Thread by @nickwallis

Well this is interesting. Nick Read - Post Office CEO, and Paul Scully - business minister, are going to appear before the BEIS Select Committee on Tuesday next week to answer questions about compensation for Subpostmasters. Tom Cooper, the government civil servant and PO...

… director (who sat on the board throughout its disastrous, expensive, and - some would say immoral - civil litigation defence) will also be answering questions.

There are three distinct tranches of Postmasters requiring compensation….

1) Those going through the government funded, Post Office-operated Historical Shortfall Scheme. Alistair Carmichael MP has already raised serious concerns about its fairness in the HoC (postofficescandal.uk/post/compensat…)...

2) Those amongst the 555 SPMs who were part of the civil litigation who are barred from seeking any further compensation by the terms of their High Court settlement

3) Those whose convictions have been overturned.

As things stand there are those who applied to the HSS (group 1) back in 2020 who have still not had an offer for compensation. Those in group 2 are still being told to go whistle, despite Paul Scully’s noises about working with that cohort to get to fair compensation and...

… as yet no one in group 3) has received full and final compensation. Indeed some, whose convictions were overturned more than a year ago, still haven’t even received their £100k interim compensation.

It’s a shambles. I look forward to seeing what Darren Jones and his committee

… makes of it and the answers MPs get from Messrs Read, Scully and Cooper.

The fourth panellist, Carl Creswell, was polite but unhelpful the only time I met him (postofficetrial.com/2019/06/kelly-…) as he tried to stop me talking to Tom Cooper after another BEIS session at Portcullis...

… House.

Incidentally - if you want to know what former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has to say about Tom Cooper, you can read it here: postofficetrial.com/2020/07/the-po…

The session starts at 9.45am on Tuesday 11 Jan. I am expecting...

… the minister, Cooper and Creswell and the Post Office to put up the usual smokescreen of nonsense, so it’ll be interesting to see if Jones or any of the MPs on his committee can cut through it.

You can watch the session live here: parliamentlive.tv/Guide

#PostOfficeScandal