Post Office victims facing 'another fight on their hands' after 'disgraceful' delay in compensation: 'Another scandal in the making'

Writing in the Sunday Times, Bates claimed he was given a "take it or leave it offer" amounting to less than half of his original claim, around 49 per cent of what he is owed.

In the historic scandal, 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly prosecuted due to a faulty Horizon accounting system, making it look like money was missing from their accounts.

Discussing the latest blow to the victims on GB News, former Editor of the Sunday Express David Wooding said the delay in compensating those affected is "another scandal in the making".

Wooding said: "Alan Bates has been waiting more than 20 years since the first complaints went in, and he was told by the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, only two years ago that they would get their claims settled, and now it seems that that's not going to happen.

"The promise that was made was that there would be no legalistic speak in these claims - in other words, they weren't going to get lawyers in to play hardball with them - and in fact, that's what's happening."

Wooding added: "He's been offered 49.2 per cent of what he's originally claimed, and he says that's not good enough. So it looks like they're going to have another fight on their hands, which is quite disgraceful, and the same will be happening for all the other victims of this Post Office scandal."

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:

• 'Damn-right war on victims!' Former Post Office sub-postmistress blasts fresh compensation delay: 'Scandal on top of a scandal'
• Post Office Horizon scandal victim offered payout after he died - 'Slap in the face'
• Post Office to cut 100 jobs to fund subpostmaster payouts after Horizon scandal

Highlighting the growing number of Post Office victims who are "getting elderly" and may die before seeing any compensation, Wooding suggested that the lawyers who are involved could be making "more money than the victims will ever see".

Wooding fumed: "Some of them are getting quite elderly now, and I'd like to know how much the lawyers are making out of all this. They're probably raking in far more than some of these people will ever see.

"And it's quite a disgrace, really, because Alan Bates really did fight hard for the people there, and they thought they'd won a victory. It seems to me that this is going to drag on even further, so it's another scandal in the making."

Weighing in on the latest in the scandal, former Scotland Yard Detective Peter Bleksley hit out at the absence of company Fujitsu in the compensation of victims, questioning their lack of accountability.

Agreeing with Bleksley, Wooding told GB News: "Fujitsu were massively involved in this, and now I guess this is where the lawyers are getting involved, because they're saying 'who owes the money to the victims?'.

"The Post Office was the organisation which wronged them originally, using a dodgy system, so whether that's a separate action or not, I don't know, you'd have to ask a lawyer about that. But it looks to me like the blame has all been heaped on the Post Office rather than on the subcontracted Fujitsu."

Hoping that the civil service and the Government realise what a "disgrace" the state of the compensation scheme is, Wooding concluded: "The civil service have got no money and the Government is in massive debts, and they're trying to limit the claims as much as they can, which we can understand why they get lawyers to do that, but that's no good if you're the victim of a real wrongdoing.

"I hope that seeing this in the papers, they'll say this is a disgrace, and we need to do something about it."