Rishi Sunak has announced a plan to grant an unprecedented blanket acquittal for hundreds of post office operators wrongly convicted in the Horizon IT scandal. Responding to an urgent question about this after PMQs, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal services minster, said the inquiry into the scandal had shown that the Post Office acted not just with incompetence, but with “malevolence” too. (See 12.49pm.) Lawyers have warned against setting a precedent of government interference in the justice system after the plans for blanket laws to exonerate the post office operators were announced. As PA Media reports, while many welcomed proposals for legislation which could clear the names of hundreds of post office branch managers in England and Wales by the end of the year, some barristers and solicitors cautioned the government against setting a “legal and constitutional precedent”. Sam Townend KC, chairman of the Bar Council, said: We will examine the proposals carefully. Anxious care should be taken as to ensuring the independence of the judiciary and the government must be careful about setting legal and constitutional precedent. There are many lessons to be learned from the Post Office scandal. Not only is there a clear case for parliament to review the ability of certain corporate bodies to bring private prosecutions but it also highlights the vital importance of access to legal advice and the urgent need to repair confidence in the justice system. Pressure is mounting on the government to review more than £2bn in new contracts awarded to Fujitsu since a court ruling in 2019 found its Horizon IT system caused accounting errors that were blamed on more than 900 post office operators who were then wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office. Michael Gove has refused to set a deadline for an independent report on allegations of “corruption, wrongdoing and illegality” at Teesworks, the industrial development within the government’s high-profile freeport project. The estimated cost of the HS2 line from London to Birmingham has ballooned to as much as £66bn, the scheme’s executive chair has told MPs.