money was missing from Post Office branch accounts.
The Post Office continued to prosecute sub-postmasters even after it was alerted to potential issues with the Horizon system.
Their plight and Bates’s efforts to secure justice were chronicled in the ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Bates and 554 other sub-postmasters won a High Court legal action with the Post Office in 2019. That ruling paved the way for compensation, with Sunak’s government announcing a new scheme for the High Court group in March 2022.
There are now four schemes, which as of January this year had paid out about £633 million to more than 4,300 claimants.
Financial redress for Bates and the other 554 High Court claimants, via the group litigation order scheme, has reportedly been slow.
Writing for The Sunday Times, the 70-year-old, who was knighted last year for his campaigning, revealed that he has been offered 49.2 per cent of his original claim, despite appealing and being referred to the scheme’s independent reviewer, Sir Ross Cranston, a retired High Court judge.
He has previously said his original compensation offer, made in January 2024, was “derisory” and just a sixth of his claim, with the second offer rising to a third.
Bates is now calling for the creation of an independent body that would administer compensation schemes for public sector scandals, including Horizon, contaminated blood and Windrush.
Exposing the flawed system, Bates said subpostmasters were being asked to provide evidence the government knew they did not possess, often because their claims date back 20 years.
The department had “conveniently forgotten” that many sub-postmasters were “instantly locked out” of their offices when they were wrongly terminated by the Post Office, meaning that any documentation they could have relied on within that office was “lost”.
“The sub postmaster compensation schemes have been turned into quasi-kangaroo courts in which the Department for Business and Trade sits in judgement of the claims and alters the goal posts as and when it chooses,” he said.
“Claims are, and have been, knocked back on the basis that legally you would not be able to make them, or that the parameters of the scheme do not extend to certain items.”
A Department for Business and Trade spokesman said: “We pay tribute to all the postmasters who have suffered from this scandal, including Sir Alan for his tireless campaign for justice, and we have quadrupled the total amount paid to postmasters since entering government.
“We recognise there will be an absence of evidence given the length of time that has passed, and we therefore aim to give the benefit of the doubt to postmasters as far as possible.
"Anyone unhappy with their offer can have their case reviewed by a panel of experts, which is independent of the government.”
