Put up Workplace attorneys mentioned charging victims of the Horizon scandal a price simply to entry the compensation schemes, the inquiry has heard.
Portfolio supervisor Mark Underwood emailed basic counsel Ben Foat and in-house solicitor Rodric Williams in January 2020 to say that the Put up Workplace couldn’t search fee from candidates ‘nevertheless small and whatever the rationale behind it’. Underwood went on to say that charging sub-postmasters could be ‘extraordinarily difficult and could be a place that I imagine the enterprise would battle to keep up underneath political and media strain’.
The e-mail was revealed to the inquiry throughout questioning of Put up Workplace chief government Nick Learn final week. Ed Henry KC, representing a gaggle of postmasters, described the proposal to cost charges to anybody accessing compensation as an ‘atrocious line of considering’. Learn accepted that the concept appeared ‘weird’.
Underwood’s e-mail outlined that, as an alternative of charging charges, the Put up Workplace may ‘obtain the identical desired final result’ by way of a ‘very tight and clearly communicated set of eligibility standards and necessities when it comes to the documentation candidates have to supply so as to be accepted into the scheme’.
Henry recommended the ‘desired final result’ being mentioned was to limit entry to the scheme and deter candidates. Learn replied: ‘Probably.’ Henry mentioned this try and set a excessive bar for functions was a ‘extra refined and insidious technique’ of decreasing compensation claims – notably as a result of it was accepted by that point that postmasters had discovered it unattainable to pay money for paperwork associated to their case.
’These advising you all knew, when this demand for contemporaneous doc was hatched, that subpostmasters would have nice issue in complying with it’, mentioned Henry. ‘The folks on this e-mail, one in every of whom, in fact, was Mr Williams, Rodric Williams, would all have identified the difficulties for sub-postmasters of acquiring contemporaneous paperwork, when these had been historic occasions that had occurred many, a few years earlier than and the place they’d been subjected to such unfairness.’
Learn replied: ‘That’s a disturbing conclusion, sure.’
The Put up Workplace factors out that £363m has now been paid to greater than 2,900 folks affected by the Horizon IT scandal. However some postmasters have mentioned they’re required to supply proof of losses and paperwork from a long time in the past.
On the inquiry, Learn agreed he could be ‘deeply involved’ if the compensation course of mutated right into a legalistic or adversarial course of.
He accepted the method had been ‘overly bureaucratic’, saying: ‘There are lots of examples, I believe, the place forms received in the way in which, issues have gone mistaken. I don’t suppose that’s essentially borne out by folks being malicious in any manner. I simply suppose that could be a poor course of, relatively than it being something greater than that.’
He added: ‘The place there are disputes or the place there are points related to technical causes, we’ve received ourselves to a place the place we pay interim funds and we attempt to work out how we resolve these specific disputes.’
The inquiry continues.