Campaigners and parliamentarians have recently called for re-examination of scores of cases from the 2000s in which the Department for Work and Pensions brought criminal cases against Post Office staff
One of the new ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions has reiterated the previous administration’s stance that earlier criminal prosecutions brought by the department against postmasters are not implicated in the Horizon scandal.
From 2001 to 2006, the DWP prosecuted 61 Post Office employees for welfare fraud offences. These cases were not covered by legislation enacted earlier this year which, at a stroke, quashed the convictions of hundreds of postmasters affected by the Horizon scandal.
There have been growing calls from affected families – reinforced by parliamentarians from across the house – to re-examine the DWP-led prosecutions and consider whether convictions were impacted by the faults of the Horizon IT system.
These calls were rebuffed by representatives of the previous Conservative government, including former Department for Business and Trade minister Lord Malcolm Offord who, shortly before the general election was announced, told his fellow peers that he could “assure [them] that DWP prosecutions had nothing to do with the Horizon system”, and that there was no grounds for including these cases among the mass exonerations delivered by the new laws.
This position has seemingly been reiterated by the new Labour administration as Baroness Maeve Sherlock, a minister of the DWP, has said that “there is no evidence that any of the cases prosecuted by DWP relied on the Horizon system”.
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Answering a written parliamentary question from fellow Labour peer Lord Sikka, Sherlock said that most of the 61 cases “involved encashment of stolen benefit payment order books” and that the decision to bring prosecutions had “followed lengthy, complex investigations, relying on multiple sources of evidence”.
She added: “In the early 2000s the department moved to paying benefits automatically into people’s bank accounts which significantly reduced the opportunity for benefit fraud, including potential offences by Post Office staff.”
Alongside her answer, the minister also provide outline information on the 61 cases, including details of the date of each conviction, the court in question, and the sentence decided upon.
Sikka’s calls for the prosecutions to be revisited have been echoed by other politicians – including Bob Neill who, until standing down as an MP at the election, chaired the House of Commons Justice Select Committee. During his final days in office, Neill questioned whether these cases might be “tainted” and said that they “need to be looked at”.
Among the 61 people convicted following a DWP prosecution is Roger Allen, whose family has led a high-profile campaign to quash his conviction – and claimed that the department has failed to meet demands to provide the evidence against him.
While the DWP still investigates suspected criminal wrongdoing, it no longer prosecutes its own cases – a responsibility which was taken over by the Crown Prosecution Service in 2012.
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