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Tim Parker
Chairman
Finsbury Dials
20 Finsbury Street
LONDON
EC2Y 9AQ
Paul Scully MP
Minister for London and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
1 Victoria Street
London
SW1H OET
25% May 2021
Following our helpful conversation last Monday and following your appearance in
Parliament, I wanted to write to set out what I consider is required to address
the complaint by those who settled as part of the Group Litigation that they did
not get a fair share of the settlement proceeds.
Although Post Office played no part in the apportionment of the settlement
proceeds to individual claimants (which would have been the subject of an
agreement between the claimants, their lawyers and their litigation funders),
from a moral perspective, it is essential to offer the postmasters who brought the
Group Litigation something more by way of compensation, to make up for the
costs they incurred. I sympathise with Alan Bates' perspective that these
individuals, who expended a great deal of time and effort on the litigation, did
not deserve to lose some £43m of their settlement to the litigation funders. I
have recently been contacted by one postmaster who continues to face great
hardship. Had the proceeds of the settlement been shared more fairly, he may
not have done so. I do not want our new Post Office to simply walk on by while
any postmaster from the GLO continues to struggle. Simply, until the original
GLO claimants receive some compensation commensurate with the costs they
incurred in order for this miscarriage of justice to have come to light, justice is
unlikely to be seen to be done and the reputational and in turn commercial
damage to Post Office will continue. The present operations of Post Office will
continue to be impacted by these historical issues.
Having given some thought as to how that might be achieved, one option may be
to make an ex gratia payment towards the GLO settlers' funding costs which
could be distributed by the Claimant Steering Committee. [That way, Post Office
does not need to take responsibility for the difficult issue of apportioning the
payment between individual claimants who suffered varying degrees of
loss.] The alternative, if the Claimant Steering Committee is unable or unwilling
to take on that task, would be simply to offer an equal sum to all the GLO
participants. I am advised that any such arrangement would require a separate
PostOffice.co.uk
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agreement between all parties. Whether that is achievable is something we
would need to explore further but my experience tells me that where there is the
will there is a way. Naturally we would only proceed on the basis that no further
allocation would be made to the litigation funders. Although the funding would
need to come from Government, Post Office could manage this element which
would mitigate the floodgate risk regarding previous government
settlements. We could also consider, as part of the settlement, restricting any
future claims against the Government.
In short, further compensation is required that would offer a final resolution to
those claimants who brought these issues to light so that they are compensated
without any reduction for the funding costs they incurred (without which the
miscarriage of justice may not have come to light). In that regard, I firmly
believe that we are well beyond a point where legal constructs, such as the
finality of settlements or the legal niceties around responsibility for funding costs,
should prevent us from doing the right thing.
I would welcome a further discussion with you as to how we might take this
forward.