Mr Bates told the Business and Trade Committee that the Post Office should be “sold to someone like Amazon for £1” as he described the organisation as a “dead duck” that is “going to be a money pit for the taxpayer in the years to come”.The campaigner led a group of 555 subpostmasters who took the Post Office to the High Court over the scandal, which was settled in December 2019.
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00:00 I think over the years I've been dealing with post office, the culture has always been post office.
00:06 It hasn't changed, it's been the same for donkey's years. It will not change and you cannot change it.
00:12 My personal view about post office is it's a dead duck and it has been for years and it's going to be a money pit for the taxpayer for years to come.
00:21 And you should sell it to someone like Amazon for a pound, get really good contracts for all the serving sub-postmasters.
00:28 And within a few years you'll have one of the best networks around the world.
00:33 That's a very radical proposal and not one I'm sure many of our constituents would be comfortable with but interesting that it comes from you.
00:41 I don't know what you can do other than remove the whole scheme away from government itself or say the department and try and do it elsewhere.
00:49 We keep coming back to this time after time after time, pay people. There's a lot of distractions, a lot of other things have been thrown up all the time.
01:01 But just get on them, pay people. We've heard figures this morning, given perfect examples of how long it is going to take.
01:10 People refuse to give deadlines now because they can't meet them. That suggestion that I put in earlier about paying people a thousand pounds a day or being charged a thousand pounds,
01:24 that is actually compensation and that should go to the actual claimant involved.
01:30 Everyone keeps referring to the scheme, understandably, as a compensation scheme but it's not, it's financial redress.
01:37 This is money these people are actually owed and they've been owed it for years.
01:42 Compensation sounds like something that benefits at the whim of government and all the rest of it.