In 2017, the Farncombe Subpostmaster, Chirag Sidhpura, was sacked over a £57,000 discrepancy at his Post Office branch. Chirag’s case was taken up by his MP, Jeremy Hunt, and the campaigner Eleanor Shaikh. In a recent newsletter to constituents, Jeremy Hunt wrote: “In 2017 the tail end of one of the biggest miscarriages in British legal history struck at the core of Farncombe, devastating the life of our ex Sub-Postmaster Chirag Sidhpura and his family. “Chirag was accused of stealing £57,000 on account of a faulty IT system, just as Post Office Directors were gearing up to fight 555 ex-sub-postmasters…

Howe and Co sit down with BEIS officials to see just how serious the government is about compensation On 19 January 2022 a meeting was held between officials from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and three lawyers from Howe and Co, who represent 146 Subpostmasters at the Statutory Inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT disaster. The meeting had been called by Howe and Co on the back of some vague promises by the Postal Affairs Minister Paul Scully that he was going to “continue to work” with Alan Bates and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance to…

I am not going to attempt to rehash the entire BEIS select committee hearing earlier today as you can still watch it in full here and you can read the transcript here. If you want a blow-by-blow account you can read my live-tweets, carefully collated into a single, readable web-page by the brilliant thread reader app here. The news lines which came out of the sessions (in my mind, anyway) are: 1) Nick Read describing all the 736 convictions of Subpostmasters (prosecuted at a rate of one a week between 2000 and 2013) as “unsafe”. Up till now we knew…