00:00Evening, nice to see you. Great story on the front page of the Sunday Times, which has just dropped Mr Bates versus the bureaucrats.
00:07So the post office hero, Mr Bates, is complaining quite rightly that quasi kangaroo court is frustrating victims payouts of the post office scandal.
00:16Basically, long story short, victims aren't getting their compo.
00:20No, absolutely. He's been waiting, what, 22, 23 years since the first complaints went in.
00:25And he was told by the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, only two years ago that they would get their claims settled.
00:34And now it seems that it's not going to happen.
00:38The promise that was made was that there would be no legalistic speak in these claims.
00:45In other words, they weren't going to get lawyers in to play hardball with them.
00:49And in fact, that's what's happening.
00:50He's been offered a 49.2 percent of what he's originally claimed.
00:55And he says that's not good enough.
00:58So it looks like it looks like they're going to have another fight on their hands, which is quite disgraceful, really.
01:05And the same will be happening for all the other victims of this post office scandal.
01:09And I'll say, David, as well, it's also happening with the infected blood victims who have been absolutely stitched up by the state,
01:17you know, be it the health secretaries or the NHS, pharmaceutical companies, for decades.
01:22They are still waiting for their compensation.
01:24And a lot of them, a lot of them are dying.
01:26They were all infected with AIDS, HIV from filthy blood from Skid Row in America.
01:31And they're all dying off.
01:32They're seeing out their last days without ever really getting justice.
01:35And I suspect a lot of these postmasters are probably, you know, not around either.
01:40Some of them are getting quite elderly now, you know.
01:42And I'd like to know how much the lawyers are making out of all this.
01:45They're probably raking in far more than some of these people will ever see.
01:50And it's quite a disgrace, really, because this man really did fight hard for the people there.
01:55And they thought they'd won a victory.
01:57And it seems to me that this is going to drag on even further.
01:59So it's another scandal in the making here.
02:01Good for the Sunday Times to bring this one to light.
02:04What Sir Alan Bates is saying is that there should be an independent organisation,
02:11free from the civil service, to make decisions on public sector scandals like this.
02:16Because obviously the civil service have got no money.
02:19And they're trying to keep the government is in massive debts.
02:23And they're trying to limit the claims as much as they can,
02:26which we can understand why they get lawyers to do that.
02:28But that's no good if you're the victim of a real wrongdoing.
02:33Yeah, a disgraceful way to treat those victims of the post office scandal.
02:36And I'll say it again, the contaminated blood scandal as well.
02:38Paul Richards, you had a quick question for David?
02:40Well, I mean, David, you and I speak to ministers.
02:43And we know that they are absolutely determined to get compensation and justice for these people.
02:49So what is the hold up?
02:51Is it the civil service?
02:52Is it the legal system?
02:53You know, what can ministers do to kind of break the logjam and get these people the justice they deserve?
02:57I think you're right.
02:59The civil service does have a mind of its own in many ways.
03:03They are, for good reasons, separate from governments.
03:06You know, there's the democratic side who make the big decisions and the civil service who make it happen.
03:12But they're probably going through the various protocols that they've always had.
03:16It's a very bureaucratic system.
03:17So 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.
03:23And that's probably what's happening.
03:25So how can we crack some heads together then?
03:27How can we get it moving?
03:28I think that's where the ministers have to get involved.
03:30And I hope that seeing this in the papers tomorrow morning, they'll say this is a disgrace.
03:35We need to do something about it.
03:37Peter Blexley?
03:38David, there's one name missing from this front page article, and it deeply concerns me, and that's Fujitsu.
03:46Have they kind of been forgotten about?
03:48What are journalistic sources doing about pursuing that company who created this flawed IT system?
03:55And what happened to the money?
03:58Because it didn't simply disappear.
04:00It must have gone somewhere.
04:02And who got their grubby mitts on it?
04:04That's an absolutely brilliant observation, that, Peter.
04:08I mean, Fujitsu were massively involved in this and implicated.
04:11Now, I guess this is where the lawyers are getting involved, because they're saying who owes the money to them.
04:19The civil service, well, the post office was the organization which wronged them originally using a dodgy system.
04:28So whether that's a separate action or not, I don't know.
04:31You'd have to ask a lawyer about that.
04:32But it looks to me like the blame has all been heaped on the post office rather than on the subcontracted Fujitsu.
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