Hundreds of UK Post Office managers were bankrupted and imprisoned, thanks to flawed accounting software deployed by the government-run Post Office, which also initiated a 20-year campaign of cover-up and legal harassment against them.
It has been described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history.” Yet, before the current explosion of public interest, almost nobody in British politics or the media paid it any proper attention for two decades. This is very much part of the scandal which provides a wider snapshot of the dire state of UK politics.
While playing a vital role in towns and villages, submaster-managed post offices and their staff are quite distant from the priorities of the Westminster ‘bubble.’ Like the Brexit revolt before it, the recent explosion of public indignation over how government-run institutions treated the ‘little people’ meant that UK politicians have been ill-prepared for the anger surrounding these criminal convictions, bankruptcies and worse.
A symptom of political disconnection is that it has taken Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a prime-time television docudrama on ITV, to ignite this level of outrage. While some pundits, half in jest, have asked “if it wasn’t on TV, did it even happen?,” the sudden, widespread outburst of anger in response to a TV drama shows how this scandal has come to symbolise public frustration with an out-of-touch Westminster class treating ordinary people with contempt.
What scandal?
It’s not as if there’s been no time for action. Over a 15-year period starting in 1999, more than 700 Post Office branch managers (‘sub-postmasters’) were convicted—after being “relentlessly pursued” by their parent organisation—of false accounting, theft and fraud. These convictions were based on flawed information provided by the Horizon IT financial software which Japanese tech company Fujitsu Services began operating for the Post Office in 1999.
Between 2015 and 2021, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, Britain’s statutory body for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice, reviewed wrongful convictions and later said:
Horizon appeared to have significant bugs which could cause the system to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money which sub-postmasters found difficult to challenge as they were unable to access information about the software to do so. (Emphasis added)
How substantial?
Sub-postmasters, who ran independent Post Office branches on behalf of the company, were expected to count the cash held at their branch each day and declare this on the Horizon system—faults within which could then over-report daily takings to auditors.
Seema Misra was accused of stealing £75,000 (€87,000) from the office she ran in Surrey. She was jailed on her son’s 10th birthday and only resisted suicide because she was pregnant with another child.
Balvinder Singh Gill was sectioned three times while struggling with his mental health after he was accused of stealing £108,000 (€125,500).
“You’re the only one”
There are many such reported cases of personal turmoil caused as a result of this scandal; of marriages breaking down, addictions catalysed and livelihoods and homes being lost. According to The Guardian, the sorry tale is linked to at least four suicides to date. The position of sub-postmaster typically involves providing frontline services to a small community, building up trust over decades—increasingly important at a time when the Post Office itself has taken on the roles once played by the local bank.
It took some time for sub-postmasters to understand the scale of the problem, with the Post Office telling—that is, lying to—individuals who reported issues with the Horizon system that “you’re the only one to have problems.” Sub-postmasters inevitably became isolated from their own communities, where some believed them to be thieves. Individuals were also hounded by Post Office investigators who were being offered cash bonuses for every conviction.
Low Horizons?
The Post Office, which is fully owned by the government, knew all this time that faulty software was much more than an isolated issue; newly reported covert recordings have revealed that senior staff were aware of problems with Horizon at least two years before the head of the organisation denied it. But it wasn’t until 2009 that wider issues with the IT system were first reported by Computer Weekly. It took another ten years for a group of Post Office operators to win a high court case in which their convictions were ruled wrongful. To date, only 93 convictions have been overturned.
Perhaps the process will be resolved more quickly now that the issue has exploded into public view, largely due to the transmission this month of Mr Bates vs the Post Office—the most-watched programme on any British television channel so far this year. The series dramatises the run-of-the-mill victims of this scandal who might otherwise not have attracted such high-profile public attention. Chief among these was Alan Bates, played on screen by Toby Jones, whose life was substantially disrupted and who went on to lead the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance campaign against the Post Office.
Circling the Bandwagons
The impact of the TV dramatisation has prompted many to belatedly try to jump on the sub-postmasters’ bandwagon. News outlets are clearly keen to stress that they’ve been on the side of the sub-postmasters for years, even if coverage on today’s scale is unprecedented. As journalist Tom Peck jokes, those not portrayed in the TV drama are trying to scrape up some credit for winning justice.
The Conservatives, in government for the past 14 years while the scandal festered, have sought to spread responsibility by pointing the finger at opposition leaders who are also culpable. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, widely seen as the UK’s prime minister in waiting, was the Director of Public Prosecutions at a time when sub-postmasters were being railroaded through the courts. When Sir Ed Davey MP, now leader of the Liberal Democrats, was a postal minister in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, he refused to meet campaigner Alan Bates. Both now claim their innocence, though the public verdict seems unlikely to be favourable.
A cynic might say the political scramble to take the moral high ground is reflected in MPs calling for Mr. Bates to be knighted—and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing a new law to quash convictions of Horizon victims. (There are exceptions here, such as Lord James Arbuthnot, Tory MP for North East Hampshire from 1997 to 2015 and an avid supporter of the campaign for justice since 2009.)
The media was also evidently pleased to learn that some sub-postmasters were sent to court by the Crown Prosecution Service while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was its head, although his overall role in this seems tenuous at best, not least because the majority of the cases were prosecuted by the Post Office itself.
What next?
No doubt, the newspapers will soon move onto another scandal, given that the London liberal media bubble sees the Horizon victims as deeply unfashionable. But this issue will continue to trudge on, not least due to the ongoing judge-led public inquiry, with slightly more commentary than before. Mr. Bates’ Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance is looking not for knighthoods but for the victims who have had their convictions overturned to receive the financial redress owed to them.
Some attention is likely to remain on the Metropolitan Police’s criminal investigation into the Post Office over “potential fraud offences” committed by the organisation—which continues to operate a version of Horizon—during the scandal, not least because no senior executives have yet been officially punished for their actions.
Fifteen months after parliament said it would ensure compensation was awarded “promptly,” these individuals are still waiting. Campaigners say they will not stop their action until all involved “have received the financial redress they are due and have been promised.”
