The Post Office has offered compensation to 777 of the 2,500 postmasters who applied for compensation over a 20-year scandal that saw some of them serve prison sentences. Its chief executive, Nick Read, told MPs on Tuesday that he hopes that lawyers and staff working on the case can make offers to the all but a handful of the claimants by the end of the year. But he warned that the Post Office will need help from the Government to ensure that all the postmasters are properly compensated for what happened to them. “The Post Office itself doesn’t have the financial resources to compensate a miscarriage of justice of this scale,” he told the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. In total, 950 postmasters were prosecuted for a variety of charges from 1999, but many of these cases were later linked to problems in the Horizon computer system. Some of …