The Post Office paid one law firm more than the entire cost of the public inquiry into the Horizon miscarriage of justice for four year’s of representation. As reported in Computer Weekly, which broke the story of the scandal, the Post Office paid Herbert Smith Freehills £86m. The public inquiry into how hundreds of innocent subpostmasters were wrongly convicted has so far cost around £48m.

Sir Alan Bates, the campaigning former subpostmaster, said: ‘It is utter madness that a publicly owned corporation is allowed to waste so much public money on trying to justify its years of incompetence and mismanagement and cover the backs of its executives, who all seemed to be suffering from corporate amnesia.’ He also called for the spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, to look into the Post Office’s spending.

This week the government announced a new compensation scheme to offer redress to victims of the Post Office’s previous IT scheme, Capture, which was used prior to the roll-out of the infamous Horizon accounting system. Capture was used in branches between 1992 and 2000, and is known to have also led to wrongful convictions, like that of  Patricia Owen, whose case has been recently posthumously referred to the Court of Appeal.

The Capture Redress Scheme will provide payments of up to £300,000 to former postmasters who suffered financial losses, and will consider paying out more in ‘exceptional’ cases.