The Post Office scandal: who foots the bill?
Political Fix
Financial Times
4.2 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who should foot the bill – both financial and political – for the Post Office scandal? Hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting on the basis of faulty data now face pay-outs and exoneration. Lucy Fisher is joined by the FT’s Rafe Uddin, who has been reporting from the Post Office inquiry, to ask who should pay the compensation bill, and who should shoulder the blame for the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern British history. Plus, Political Fix regulars Robert Shrimsley and George Parker dissect Keir Starmer’s new plan for supervised toothbrushing in schools and a crackdown on junk food, to consider whether Labour will run a ‘nanny state’.
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Presented by Lucy Fisher. Produced by Audrey Tinline. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Original music and audio mix by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who will foot the compensation bill for the massive post office scandal? |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Lucy Fisher, this is political fix from the Financial Times and with me in the studio today our political fix from the Financial Times. |
| 0:13.0 | And with me in the studio today |
| 0:14.3 | our political fix regulars, F.T. columnist Robert Shrimsley. |
| 0:17.2 | Hi Lucy. |
| 0:18.0 | Hi Robert. |
| 0:18.9 | And the F.T.'s political editor George Parker. |
| 0:21.2 | Hello Lucy. |
| 0:21.8 | Hi George. Also here is the F.T.'s R. Hi George. |
| 0:23.0 | Also here is the FT's Rafe Uden. |
| 0:25.8 | He's been leading the reporting team which has included you and me George covering this story of |
| 0:30.3 | the subpostmasters who've suffered for years in the Horizon software scandal. |
| 0:35.0 | More than 700 people were convicted between 2000 and 2014 of theft or false accounting |
| 0:41.0 | using flawed data from the Fujitiu software system. |
| 0:45.5 | Rafe welcome and thanks for joining us to tell us about the scandal today. |
| 0:49.3 | Hi Lucy. |
| 0:50.8 | So give us an overview of specifically what's happened in the last week on the subject. |
| 0:55.6 | Sure, so after an I TV drama aired across the sort of first four days of the new year, public outcry around the prosecution of |
| 1:07.2 | sub-postmasters has grown. Within a week of that drama ending, the Prime Minister appeared at the dispatch box on Wednesday |
| 1:15.9 | and said that the government was going to take the sort of unprecedented step to table legislation |
| 1:21.6 | to overturn the convictions of several hundred people who had been |
| 1:26.2 | convicted using this flawed data. |
... |
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