I just want to raise one matter: those excluded from this legislation. I understand that the Government do not want to go head to head with the Court of Appeal, but some people have been excluded through the accident of fate—they have been refused permission to appeal or have had their convictions not turned down by the Court of Appeal. Will the Government encourage and, if necessary, resource and facilitate, those people who are expressly excluded for those reasons from this legislation? Will the Government encourage them to go back to the Court of Appeal for their convictions to be reconsidered? It would be quite wrong if these sub-postmasters were, through that accident of fate, the only sub-postmasters in the country to continue to have convictions against their name.
]]>The Post Office itself is under investigation by the police. Is it not quite inappropriate for the Post Office to express any view as to the correctness of overturning convictions and is it not quite wrong, coming back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for it to have any position or play any part in the compensation process?
]]>This Bill is with us at the request of the chairman of the public inquiry to ensure that the Government do not run out of time to pay compensation or, as Alan Bates has often said, to give redress. He says that it is redress rather than compensation because this is money that the Government owe the sub-postmasters; some of it is money which has always, in law, belonged to the sub-postmasters. Let us acknowledge that point and move on.
The name of the Bill is the Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill, which suggests that it is about a faulty computer system. But this dreadful story only started as a story about a faulty computer system. It became something else, as we have seen from the evidence at the public inquiry: it became a matter of human behaviour; of oppressive contracts; of Post Office investigators prioritising asset recovery over justice; of useless helplines with Post Office and Fujitsu staff telling sub-postmasters that they were the only people suffering these problems and then telling them to do things which made matters worse; of senior managers at the Post Office and possibly, although I do not know, Fujitsu, lying about what their technical staff could do by way of remote access; of Ministers of all parties failing to exercise the responsibilities of ownership; and of the courts ignoring the requirements of justice in order to accommodate the most trusted brand in the country. The background of this saga was a computer system, but compensation, as we have heard from the public inquiry, is payable in respect of so much more. So, frankly, I do not much like the name of this Bill, but having questioned its name, I shall move on to its substance.
Money is to be payable to compensate people affected by the Horizon system, or to compensate persons in respect of other matters identified in High Court judgments. The expectation at the beginning of the group litigation was that it would be split into five different cases. Because the Post Office—I assume with the backing of the Government, although we shall find that out soon—decided to spend the sub-postmasters into submission with taxpayer-funded litigation, the sub-postmasters were forced, as we saw in the drama, to settle after only two of those cases had been decided. The consequence was that many issues were left undecided. Does the Bill cover these issues?
What about issues arising out of the public inquiry, rather than out of High Court judgments? We have been listening over the past few days to some pretty dreadful stories of behaviour by the Post Office investigators, who have been confronted with their bullying behaviour. We have heard the evidence from Duncan Atkinson KC about the shortcomings of the Post Office prosecutors and their prosecutions. I hope that these issues will be covered by the Bill as well as what has come out of the High Court judgments.
I feel a bit churlish, frankly, attacking both the name and the contents of a Bill that I welcome, but I do welcome the idea that the Government should not run out of time to pay the redress that we as taxpayers—with the help of Fujitsu, now that it has recognised its moral obligation; I hope that soon it will recognise its legal obligation to contribute to the cost—owe to the sub-postmasters. The very fact that it should be necessary to have the Bill in the first place suggests that the three compensation schemes have been slow and bureaucratic —and they have been. We must get a move on and do our utmost to make sure that the Bill is not, in the event, needed, because full compensation, or redress, is paid before August.
]]>I declare my interest as a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. I put my name down for this debate intending to use this speech to call on the Government to announce the wholesale exoneration of all those convicted as a result of Post Office evidence since the introduction of Horizon. I thank the Prime Minister for making that unnecessary, which will shorten this speech dramatically. He has been well supported and motivated in this by the excellent Post Office Minister, Kevin Hollinrake, and his formidable team. I shall not in this Second Reading debate succumb to the temptation to travel widely beyond the contents of this Bill, which is very short. I have spent the last week trespassing far too much on people’s patience, on TV and radio and in the newspapers. I apologise for that and feel—
]]>“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”?
]]>I declare my interest as chairman of the advisory panel of Thales, a digital company, and a member of the Post Office Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. I have learned in relation to the Post Office scandal that the complexity of computers is such that nobody really fully understands exactly what programs will do, so it is absurd that there is still in law a presumption that computers will operate as they are intended to. I hope that noble Lords will be able to turn their minds to changing that in the relatively near future.
I can be brief, because I was intending to raise issues relating to privacy, cookies and information which have already been so well canvassed by my noble friend Lord Kamall. Currently, we have to consent to cookies and terms and conditions, but we do not read them, we do not understand them, we do not know their effect—we do not have time. We will do anything for convenience, so the consent that we give is neither informed nor freely given. My noble friend Lord Kamall said what I wanted to say about an open electoral register. The thought of sending paper letters to everyone to inform them about the use of their data seems disproportionate and I, too, would like to know what on earth the ICO is thinking of in demanding such notification to everybody in the Experian case. I also adopt his questions about exemptions from getting consent to cookies when they are purely functional and non-intrusive. But there is no need for me to say it again, so I will not.
]]>I will cover another aspect of Russia’s crimes. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as a member of the advisory board of the Electric Infrastructure Security Council in the United States. One of the major features of the war in Ukraine has been the relentless attacks by Russia on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. It is a new facet of war, of which every country needs to take note. As the noble Lord, Lord Owen, reminded us, those attacks began not in 2022 but earlier: with the invasion of Crimea. On
It is thought to have been the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid. Very fortunately, the Ukrainian power distribution companies had a very effective set of firewall and system logs that allowed them to reconstruct events. That is perhaps unusual for any corporate network. We have to ask ourselves whether our own critical national infrastructure has such robust logging capabilities.
The 2015 hacking was carefully planned. It began with spear phishing attacks in 2014, targeting IT staff and using vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word. It then involved mapping the whole of the network and getting access to the Windows domain controllers and the uninterruptible power supply. They hijacked virtual private networks and got control of the supervisory control and data acquisition system—SCADA—that gives access to the power grid, allowing the attackers to rewrite the grid’s software so that it could not be recovered. Then they carried out telephone denial-of-service attacks on the customer call centres to prevent customers calling in to report the outage. In military terms, it was a combined arms attack of great force.
In 2016, Russia did it again through an automated attack using malware called Industroyer. As in 2015, Ukrainians regained control within a few hours by reverting to manual operations. In 2022, Russia launched cyberattacks called Industroyer 2 on the electricity system, alongside its full-scale military attacks. But on this occasion the Russian hackers tried not only to turn off the power but to destroy the computers the Ukrainians use to control their grid, making it impossible to bring power back online using those computers. With Russian soldiers nearby, it was harder to send out a truck to bring back a substation online. Nevertheless, by this time, Ukraine had had the advantage not only of repelling the Russian military advances but of having spent eight years repelling Russian cyberattacks. As in so many things, Ukraine had become better at it than Russia.
But in October last year, Russia began to launch missiles against the physical power infrastructure of Ukraine. This is a contravention of international humanitarian law and of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva conventions. Somehow, Ukraine managed to keep the grid from collapsing. It did that through scheduled power outages in some cities and towns, so that consumers were disconnected for predictable four-hour blocks three times a day, giving electrical engineering crews time to make repairs.
Ukraine set up “points of invincibility”, often tents, with generators where you could get a cup of tea or recharge your telephone. Also, Ukraine has joined the European power grid. This was meant to happen in 2023 under an agreement made in 2017. Under that agreement Ukraine, with the agreement of Russia, was going to disconnect from the Russian supply for a few days in mid-February 2022 to prove that it could operate autonomously. Within hours of Ukraine temporarily disconnecting from the Russian supply, Russia invaded. Luckily, Ukraine had suspected that something like that might happen, had secretly moved their main control room to an undisclosed place in the West and were able to join the European grid on
By December last year, about half of Ukraine’s power generation had been destroyed. Recovering that capacity will be a key part of rebuilding Ukraine. It will require equipment that is already in high demand. An international attempt to find large autotransformers to replace those destroyed by Russia sadly produced only a few, two of which are still moving slowly through Poland and are expected to arrive in the early autumn of this year. Ukraine’s current objective is to have 68% of the energy sector back online this month, up from 51% in early August, but it will not be easy. Russia tries to hit substations as soon as they are repaired, so Ukraine is working to build protective structures over them. It may well be that the lull in current attacks on the power grid is caused by Putin stockpiling ammunition to hit it again this winter.
We can be proud of what the UK has done to help Ukraine during this most terrible of times. We have been providing training for Ukrainian soldiers which, clearly, they have found extremely valuable. But the time is coming when the boot will be on the other foot. It will be the Ukrainians who will have the most recent experience of war fighting and the greatest knowledge of how our enemies are likely to behave. We must be open to learning from them. One of the greatest areas of their expertise and of their, and our, vulnerability, is the war now being carried out in the power sector. All the technology on which we are completely dependent runs on electricity. We neglect its vulnerability at our peril.
]]>