Post Office Horizon IT scandal: Alan Bates rejects second offer

As bad as the post office behaived. And it is finguck disgracefully.

What seems the most effective way of preventing this behaviour. Is some way to ban parliment from passing its duty to manage the judiciary on to 3rd party organisations.

Seriously our courts police and CPS is supposed to be how laws are kept equal without giving agency to people with conflicting interests when examining evidence. And government ministers are supposed to oversea these organisations under the scrutiny of a parlimentry majority. IE democratically ( ignoring how crap fptp is).

Yet the post office was handed CPS's job and police investigational powers. For crimes it perceives from its staff. Not entirly unique RSPCA has been given policing investigational powers with animal care crimes. Local authority CPS and police powers with council tax payment cases.

But in all of these crap systems. The whole point of judiciary having no conflicting interests in the gathering and or evaluation of evidence. Is totally ignored. Just to allow our government to invest less in ensuring non biased investigation and prosecution of laws. While claiming its for efficency.

Any situation where UK citizens can have their freedom removed based on evidence gather evaluated and or presented by people with conflicting interests in the results of that evaluation. Is clearly prown to curruption. And our government should simply have no right to pass those guys to organisations with other priorities and motivations then justice.

Of course banning a future parliment from anything is impossible in our current constitutional monarcy. So it would require a pretty historic constitutional change to allow some form of limits on all parliments. But it is time for something significant i personally think.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

"It comes as the Post Office inquiry was told by its former finance director that the company maintained an “unacceptable relationship” with postmasters.

Alisdair Cameron said the relationship with the postmasters was “self-serving” and based on an imbalance of power.He said he thought it was established now that the original prosecutions of subpostmasters were “a deliberate miscarriage of justice."

Alan Bates' fight for justice inspired ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office drama.Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software indicated that money was missing from Post Office branch accounts.Mr Bates leads the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, campaigning for financial address for the hundreds of victims who took part in the group legal action against the Post Office.

Their compensation was swallowed up by the huge legal costs in bringing their case.The government went on to set up a specific compensation fund to give these sub-postmasters the same financial redress as everyone else.But progress has been slow.Mr Bates is warning he will have to "look at other ways to progress the redress" if the Department of Business and Trade does not sort things out.

A waste of public money and a postponement of justice.”Mr Cameron, who joined the Post Office in 2015 and worked closely with then chief executive Paula Vennells, sat on the sub-committee of the Post Office board that oversaw its defence to the group litigation in 2018-19 led by Alan Bates.At the start of his session, he gave an apology: “I am sorry that when I joined the Post Office in 2015, I accepted without challenging the evidence that there had been no miscarriages of justice in the earlier prosecutions which caused so much devastation to postmasters and their families.“As a member of the GLO [group litigation order] sub-committee, I am sorry I did not push against the lack of challenge and testing of Post Office’s legal case.

Had I done better in these things, we might have started the process of getting justice for postmasters earlier.“I hope that my statement and evidence today assists the inquiry in its investigations and in getting to the truth which is the least that those affected deserve.”Mr Cameron was asked about a ‘Strictly Confidential’ document titled “What went wrong?”, written by him in November 2020, which set out the criticisms faced by the Post Office after it lost the litigation brought by 555 subpostmasters.In it he said that at the heart of what went wrong, the “original sin” of the Post Office was “our culture, self-absorbed and defensive”, which “stopped us from dealing with Postmasters in a straightforward and acceptable way.”The document revealed his estimate of the total cost to the Post Office of the scandal at the time was £1-£1.5bn.

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