During a debate on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, ministers were asked to investigate the delay to the proposed investigation into the 100 subpostmaster convictions that were instigated by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP).
Speaking during a debate on the proposed law that will make a lack of candour, transparency and frankness in public office a criminal offence, peer Prem Sikka said the Post Office Scandal “is one of the triggers” of the bill and stated he has current “concerns about the government’s candour” in relation to a review of the DWP’s actions.
Former subpostmaster and campaigner Sir Alan Bates, who experienced years of deflection from public authorities, warned that the challenge is that the civil service has had “hundreds of years of experience in avoidance and twisting and turning, without actually lying”.
While the Post Office scandal featured heavily in the debate, Sikka was referring specifically to the DWP’s prosecutions of subpostmasters – which formed part of the wider scandal – and the slow progress being made on the promised review of them.
Around 100 subpostmasters and branch staff were prosecuted by the DWP with support from the Post Office. Following the increased public awareness of the Post Office scandal, which included hundreds of wrongful convictions of subpostmasters, the government promised to review them. That was 20 months ago and nothing material has happened since.
Sikka told fellow peers: “On numerous occasions, I have raised issues about the 100 or so prosecutions of postmasters by DWP. On 27 February 2025, the minister for the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology told this House that the minister for transformation was looking into this, that a review was being established.
“Nothing has been heard since,” Sikka said during the debate. “I directly contacted Number 10. It arranged a meeting with the minister for transformation. That meeting took place on 27 January 2026, and I learned that there has been no review – indeed, there is no reviewer. None has been appointed.”
He added that the government refused to reveal the exact terms of reference for the reviewer: “So, 20 months after the initial statement to this House, there has been no update, no review and no reviewer; no one has been appointed, there are no meetings with survivors or their families.
“In the spirit of candour, I invite the minister to investigate this disappointing chain of events and return to this Chamber to explain to the House why, for 20 months, there has been no candour about what has been going on.”
Setting out measures in the proposed bill, Gerard Anthony Lemos, Parliamentary under-secretary of state and Lords minister, told the debate that it will introduce a “duty of candour and assistance, requiring all public servants and officials to come forward proactively, and act with candour, transparency and frankness in all inquiries and investigations seeking to establish the truth”.
He added that failure to comply “with the intention of impeding the investigation, or being reckless in doing so” will be a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment.
“We have seen time and again why the bill is so vital. The Post Office Horizon scandal, infected blood, Grenfell and – most recently – the shocking Nottingham maternity scandal all involved a lack of candour and efforts to conceal the truth,” he said. “In some cases, attempts were even made to create false narratives against the victims.”
Hillsborough Law
The official long title of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, widely known as the Hillsborough Law, is: “A Bill to impose a duty on public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness; to make provision for the enforcement of that duty in their dealings with inquiries and investigations; to require public authorities to promote and take steps to maintain ethical conduct within all parts of the authority; to create an offence in relation to public authorities and public officials who mislead the public; to create further offences in relation to the misconduct of persons who hold public office and to abolish the common law offence of misconduct in public office; to make provision enabling persons to participate at inquiries and investigations where the conduct of public authorities may be in issue; and for connected purposes.”
The Hillsborough scandal and the campaigning of victims instigated the creation of the bill, with public awareness of the Post Office scandal adding fuel.
Peer Kevan Jones, who has been campaigning alongside subpostmasters such as Sir Alan Bates, for a decade and a half, said: “Like the Hillsborough families, the victims of that scandal were lied to. Things were covered up; decent and hard-working individuals not only lost their livelihoods but went to prison; and 13 tragically took their own lives.
“…it would be bad enough if Hillsborough was the only tragedy, but it is not. The Post Office scandal has been called one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in this country. It is the state – the Post Office lied, the state lied. The government hid behind the fact that the Post Office was an arm’s-length entity to not put forward the truth. They spent £100m of taxpayers’ money to defend the indefensible when the postmasters took them to court.
“In the Post Office case, with the duty of candour, you would have thought that once the scandal broke after the court case the Post Office would be forthcoming. It was not. It took it another three years to admit…”
Bates said the problem is “subtle lies in the sense of officials are avoiding telling the truth. It’s more that, rather than outright lies. There’s enormous amounts of avoidance and twisting and turning – something the civil service has hundreds of years of experience.
“If they start lying, they should lose their jobs, as simple as that. They’re public officials servants that work for the state, for the individuals. There’s no way they should be lying. This goes on time after time in all government departments.”
Peer James Arbuthnot, also a long-time campaigner for justice for subpostmasters, asked for clarification that the bill will cover the Post Office as an arm’s-length body, adding: “An important aspect of the Post Office scandal is that it began as a computer problem, both hardware and software, but rapidly turned into a human behaviour problem, as managers denied the existence of the computer problem. Perhaps they denied it first to themselves, but later, they certainly denied it to everyone else.
“Managers believed – or pretended to believe – what they were paid to believe, and therefore what they wanted to believe. We all tend to believe what we want to believe. But how does a duty of candour in practice apply in such circumstances? The bill could do more, perhaps through the institution of an office for whistleblowers from the start.”
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