Speeches by Thomas.

“Our sense is that people will want to begin the process initially by making a judgment as to how big and wide their claim should be. Once they bring their claim forward, advice can be made available. What we have wanted to do as well, though, is to give another route for people to get swifter redress, so we have introd…”

“As we have alluded to, there are things relating to the use of forms that are provided going forward. As I say, we have introduced a fixed-sum payment in the Horizon shortfall scheme to, in a very direct way, help speed up redress for those people when the Post Office has the responsibility for running that compensatio…”

“Legal advice is available to people who choose to ask for a full assessment of their legal claim.”

“That is probably a question for me—[Interruption.] Sitting suspended for Divisions in the House. On resuming—”

“Given the number of people who were yet to have compensation when we came into office, I absolutely want to speed up the process.”

“My basic analysis is that we have to do more to get redress out the door more quickly.”

“On the overturned convictions scheme, we are making reasonable progress on getting redress out to the victims who are covered. On the GLO scheme, which I am sure we will come to, we are now confident, having talked to the claimants’ lawyers, that by the end of March we will be able to get substantial redress out to all…”

“On the process of giving compensation to all those who are identified as having had a conviction and as having had it overturned in the legislation we voted for in the last Parliament: a compensation scheme had not been set up for those individuals by the time of the general election. Those details have been left for u…”

“As you have just discussed with Heidi, we inherited the system after the last Parliament took the decision to overturn the convictions of all the sub-postmasters, but none of the details of the compensation process had been sorted out by the time of the election. That was left for us to sort out.”

“I think it would be an understatement to say that there has been considerable criticism of the compensation process. Many of the sub-postmasters I have spoken to who were victims of the scandal have criticised the speed and, on occasion, the number of requests that they have received for extra information to help judge…”

“Just to be clear, we have delivered that message in a significant way to the Post Office. One of the reasons why we have actively introduced fixed-sum payments is to try to make the process easier for a relatively large number of people. We meet on a regular basis with claimants’ lawyers to understand ongoing cases, in…”

“We are certainly trying to avoid that perception. We are trying to be as generous as we can. The motivation behind requests for additional information is to enable us to make a more generous offer. We are depending on the scheme wherever we can—we are making interim payments and, where we have been told that there are …”

“We are certainly aware that what has occasionally happened is that the requests for information have come late in the GLO process—after our first offer has been tabled. When a challenge process kicks in we are happy to be held to account, and 90% of challenges will be responded to within the 40-day process. I hope that…”

“If you will forgive me, this is a good moment to mention that Sir Gary Hickinbottom has just been appointed as the chair of the HCRS appeals process. He is again helping us to make sure the newest compensation scheme learns from some of the lessons of past ones. On HSS, there is an independent process. We think that th…”

“I certainly hope it is not, but as I said earlier, this is the compensation scheme I am most concerned about. We are talking actively to the Post Office about what can be done to speed the process up. It is one of the reasons why we are trying to take some of the pressure off the scheme by ensuring that the appeals pro…”

“That is a criticism we would accept, and we are looking at speeding that up. When we ask for additional information now, it is to try and give a more generous offer—that is the motivation—but I recognise that we need to do that earlier in the process to avoid creating these frustrations. That is an issue that claimants…”

“Yes. On occasion, the criticism has been that requests for additional information have come quite late in the 40-day process.”

“There are a number of things we have done. The introduction of fixed-sum payments is one that we think will help significantly to speed up victims’ access to fair redress, where it is appropriate. We have introduced a whole new compensation scheme following the decision of Parliament in the last Session to overturn the…”

“We have encouraged the Post Office to look afresh at the support they are getting from lawyers. I have made it clear to the Post Office that they need to look at ways to speed up the process.”

“We have certainly made it clear to the people working for us on our schemes and we have also told the Post Office that directly.”