Sir Keir Starmer is facing questions over why he did not intervene in the prosecution of innocent deputy postmasters when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.
The Labor leader insisted on Monday that prosecution powers given to the Post Office should be removed.
“I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service, we have prosecuted on behalf of other departments, we can do that here; it must be done immediately,” Sir Keir said.
“And these convictions, the remaining convictions, need to be looked at collectively.”
However, his critics questioned why he did not raise the issue when the scandal first emerged and, more importantly, when he was chairman of the CPS.
Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage has said he is considering a return to frontline politics, leaving him angry enough to share it with his 1.8 million followers on X.
caused @Keir_Starmer Didn’t he intervene in the Horizon scandal when he was Director of Public Prosecutions?” He sent Mr Farage. “The story first broke in 2009, but the prosecution continued until 2015. Given the growing concerns at that time and more than 700 cases, there are serious questions to answer.”
The post was followed a few hours later by some statements. “The DPP has the right to intervene in any case. Where was Starmer?” asked Mr Farage.
Ser Keir will be wary of being dragged into a scandal that is clearly not his own making. But he was in the DPP for five years from 2008 to 2013 before embarking on a political career that took him to the doorstep of Downing Street.
Sir Keir’s question is: was there an opportunity to intervene and take action in the Post Office investigations?
The rules on private prosecutions state that there will be circumstances in which it is appropriate for the CPS to exercise the power for the DPP to continue the prosecution or stay or discontinue the prosecution.
This power comes from crucial legislation under section 6 of the Prosecution of Crimes Act 1985. But before the CPS can take over a private prosecution and possibly close it, it first needs to know about the legal case.
As there is no formal mechanism for private prosecutions to be reported to the CPS, the organization does not necessarily have knowledge of cases being pursued by the Post Office.
However, the CPS itself prosecuted some cases against sub-postmasters. A CPS spokesman said on Monday: “This is a relative drop in the ocean compared to the 700 or 800 people the post office was involved with.”
It is unclear how many of these would be under Sir Keir’s watch as DPP, but by 2009, when Sir Keir had spent a year in the job, the first flourishes of a scandal emerged in an investigation by Computer Weekly, which highlighted seven people. potential miscarriages of justice.
One of the first cases was a case against assistant postmaster David Hughes, who pleaded guilty to making a forged instrument at Workington Magistrates’ Court around 2007 and was sentenced to 12 months community order and 100 hours unpaid work.
Apart from the hundreds of people wrongly convicted, the error of a faulty IT system called Horizon, which the Post Office had insisted on for years, was blameless. The accounts showed a “discrepancy” of several thousand pounds caused by Fujitsu’s system.
Exactly 15 years later, in 2021, Mr Hughes was finally acquitted of all charges, his reputation restored and cleared of all wrongdoing. This time the CPS gave no evidence when the case returned to Southwark Crown Court.
In other words, a year into Sir Keir’s reign as DPP, the CPS had secured at least one conviction and the burgeoning scandal was already beginning to surface.
‘Admit your guilt’ instruction given
In 2012, according to evidence given to the public inquiry by Della Robinson, a wrongly convicted assistant postal officer, the CPS “told me that if I pleaded guilty to false accounting, they would stop chasing me for money and stop stealing. charge. “Then I chose to do it.”
Ms. Robinson pleaded guilty to false accounting and was sentenced to 180 hours of community service in January 2013. The conviction was overturned in April 2021.
Sources close to Sir Keir are adamant the Labor leader and prime minister-in-waiting has no standing to answer. They said the ITV drama had rightly angered millions of viewers and thrust the Horizon scandal into the spotlight.
But the issue had taken a long time to resolve, including an ongoing public inquiry, and the scandal was created by the Post Office, which unfortunately had prosecutorial powers.
“The truth is that this was a private case and that [Sir Keir] He was a public prosecutor. “Nobody knew it was a problem because the Post Office had prosecutorial powers,” said one source.
In fact, a parliamentary briefing note written in 2023 by Nick Read, chief executive of the new Post Office Limited, detailed six cases prosecuted and appealed by the CPS.
“Of these, one was accepted and the conviction quashed at Southwark Crown Court, while five cases were appealed; in two cases the convictions were secured, upheld by the Court of Appeal, and in the remaining three the appeals were quashed,” Mr Read wrote.
The Post Office only notes cases that are on appeal, so the actual number of cases handled by the CPS is unclear. The CPS was struggling to count how many cases it had opened on Monday night.
Private prosecutions are relatively rare. Some organizations have historically taken on this role, such as the RSPCA, which has prosecuted people suspected of animal cruelty for almost 200 years.
Although in recent years the RSPCA has at times found itself in the metaphorical dock as it relentlessly pursues cases. He has been accused of being both an investigator and a prosecutor, prompting the charity to announce in 2021 that it would investigate the allegations but hand over files to the CPS for prosecution.
There was an even more serious potential conflict at the Post Office, as one lawyer explained.
Post Office is ‘investigator, prosecutor and victim’
“The Post Office,” said attorney Nick Gould, “is the investigator, the prosecutor and the victim.”
One of her clients, Seema Misra, was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2010, even though she was eight weeks pregnant. She was still wearing the probation tag when she went into labor.
The £70,000 shortfall in his account was, of course, caused by the Horizon computer system; his conviction was overturned in 2021.
Ms Misra blames the Post Office fair and square and its patrons who have never been to jail.
“They didn’t realize that they were playing with my life, my mother’s life, my wife’s life. “Even a man with a heart of steel wouldn’t do that,” he said in an interview after his conviction was overturned. “They can’t be human, but they still did it. The bosses are still free, they have families, while I’m in prison.”