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Marketing previous subpostmaster thinks the civil service has more to address for than ministers in the Post Office Horizon scandal
By
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Karl Flinders, Chief press reporter and senior editor EMEA
Released: 09 Apr 2024 19:20
Civil servants were more to blame than political leaders for the length of time the Post Office scandal was enabled to run, according to Alan Bates, the previous subpostmaster who led the two-decade defend justice.
Bates – the star of the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Officeinvested 5 years as a subpostmaster and the 20 subsequent years marketing for justice for the countless victims of the scandal. He appeared on the very first day of the last stages of the statutory public query.
Bates, chair of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), informed the query he has actually handled many various federal government ministers for many years as he campaigned for the reality, and implicated the civil service in addition to the Post Office of affecting them.
He stated: “A great deal of ministers come in for stick, however I hold the civil service more to blame in a great deal of the circumstances and [for the reasons] why things didn’t advance at the time. I make certain in between [the civil service] and the Post Office they were rundown ministers in the instructions they desired.”
Bates has actually never ever relented in his project to get to the fact. The questions heard how the Post Office saw him as a trouble-maker and “not fit to be a subpostmaster.”
Throughout the hearing, Bates implicated the federal government and the Post Office of being vindictive towards him with derisory deals of monetary redress. “I believe there is a little vindictiveness on the part of the department and the Post Office. I state that due to the fact that they do not believe anything I have actually done over the years has any worth.”
If it wasn’t for Bates, the level of the scandal might never ever have actually been understood. He has constantly stood his ground versus the Post Office and the federal government. The very first thing he required after the JFSA’s 2019 High Court triumph that showed Horizon was to blame for phantom accounting losses, was a public query – and he got it a year later on.
When the questions was initially developed as a non-statutory evaluation doing not have powers, he at first declined to participate, thinking the strategy would enable the federal government to “brush it under the carpet.” In a February 2021 letter to then prime minister Boris Johnson, Bates asked for that the prime minister time out the non-statutory Post Office Horizon IT query, re-establish it as a statutory query, and hold a public assessment on the regards to referral.
“A non-statutory questions with minimal regards to referral and with minimal powers,