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Former sub-postmaster Sir Alan Bates has reached a deal to settle his claim over the Post Office Horizon scandal. The breakthrough comes more than two decades after he began campaigning in what turned into one of Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice. A final settlement deal, which has been estimated to be worth between £4million and £5million, has now been agreed. A government spokesperson said: "We pay tribute to Sir Alan Bates for his long record of campaigning on behalf of victims and have now paid out over £1.2bn to more than 9,000 victims. "We can confirm that Sir Alan's claim has reached the end of the scheme process and been settled." Sir Alan was previously made a compensation offer worth just one-sixth of his claim, which he had branded "derisory". He helped lead the fight to prove that the Horizon software system, used by the Post Office and supplied by Japanese technology company Fujitsu, was faulty. Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for fraud and theft between 1999 and 2015, with some taking their own lives over the scandal. When ITV turned their fight for justice into popular drama series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the government accelerated plan to compensate victims. But the scheme set up to administer it has been mired in controversy. A group of 555 sub-postmasters, including Sir Alan, sued the Post Office in the High Court in 2017. They won £58million but after legal fees were left with just £12million, prompting ministers to establish a separate compensation scheme amid public backlash. Sir Alan previously described the process as "quasi-kangaroo courts in which the Department for Business and Trade sits in judgement of the claims and alters the goalposts as and when it chooses". "Claims are, and have been, knocked back on the basis that legally you would not be able to make them, or that the parameters of the scheme do not extend to certain items,” he wrote in The Sunday Times in May. Former High Court judge Sir Ross Cranston oversees cases where a claimant has disputed a compensation offer from the government and objects to results of a review by an independent panel.
