The four-part series Mr Bates vs The Post Office made many people aware of the Horizon IT scandal.
Getty ImagesThe airing of the TV drama into the Post Office scandal “brought the urgency” to speed up compensation pay outs for sub-postmasters, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said.
The government needed to be “seen to be doing the right thing”, said Badenoch, who was business secretary at the time.
She accepted at the inquiry into the scandal that it was “extremely disappointing” that it took the ITV drama to escalate the issue.
But she said her row with the Treasury over the time it was taking to issue compensation last August was not just a case of her “posturing”.
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly prosecuted after a faulty computer system called Horizon made it look like money was missing from their branches.
Monday marked the start of the final week of evidence at the inquiry into the scandal, more than two and a half years since it started hearing evidence in public.
Badenoch said the four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which went out in January, raised awareness of the issue, turning compensation from “a value for money perception to a public perception question”.
She insisted work was being done on the issue by the previous government, but admitted it was “too slow” and criticised the whole “government machine” for slowing down compensation.
The inquiry heard how Badenoch told the Treasury she wanted to give £100,000 “flat offers” to all sub-postmasters with a claim, with the inquiry to the counsel Jason Beer KC describing her mention of “ministerial direction” as a threat.
He said this could be seen as “soft power” or “posturing”.
But Badenoch denied the claim, saying: “It was signalling the direction I wanted the department to take to make it very clear.”
She said she believed speed should triumph over accuracy, and admitted that this might not have represented value for money from a taxpayer point of view.
‘Vanilla updates’
Badenoch was also questioned over her sacking of former Post Office chairman Henry Staunton.
She said she was not aware of how serious concerns were about him because of “vanilla updates” from civil servants.
Her evidence statement provided her reasons for Mr Staunton’s dismissal, which included the former chairman attempting to shut down a whistleblowing probe into his conduct, behaving in an aggressive, intimidating and disrespectful manner, and having a poor understanding of Post Office’s work.
Mr Staunton has previously defended himself after a report found he used derogatory language during a meeting about recruiting a board member. He has also refuted Badenoch’s claim that he was under a “formal investigation” for “serious matters such as bullying”.
‘Nothing should be off the table’
Earlier on Monday, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said ownership of the Post Office could be handed over to its thousands of sub-postmasters across the UK.
“Nothing should be off the table for the future of the Post Office,” he said, adding that the organisation’s future will be set out in the first half of next year.
He said Post Office’s corporate culture was “at the root of this scandal” and that some sub-postmasters had “lost all faith in the justice system” because of it.