Post Office scandal to 'drag on even further' with compensation delays, Wooding warns

Good evening. Nice to see you. Great story on the front page of the Sunday Times, which has just dropped Mr Bates versus the bureaucrats

So the post office hero, Mr Bates, is complaining quite rightly that quasi kangaroo court is frustrating victims payouts of the post office scandal

Basically, long story short, victims aren't getting their compo. No, absolutely. He's been waiting, what, 22, 23 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 it'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

He's been offered a 49.2% 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, really. And the same will be happening for all the other victims of this post office scandal I say David as well it also happening with the infected blood victims who have been absolutely

stitched up by the state, you know, be it the health secretaries

or the NHS, pharmaceutical companies, for decades. They are still waiting for their compensation

And a lot of them, a lot of them are dying. They were all infected with AIDS, HIV, from filthy blood

from Skid Row in America, and they're all dying off. They're seeing out their last days without ever really getting justice

and I suspect a lot of these postmasters are probably not around either

Some of them are getting quite elderly now. 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 this man 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 here. Good for the Sunday Times to bring this one to light

What Sir Alan Bates is saying is that there should be an independent organisation free from the civil service to make decisions on public sector scandals like this Because obviously the civil service have got no money and they trying to keep the government is in massive debts and they 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. Yeah, a disgraceful way to treat those victims of the post office scandal. And I'll say it

again, the contaminated blood scandal as well. Paul Richard, do you have a quick question for David? Well, I mean, David, you and I speak to ministers

and we know that they are absolutely determined to get compensation and justice for these people

So what is the hold-up? Is it the civil service? Is it the legal system? You know, what can ministers do to kind of break the logjam

and get these people the justice they deserve? I think you're right. The civil service does have a mind of its own in many ways

They are, for good reasons, separate from governments. You know, there's the democratic side who make the big decisions

and the civil service who make it happen. But they're probably going through the various protocols

that they've always had. It's a very bureaucratic system. So they'll be saying we have to get the lawyers involved

and make sure we're not paying more than we need to and one thing and another

And that's probably what's happening. So how can we crack some heads together then How can we get it moving I think that where the ministers have to get involved And I hope that seeing this in the papers tomorrow morning they say this is a disgrace and we need to do something about it Peter Blexley

David, there's one name missing from this front page article and it deeply

concerns me and that's Fujitsu. Have they kind of been forgotten about? What are journalistic sources

doing about pursuing that company who created this flawed IT system and what happened to the money

Because it didn't simply disappear, it must have gone somewhere and who got their grubby mitts on it

That's absolutely brilliant observation that, Peter. I mean, Fujitsu were massively involved in this and implicated

Now, I guess this is where the lawyers are getting involved because they're saying who owes the money to them

The civil service, 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. Yeah