DELIVER JUSTICE

Wrongly accused demand payouts be speeded up

- MATT ROPER

POST Office workers wrongly accused in the IT scandal are still waiting for payouts, four years after winning their case.

Many fear they will die before getting the cash for having their lives devastated over two decades.

They accused the Government of dragging its heels over the compensation, 24 years after their wrongful convictions for stealing.

One, Alan Bates, demanded the cash is handed over before more people die of old age, with more than 60 people having already passed away without getting a penny.

He said: "Get moving with the compensation. Don't extend the deadline for payments because you can't extend people's lives." The former sub-postmaster, played by Toby Jones in new ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, has fought for two decades to expose the truth about the IT system glitches that devastated 3500 staff.

More than 230 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were jailed after 700 had been prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting and four killed themselves. They were blamed for mistakes by the defective Horizon computer system.

In 2019, Alan and five other staff took the Post Office to the High Court where a judge ruled the IT was at fault in the UK's worst miscarriages of justice.