The widow of a Post Office Horizon scandal victim who received a compensation offer days after he died branded the delay a “a slap in the face”.
Terry Walters, 76, whose funeral took place on Friday, passed away last month following years of ill health. A letter arrived a week later offering “less than half” of his original claim for financial redress.
Mr Walters, from Wilmslow, Cheshire, was one of 555 sub-postmasters who won a legal battle against the Post Office in 2019. Hundreds were falsely accused, and many wrongly convicted, of stealing from their branches between 1999 and 2015.
Terry’s wife Janet, 68, said the length of time many victims have had to wait for offers of compensation was another “scandal” and branded the offer as a “slap in the face” and adding: “Enough is enough. I think it’s an utter disgrace. I’ve told them I will not accept the offer. I won’t just take anything and go away. It’s a scandal what they did with the Horizon system, it’s a scandal now because of the length of time it’s taken.”
Janet says her husband’s claim was put forward in February 2024, but it took a year to receive an offer for redress from the government.
She said: “It should have been a 40-day turnaround of an offer. It’s taken 12 months to receive an offer, an offer which came after Terry had passed away. They wanted a stroke report back in September to drag it out a bit more, to see if it’s being caused by all the stress from the Post Office. I think it contributed considerably to the whole state of him.”
Janet wants compensation payments for victims to be speeded up. Her husband was one of the former sub-postmasters who took the Post Office to court in the landmark case led by Sir Alan Bates, which helped expose the scandal.
Sir Alan, 70, who knew Mr Walters personally, backed his widow’s demand for payments to be fast-tracked.
He said: “The government is continuing to put Post Office victims through hell. We are heading towards more than 100 former sub-postmasters who have died while waiting for compensation. Ministers and civil servants are living in ivory towers totally removed from the hell the victims have gone through day after day, year after year. The whole thing is bogged down in bureaucracy.”
The government claims to have doubled the amount of payments made to former sub-postmasters. Mr Walters had used a redundancy pay-out to take over Hockley Post Office in Stockport in 2005.
But, less than two years later, he was suspended over alleged shortfalls. He was never allowed back behind the counter and his contract was terminated the following year over thousands of pounds of losses that didn’t exist.
The couple had to sell their home and had to live in rented accommodation. Janet said: “To have a big institution such as the Post Office come along and accuse you of doing something – it was devastating and humiliating. We’ve lived on promises all this time: 17 years out of somebody’s life is a long time.”
She believes that receiving a full pay-out in the years before her husband’s health declined would have made a big difference to the quality of their lives.
Mrs Walters added: “We could have done the things we had wanted to do all these years, buy a proper home perhaps, treat ourselves to a nice holiday, go out and do things.”
A total of 227 of 492 eligible claimants in the scheme created to provide redress for those in the original Group Litigation Order (GLO) are still waiting for full and final compensation, according to the most recent figures.
The government says 407 offers have been made of the 425 people who have so far made full claims.
Mrs Walters is considering writing to King Charles about the delays.
She said: “There must be someone in a high authority that can say, well, it’s time this was finished so people have a chance to move on with their lives.”
And she vowed not to scatter her husband’s ashes until his compensation is paid in full even though she knows the process will likely take many more months to settle.
Lord Beamish, a leading campaigner for justice for Post Office victims, says the redress offer process should “err on the side of the postmaster rather than the Post Office”.
He said: “I think it has been bureaucratic in the past, and I think it’s been trying to get information which is difficult to actually obtain.
“I think in those cases the benefit of the doubt should be put on the postmaster.”
Lord Beamish added: “Getting people around a table and trying to get a resolution should be the main aim.”
A Department for Business and Trade (DBT) spokesperson said redress payments had doubled under the current government.
Around £698 million has been paid to more than 4,400 claimants across four schemes.
The DBT spokesperson said: “We are sorry to hear of Terry’s death and our thoughts are with Janet and the rest of his family and friends.”
He says that offers have now been issued to 407 of the 425 GLO claimants “who have submitted full claims”.
He added that the DBT is “making offers to 89% of GLO claimants within 40 working days of receipt of a full claim, with over half of eligible claimants having now settled their claim.”
Latest government figure show that out of the 425 GLO claimants, 265 have had their claims paid.
Figures for the Horizon Shortfall Scheme show, 2,090 out of 2,417 eligible claims made before their original deadline in 2020 have been paid, leaving more than 300 still waiting.
Of the 4,665 “late” claims, 1,260 have been paid, with more than 3,400 still waiting.
