UK TO BRING IN NEW LAW TO QUASH WRONGFUL POST OFFICE CONVICTIONS – Prime Minister speaks out in the wake of national outrage over the scandal
The UK will seek to use new legislation to overturn the wrongful convictions of hundreds of Post Office managers, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the wake of renewed national outrage over the scandal.
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of self-employed sub-postmasters at branches of the state-owned Post Office were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting because faulty software wrongly showed thousands of pounds missing from branch accounts.
A TV dramatisation of the scandal, one of the biggest miscarriages of UK justice, has heaped pressure on the government to act more swiftly to deliver justice, after some sub-postmasters were jailed and hundreds of others saw their livelihoods destroyed.
While 93 convictions have been overturned, hundreds of others are yet to be quashed.
“We will introduce new primary legislation to make sure that those convicted as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated,” Sunak told parliament.
“This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history. People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own,” Sunak said.
An ongoing public inquiry is expected to conclude later this year, while London’s Metropolitan Police is conducting a separate investigation.