‘Utter disaster’: Alan Bates attacks schemes compensating post office operators

Sir Alan Bates has said that the schemes set up to compensate post office operators over the Horizon IT scandal have been an “utter disaster” and that the government should not be involved in running them. Bates, who led a two-decade fight for justice for thousands of post office operators falsely accused and wrongfully convicted for theft and false accounting, has previously accused the government of presiding over a “quasi-kangaroo court” system for compensation. “I’d have to say they were an utter disaster to be quite frank,” he told the public accounts committee of MPs on Monday. “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. …