Welcome to today’s session of the Business and Trade Committee as we continue our investigations into securing justice and redress for the sub-postmasters who were victims of one of the worst scandals in British justice in our history. I am very grateful to David and Glenys Eaton, who are joining us for our first panel today. Welcome to the Committee, David and Glenys. If I may, I would like to start by saying how sorry the Committee is about the experience that you went through and how grateful we are to you for, after all this time and everything that you have been through, having the courage and strength to step forward and give testimony to the Committee today. We very much hope that the evidence that you give us today will help us as a Committee to pursue justice on behalf of everybody else who has not yet had redress. David, could I please start with you? Could you very briefly give us an overview of how your conviction was quashed? After the legislation was passed almost two years ago, what happened? How did you find out that your conviction had been quashed? What was the process that you went through?

Basically, I received a letter on 1 October 2024. It was just a letter saying that my conviction had been quashed, and with it was a list of solicitors who could help me. I registered online myself on the 7th, and on the 15th I engaged Howe+Co on my behalf. When I spoke to Howe+Co on the 15th, I mentioned my wife, who was jointly accused with me, but they had no knowledge of Glen at all. So with that, Howe+Co made inquiries to the justice system to find out what was going on. This was in the 10th month of 2024. It was four months before my wife got a reply to tell her that her conviction had not been quashed.

I see. So you had a letter, quite quickly after the Act was passed, about your conviction. How quickly did the Government then pay the redress payment to you? Was that quite quickly?

It was four months later, in 2025. What I couldn’t understand was that it was only the first part of the payment. I couldn’t understand why, if they were going to pay the redress, it wasn’t all paid in one sum. I think it was just £200,000, and then we had to wait and see. Why wasn’t the whole amount paid at the same time? It didn’t make sense.

Was the rest of the payment ever paid?

It was paid, yes. That came on 27 February 2025.

I see. So it was a little bit after.

Yes.

Let’s get into the situation that Glenys went through.

Well, Albert, our solicitor, applied on 15 October, when I contacted him originally, and it was on—let me see; bear with me.

The 14th of February.

It was on 14 February the following year that my wife got a letter saying that her conviction was not quashed; she did not meet the requirements.

Yes.

Yes.

The issue was that we were convicted on the same date, with joint charges. We went to the same court, pled before the same judge, and were sentenced on the same day. We had the same set of solicitors and barristers, yet my wife, according to the Post Office and the Ministry of Justice, did not qualify. What they based their assessment on was that the Post Office had said that my wife was not employed with them on the April before the offences, and that there was no record of income tax. To be clear about this, we were self-employed: we purchased the post office, owned the post office, and managed it jointly. We were not employed directly by the Post Office, we were subcontracted, so how they can come up with that, I don’t know. But that was for more than 12 months, no matter what was said to them—I personally wrote to them twice, on two occasions. If it had not been for Howe+Co, we would have been lost. I would say that other people in the same situation are struggling now. They have not heard, will not be notified and are not believed. Basically, the Ministry of Justice replaced the Post Office and took over in the way they treated us.

They should have done, because obviously we owned the post office.

The evidence was there.

But they wouldn’t look into it.

They wouldn’t look into it. What transpired, as was reported to our solicitors, Howe+Co, was that they only investigated my side of the case into the courts, not my wife’s. They took the decision on the basis that the Post Office said that she wasn’t employed by them. But according to them, on the date of the offences, she robbed somewhere else, not the post office.

Glenys, when were you told that your conviction was finally considered eligible to be quashed under the Act?

That was only weeks ago, literally. It got to a point where we knew that we were in the right; Howe+Co were fighting every corner they could for us, and it came to a point where they said, “We need to go to a judicial review,” so we were asked to employ a barrister who would fight our corner. We had to pay over £5,000 for his services, but we knew we were in the right, and the only way we were going to get justice was to fight on, which is what Albert, our solicitor, was determined to help us to do. As soon as they realised that we were going to a judicial review—

In three days.

They immediately turned tail and said, “We have reviewed your evidence”—the barrister submitted identical evidence to what had been submitted before—

Twenty-two pages.

He had not changed a thing, but according to them, they had new evidence and they were going to overturn my sentence. It was all done literally in days, which made me very angry because we had spent all that time trying to tell them to review it, look at it closely, and look at what evidence had been presented, but all they did was take note of what the Post Office had said and disregarded anything that we had said.

Because we were liars.

It was only the officialdom of the barrister fighting our corner that actually got some movement on the case.

During that process, did you have a named person that you could talk to, or was it all by letter or by email? How did it work practically?

Albert, our solicitor, was amazing. We contacted him on WhatsApp and on the phone, and we did a Zoom meeting with him and David Enright from Howe+Co. We were kept in the loop all the way and they were absolutely brilliant. They really were so helpful and determined to see it through. Had it not been for them, we would not have got anywhere.

I would like to add that I wrote to the Ministry of Justice twice. I sent eight questions for them to answer. They never answered one question. The second time I wrote, I asked them to answer again, and they just came back with an email one paragraph long saying that there was no evidence to support it. That is how they treated us; no matter what we said, they didn’t want to know.

Well done for challenging it and for keeping at it, but you really should not have had to.

Absolutely not. The evidence was there from the very beginning. It was in the papers and was reported at our trial. They had all the evidence that it was a joint venture. For them to turn round and say that my wife must have committed an offence somewhere else on that particular date was offensive—it was just unbelievable. For 12 months they kept my wife so upset. I can very much understand why people commit suicide. It was important that we were able to support each other. There must be people out there now who do not know that they can address these issues but are just being fobbed off. Howe+Co could have charged us from the beginning, when my wife’s case was dismissed. They could have charged us to act on our behalf, but they didn’t. They took it on themselves.

Glenys, what was the emotional impact of going through this rollercoaster once again, after everything that you have been through?

It was pretty horrible—

Sorry, could you come slightly closer to the microphone? It is a bit hard to hear you.

The time in prison was absolutely horrible. It was then a time when we had got on with our life and had moved on and made a new life in a new area. We had settled down and forgotten about it. Bringing it all back up again has not been nice, and it has not been comfortable. Some of the time you feel very irritated and very angry about the way you have been treated, because we are not dishonest people, and we try and live an ordinary, good life. We have got on with our lives and we have built back up what we had lost. We were happy and breezing along and then this letter came out of the blue saying that Dave’s sentence had been overturned. We thought, “Wow! How did they know where we were?” We had moved completely from the area that we had lived in before. We were 100 miles away, so we thought that there was no way anyone would have known where we were. It came out of the blue, and it brought it back to the front of our minds again and we thought, “Wow! This is brilliant, we are going to get some redress from the horrible time we went through.” It has been constantly on our minds, and with all the letters and the to-ing and fro-ing of the solicitors all the time, it has not been allowed to settle back down again. It was a relief when Dave’s money was paid and an even bigger relief to be told mine will be paid. It feels now as if maybe we can get back on with life again and forget about the Post Office. But I feel sorry for so many other people who are in the same boat that we were in and who have got no one to fight their corner. We hope that maybe this will get people moving and get some redress for this horrible time for everyone.

May I just add to that? Just before we took it to the judicial review, we contacted our MP, and she passed it on to one of her staff, who passed it on to the MP who I understand was responsible for the Ministry of Justice. They came back after a week or so and said, “Oh, he’s been in touch with the Ministry of Justice, and there’s no reason for the change of decision.” That was the end of that little corner.

Gosh. Extraordinary.

That is how, again, they just weren’t interested.

Another dead end.

Absolutely.

David and Glenys, thank you so much for what you are doing on behalf of all of us who have constituents affected by this. Glenys, what would have happened to you if David had not been told that his conviction had been quashed? What do you think you would be doing now?

We would have been carrying on as we were in our old life. Nothing would have changed—we were not even aware that there was a redress system. As far as we knew, it was all in the past. We had finished that side of things with the Post Office and we had moved on. Admittedly, watching “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, we sat there enthralled and thought, “Gosh! That’s exactly what we went through. Those poor people—and how many of them!” We never realised. We thought we were just a one-off.

We were told we were the only ones.

You’re told when you put a complaint in, “It’s not happening to anyone else. It’s got to be you.”

That’s right.

Then to find out how many hundreds of other people had been so badly affected by it, it just made you angry. But there’s nothing you can do. You just have to fight your own corner and hope that you win, which is what we have hopefully done.

Thank you very much indeed. It is quite a bad line, so I am going to draw this panel to a close. David and Glenys, thank you so much for having the strength and the courage to give us evidence today. It is hugely appreciated. Your evidence is on the record and it will form part of the report that the Committee publishes in the aftermath of these hearings, with recommendations to Ministers for the changes that they need to make so that we can be sure that nobody else—nobody else—has to go through the appalling experience that you have gone through. Thank you very much indeed for giving your evidence to the Business and Trade Committee this afternoon. That concludes this panel.