Sir Robert Buckland said the scandal is a 'moment of shame' for the British justice system
FORMER Lord Chancellor Sir Robert Buckland has said the Horizon scandal is “a moment of shame” for the British justice system and recommended Parliament expunge the convictions of subpostmasters.
He told GB News: “As Parliament has been discussing this intensively since the revelations got an even wider audience due to that television drama, I think people are now realising the full extent to this scandal.
“The fact is that we're not just talking about people who aren't guilty of any offence, but they are victims themselves of an enormous scandal.
“And that means that a lot of them just have run out of trust, energy, patience with the system, and they're not coming forward to get their names cleared. And that's why I think, exceptionally, bearing in mind the scale and nature of what's happened here, Parliament needs to intervene.”
In a discussion with Mark Dolan, he said: “I think there are two main outcomes here: one - Parliament legislating. Two, the court system itself being resourced to speed up these appeals to deal with them en masse to process them through the system in months rather than years.
“That still requires people to come forward. And I'm not criticising victims for not wishing to put themselves through the maelstrom of a court process again, they've been wounded deeply as it is.
“And that's why I think the parliamentary option seems to me in these unprecedented, these unique circumstances, to be probably the most sensible way forward to allow people to have their names cleared without the heartache and soul sapping experience of having to clear your name.
“I think what I would say is that all of us involved and who care about the justice system, need to confess that this is a moment of shame for the system. We need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what more we can do to restore that trust.”
He added: “There's no doubt that the CPS and the DPP have the power to take over private prosecutions like the ones we saw in the main from the Post Office and either end them or carry them on themselves.
“I think that rather than pointing at individuals, it's far better to acknowledge that there's been a systemic failure here.
“The inquiry of Sir Wyn Williams, the independent former judge who's running that statutory investigation into the systemic failures here, will reveal the full extent of what went wrong from top to bottom: the governance failures, the failures in procurement of this system way back in the late 90s, and then coming up with constructive proposals about how we can prevent this sort of disaster, this scandal from happening again.
“I think inevitably the contract and the management of it by [Fujitsu] will have to be examined. It may well result in litigation itself. And I think clearly the Government is going to have to ask questions about future contracts that might be awarded and indeed look into what went wrong here.”
