LONDON: The UK government said on Monday more than $1.3 billion has been paid out in financial settlements to self-employed managers running Post Office branches who were caught up in a faulty accounting software scandal.

The figure comes just weeks after Alan Bates, the former subpostmaster who led the fight for justice, said the compensation process had “turned into quasi-kangaroo courts”.

According to the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), a total of 7,569 claims out of the 11,208 received had now been paid, leaving 3,709 claims still to be settled.

The Post Office prosecuted over 900 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015 after errors in tech giant Fujitsu’s then-new “Horizon” accounting software wrongly made it appear that money was missing from their accounts.

Many ended up bankrupt, after being forced by the Post Office to pay back the missing funds, and were shunned by their communities. Some were jailed.

At least four people took their own lives, and dozens of those so far exonerated died without ever seeing their names cleared.

The High Court in London in 2019 ruled that it had been computer errors, not criminality, that had been behind the missing money.

Bates, who was awarded a knighthood by King Charles III for his campaign to highlight the scandal, has been highly critical of the DBT’s claim assessment process.

The department “sits in judgement of the claims and alters the goal posts as and when it chooses”, he told The Sunday Times newspaper last month.

The long-running saga hit the headlines after the broadcast in January 2024 of a television drama about the subpostmasters’ ordeal, which generated a wave of sympathy and outrage.

Fujitsu’s European director Paul Patterson told a parliamentary committee several weeks later that the firm, which assisted the Post Office in prosecutions using flawed data from the software, was “truly sorry” for “this appalling miscarriage of justice”.

Post Office Minister Gareth Thomas said the government had made it a priority to speed up the delivery of compensationsince taking office in July 2024.

“We are settling cases every day and getting compensation out more quickly for the most complex cases, but the job isn’t done until every postmaster has received fair and just redress,” he added.

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2025