Litigation funding was crucial in helping bring justice to Post Office victims, but that system is under threat, writes Nadhim Zahawi
The widely-watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office drama and the next phase in the Post Office Horizon inquiry have returned the unjust treatment of the sub-postmasters and mistresses to the public consciousness.
It will have been upsetting for many of us to see the iniquitous behaviour of the Post Office laid bare, from the admittances that the security team were actively rewarded for successful prosecutions, to the reminder that some of those who were wronged have tragically died before ever getting the compensation that they deserve. But it has given the government the vital push it needed to speed up the process to ensure they receive justice.
Yet the very means by which they were able to take legal action against the Post Office now risks being unavailable to other unfairly maligned groups who may need to seek justice in the future. As Alan Bates himself has recently written, it was only thanks to litigation funding, under which a third party pays for the legal costs in return for a share of the compensation if the claimants are successful, that he and his fellow sub-postmasters were able to take the Post Office to the High Court and achieve a settlement in their favour.
This is thanks to a little-known Supreme Court ruling of last summer: PACCAR. The court allowed a cartel of price-fixing truck manufacturers, which had previously been proven to have ripped off thousands of hauliers, to successfully challenge a compensation claim on a technicality within their funding arrangements. As obscure as this judgement may seem, it could have catastrophic and far-reaching consequences for access to litigation funding. Ongoing cases where consumers are taking on huge corporations are in jeopardy. And there are now concerns that cases which were already settled before the Supreme Court’s ruling could now be deemed to be impossible to enforce.
Large organisations using every trick in the book to frustrate justice and deny compensation to individuals or smaller companies – many of them family businesses – sounds all too familiar.
During a 2015 Select Committee hearing, I personally witnessed the Post Office’s senior leadership team attempt to obfuscate at every turn. Despite my repeated questioning, I was unable to get a simple answer to a simple question – a frustration I vividly remember, especially when asked by ITV to re-enact the scene as myself!
So I can only begin to imagine how the sub-postmasters must have felt when the Post Office’s legal team either failed to hand over vital evidence to the independent investigation, or when they cynically placed obstacle after obstacle in their path to justice. It is a cruel ploy that is, sadly, all too familiar in these kinds of cases where large organisations, whether private or public, seek to bully and intimidate individuals and small businesses into submission.
I have no doubt that the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, has a grip on this issue, and I was delighted to see that he has committed to addressing this at the earliest legislative opportunity. The Horizon Bill presents just such an opportunity to overturn the PACCAR judgement and ensure full access to litigation funding.
Even with the support of litigation funding, the deck was heavily stacked against the sub-postmasters. This government has demonstrated its commitment to righting historical wrongs – but this must include ensuring that the next Mr Bates can obtain justice before parliamentary time runs out.