Background

This investigation builds on the findings of our 2024 report Lessons learned: Government compensation schemes, which provided insights from previous and ongoing compensation schemes, drew out good practice and identified risks to assist officials when developing similar schemes in the future.

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This report focuses on the operational phase of a selection of seven government compensation and financial recognition schemes:

  • The Windrush Compensation Scheme
  • The Horizon Shortfall Scheme – closed in January 2026
  • The Horizon Group Litigation Order Scheme
  • The Horizon Overturned Convictions Scheme – closed in June 2025
  • The Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme
  • The LGBT Financial Recognition Scheme
  • The Infected Blood Compensation Scheme

Scope of the report

This report is a factual assessment of the schemes’ progress.

  • It sets out each scheme’s progress and performance at encouraging claims from eligible claimants, assessing claims, making offers and paying claimants.
  • It examines reasons for any performance issues, particularly in relation to the time taken to make offers to eligible applicants.
  • It sets out how schemes have introduced changes and improvements to encourage more potentially eligible people to claim, speed up the assessment process, and improve the rate and number of accepted offers.

Video summary

Lee Summerfield, the report’s director, summarises our findings.

Concluding remarks

Compensation and financial recognition schemes are expected to provide redress to all people who have experienced harm, either directly or indirectly, from the actions or inaction of public bodies. It is important therefore that people potentially eligible for payments or other restorative measures can confidently access schemes, that their claims are processed without unreasonable delay and that payment levels are regarded as fair by recipients.

To achieve this, those responsible for administering schemes must accept some risk of overpaying claimants or making payments to ineligible individuals when deciding upon aspects such as the payment framework, evidential requirements, and the period over which the scheme is open to claims.

Some schemes have experienced significant issues in their early stages, with compensation not getting to those affected in a timely way and backlogs of claims building up. These schemes made major changes in how they operated as a result, including relaxing evidential requirements.

These changes appear to have improved claims processing (for example, final payments have been made on over 80% of eligible claims to the Horizon schemes). However, five of the schemes we examined are still open and have not yet compensated all of the expected number of eligible people, despite two of these schemes remaining open for several years longer than planned.

By February 2026, the government had paid around £3.5 billion in total across all the schemes, with up to another £11.4 billion potentially yet to be paid. Some eligible people have been waiting over a year after submitting their claim before receiving a payment. All schemes have more to do to reach as many potentially eligible people as possible and support them to make claims.

Later schemes have not yet needed to make significant changes, having learnt from the experiences of the earlier schemes and replicating some of their improvements, such as the option to claim a fixed sum payment.

Officials designing and running schemes have set up a cross-Whitehall working group to share their learning and identify good practice; however, there remains no dedicated team within the government that has central oversight of, or offers support to, those setting up or administering government compensation schemes. Without such oversight, the government risks losing its expertise to ensure compensation schemes operate in a timely, efficient and effective manner and that claimants have confidence in their administration.

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Press release

View press release (17 Apr 2026)

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