The analysis
A plague on all their houses

Rishi Sunak today announced unprecedented legislation to pardon en masse those victims of the Post Office scandal who have spent years waiting for justice. It was a mere day ago that his Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, told MPs that the government wanted to exhaust all other options before taking the ‘radical’ step of overruling multiple courts. It must have been an exhausting 24 hours, then. The precedent set by the legislation is the reason Chalk wasn’t quite so gung ho yesterday: the government has never overruled the verdicts of multiple courts before, and MPs and legal experts are concerned that this could have long-term implications that aren’t ideal. But the legislation that Sunak announced at Prime Minister’s Questions (and that Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake then elaborated on in answer to an urgent question in the Commons afterwards) is going to pass. Labour has been clear that it will support the bill when it comes before MPs because there needs to be unprecedented (that word again) action in response to such a serious scandal.

No political party really benefits from the heat of the past few days, despite attempts from all sides to blame the others. Voters see this as a plague on all houses given the problems with the Horizon IT system started in 1999. The Tories, Labour and SNP are taking aim at Ed Davey, while Conservative chairman Lee Anderson told the Lib Dem leader to ‘clear off’ at Prime Minister’s Questions today. The Lib Dems are arguing that Oliver Dowden has questions to answer – a pretty unconvincing deflection – and are instructing their MPs to send out standard answers to constituents which argue the focus on Davey is unfair as all governments elected since the scandal began had oversight of the Horizon system. Davey’s party, along with Labour, is arguing that not enough was done quickly enough. Sunak is accusing others of trying to politicise the issue. As I say in this review of PMQs, though, the reason the government has moved at pace in the past couple of days is precisely because the scandal became political.

Oh and there was fraud bouncing around hence the need for an IT solution and pen and paper was very difficult to audit, just needed the IT system to be audited at the time by the government of the time