Sir Alan Bates has branded the compensation schemes established for victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal an "utter disaster", warning that government involvement has undermined efforts to deliver justice to affected postmasters.
Speaking before the Public Accounts Committee on Monday (June 1), Bates, who led a two-decade campaign on behalf of thousands of sub-postmasters wrongly accused over accounting shortfalls linked to the faulty Horizon IT system, said the compensation process had become overly complex, legalistic and distressing for claimants.
“I’d have to say they were an utter disaster to be quite frank,” he told the public accounts committee of MPs. “There are so many reasons why they were wrong and why they caused so much grief, even nowadays. 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 said that discussions about the design and implementation of schemes for redress and compensation “started quite well” but ultimately became too complex and “legalistic” by the time they were implemented.
“They did listen to a lot of our points,” he said. “But the scheme that came out at the end seemed so different. The first thing the department did was go out and hire an expensive team of lawyers to put the scheme together. It got bogged down. It has got so legalistic [which] turned it into this enormously complex and threatening thing for victims.
"Most victims just want a fair outcome. They just want to move on.”
Bates argued that compensation programmes should instead be managed by a genuinely independent body, with government providing funding but not direct oversight.
"The civil service just grinds schemes into the ground," he said. "It has to be a totally independent body seen to act independently and have authority to do so."
Bates also suggested that a significant number of former postmasters had chosen not to pursue compensation despite being contacted by the government, citing a deep loss of trust in the system.
His comments come as the government begins winding down the various compensation schemes linked to the scandal. According to the latest figures, £1.48 billion has been paid to more than 11,500 claimants as of 27 February, although thousands of claims remain unresolved.
The Horizon scandal saw more than 900 postmasters convicted of offences including theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015 after faults in the Horizon computer system falsely indicated financial shortfalls in branch accounts.
In 2024, those convictions were overturned through unprecedented legislation passed by Parliament.
Bates reached a multimillion-pound settlement with the government in November last year, more than 20 years after beginning his fight for justice on behalf of affected postmasters. He has continued to press for faster and fairer compensation for those whose lives and livelihoods were devastated by the scandal.