A committee of MPs has called for the government to be fined if it fails to provide redress quickly enough to victims of the Horizon software scandal, as its report said the Post Office has spent at least £136m on legal fees.

New legally enforceable time limits for each stage of claim processing should be introduced, a report from the Business and Trade Committee (BTC) has said.

If a claim by a victim of the Post Office Horizon scandal does not move in line with the time limits they should receive the financial penalties paid by the government.

More than 700 sub-postmasters across the UK were wrongfully prosecuted by the Post Office for theft and false accounting using the Horizon software made by Fujitsu which incorrectly generated shortfalls in branches.

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Many more incurred large debts, lost homes, experienced relationship breakdown, became unwell in an effort to repay the imagined shortfalls and some took their own lives.

Four schemes have been launched as the state and the Post Office attempt to redress the wrongs.

Making redress less punishing

But the process of seeking compensation is “akin to a second trial for victims”, the committee chair Liam Byrne said.

It is “imperative” applicants receive upfront legal advice paid for by scheme operators rather than applicants, the committee’s report said, as evidence given by claimants’ solicitors said when they get legal advice, their financial redress offers double.

Applications place an “excessive burden” on claimants to “grapple complex legal concepts” on the amount of redress they’re owed and requests for information about the losses Horizon caused, despite no longer having access to Horizon data.

There have been delays in processing requests for disclosures from the Post Office, the report found.

It comes as the Post Office spent £136m on legal costs, meaning government legal representatives are “walking away with millions”, according to the committee.

Vast majority of redress not paid

Despite this, the BTC said the “vast majority” of redress has not been paid.

As many as 14% of those who applied to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS) to compensate for losses incurred via the faulty computer programme have still not settled their claims despite applying before the original 2020 deadline.

It cost £67m to administer the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, a bill equal to 27% of redress paid, amounting to £26,600 per claim.

Repeating calls

The topic of who operates the schemes has been revisited by the committee as it reiterated its call for the Post Office to have no involvement and for independent adjudicators to be appointed instead.

The government removed the Post Office from schemes involving convictions but the organisation still administers the HSS.

It also repeated its rebuffed demand for the appointment of an independent adjudicator for each scheme. The committee wants these adjudicators to manage cases and ensure claims move through the process swiftly.

In response, a spokesperson for the Labour-run Department for Business and Trade said: “Since entering government, we have worked tirelessly to speed up the process of providing the victims of the Horizon scandal with full and fair redress including by launching the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme earlier this year.

“We are settling claims at a faster rate than ever before with the amount of redress paid doubling since July, with almost £500m being paid to over 3,300 claimants as of the end of November.”

What a year 2024 was.

A massive election – well, two massive elections on either side of the Atlantic, and more elsewhere around the planet – followed by changes of government and plenty of economic milestones along the way. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the big moments of the year, in chart form.

We begin with the big economic picture. Growth. This time last year, the UK was (unbeknownst to us at the time) actually in recession. The news was only confirmed in the spring of this year, but for two successive quarters in the second half of last year, economic growth fell.

What’s equally intriguing is what happened next: a rapid bounce-back as gross domestic product increased by more than expected in the first two quarters of the year. Since then, it has tailed off markedly, causing some consternation in the Treasury.

Indeed, an initial estimate of 0.1 per cent growth in the third quarter of 2024 was revised down to zero growth – stagnation.

Still, interest rates are now finally on the way down. They were cut in August for the first time following the cost of living crisis, and are expected to fall further next year. However, the scale of those expected falls is considerably smaller now than before the Budget. Why? Because the government is planning to borrow and spend considerably more next year.

That wasn’t the only policy in the Budget. Alongside those increases in borrowing and spending, Chancellor Rachel Reeves decided to introduce some significant tax raises – chief among them a big increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions.

And while Labour insists this will not be visible on your pay check – and hence isn’t breaking their pre-election pledge – we will, as a nation, be paying considerably more in taxes as a result. Indeed, the tax burden, the total amount of tax incurred by the population as a percentage of GDP, is now heading up to the highest level on record. This is, it’s worth saying, a stark contrast with the costed measures Labour put in their manifesto.

That brings us to the election itself – an election in which Labour rode to an extraordinary landslide, winning more than 400 seats for the first time since the glory days of Tony Blair. It represented an immense comeback for the party, following such a drubbing in 2019. However, there are some important provisos to note.

Chief among them is the fact that the party won the smallest share of the vote of any winning party in the modern era. This was not a landslide victory in terms of overall popular support.

Among the issues that has resounded this year, both before the election and after, was migration. This time last year the data suggested that net migration into the UK had peaked at just over 750,000.

But then, last month, new data brought with it a shocking revision. In fact, the Home Office had both undercounted the number of people coming into the country and overcounted the number leaving. The upshot was a new figure: in fact 906,000 more people had entered than departed in the year to last summer. Not just a new record – a totally gobsmacking figure.

The vast, vast majority of that migration was not the “small boats” so much has been made of but legal migration, more or less equally divided between work and study. It was to some extent the consequence of the post-COVID bounceback and, even more so, changes in government policy as post-Brexit migration rules came into force.

Another issue which came to light throughout the year was something else: the leakiness of Britain’s sanctions regime with Russia. While government ministers like to boast about how this is the toughest regime on Russia in history, our analysis found that sanctioned British goods are routinely being shipped into Russia via its neighbours in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In a series of investigations, we tracked how this carousel works for the trade of cars, which get sent to countries like Azerbaijan before being shuffled around the Caucasus and entering Russia via Georgia and other routes. But that same carousel is likely being used for equipment like drone parts and radar equipment. We know it’s being sent to Russian neighbours. We know it’s ending up on the battlefield. The data tells a stark story about the reality of the sanctions regime – and helps illustrate how Russia is continuing to keep its forces armed and equipped with components from the West.

The operator of nearly 150 Pizza Hut restaurants in the UK is in advanced talks with potential buyers as it races to wrap up a deal to secure its future.

Sky News has learnt that Heart With Smart (HWS), the US-owned brand’s biggest UK franchisee, is aiming to select a preferred bidder in January after weeks of talks with suitors.

Sources close to the process said a range of trade and financial buyers had expressed interest in acquiring a large stake in the dine-in chain.

In November, Sky News revealed that HWS had begun approaching potential bidders as it sought to mitigate the impact of tax hikes announced in the previous month’s Budget.

HWS, which operates roughly 140 Pizza Hut restaurants, is working with Interpath Advisory on the process.

The company, which was previously called Pizza Hut Restaurants, employs about 3,000 people, making it one of the most significant operators in Britain’s casual dining industry.

It is owned by a combination of Pricoa and the company’s management, led by chief executive Jens Hofma.

They led a management buyout reportedly worth £100m in 2018, with the business having previously been owned by Rutland Partners, a private equity firm.

HWS licenses the Pizza Hut name from Yum! Brands, the American food giant which also owns KFC.

Insiders told Sky News last month that the increases to the national living wage and employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) unveiled in the budget by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, would add approximately £4m to HWS’s annual costs – equivalent to more than half of last year’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation.

The structure of a takeover or capital injection was unclear on Monday, although the last eight weeks have seen a string of bleak warnings from the hospitality industry.

Even before the budget, restaurant operators were feeling significant pressure, with TGI Fridays collapsing into administration before being sold to a consortium of Breal Capital and Calveton.

Sky News also revealed during the autumn that Pizza Express had hired investment bankers to advise on a debt refinancing.

HWS operates all of Pizza Hut’s dine-in restaurants in Britain, but has no involvement with its large number of delivery outlets, which are run by individual franchisees.

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Accounts filed at Companies House for HWS4 for the period from 5 December 2022 to 3 December 2023 show that it completed a restructuring of its debt under which its lenders agreed to suspend repayments of some of its borrowings until November next year.

The terms of the same facilities were also extended to September 2027, while it also signed a new 10-year Pizza Hut franchise agreement with Yum Brands which expires in 2032.

“Whilst market conditions have improved noticeably since 2022, consumers remain challenged by higher-than-average levels of inflation, high mortgage costs and slow growth in the economy,” the accounts said.

It added: “The costs of business remain challenging.”

Pizza Hut opened its first UK restaurant in the early 1970s and expanded rapidly over the following 15 years.

In 2020, the company announced that it was closing dozens of restaurants, with the loss of hundreds of jobs, through a company voluntary arrangement (CVA).

At that time, it operated more than 240 sites across the UK.

HWS declined to comment.