Rishi Sunak used the start of Prime Minister’s Questions today to announce that the government will be introducing legislation to exonerate the victims of the Post Office scandal. A planted question from Tory party deputy chair Lee Anderson enabled the Prime Minister to say:
The victims must get justice and compensation… today I can announce that we will introduce new primary legislation to make sure that those affected as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated.
Only yesterday, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was saying the government wanted to exhaust all options before taking ‘radical’ action like introducing legislation for a mass exoneration. There have been concerns from the legal world that this would represent a disruption to the separation of powers between parliament and the legal system. But clearly ministers feel those concerns have either been answered – or are secondary to the news agenda now that everyone is interested in the scandal.
This is an election year, which is why Anderson also called for Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey to ‘take his own advice, clear his desk, and clear off’ because he was the minister when sub-postmasters were trying to raise the alarm. Sunak didn’t address that point, but he will undoubtedly allow his campaign colleagues to do so too. He later accused Stephen Flynn of ‘trying to politicise’ the scandal, but the fact is that until this became political, things were moving far too slowly.
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