UK Post Office Scandal

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(We interrupt the series in progress for a bulletin about current affairs…)

Unless you’re in the UK, you are probably unaware of the Post Office scandal here. The UK has full-fledged post offices and little branches that often operate in the corner of a shop or in a small village premises. The former are run by the Post Office itself, which is overseen by the government. The latter are run by subpostmasters on behalf of the Post Office.

What Happened?

In the late 1990s, the Post Office rolled out the Horizon IT system built by Fujitsu as the software subpostmasters had to use to run their shops.

The Post Office has powers to prosecute subpostmasters itself without involving police whenever it finds evidence of fraud. It accused 3500 of them of fraud based on what it saw in Horizon. The Post Office took tens of thousands of pounds from accused subpostmasters to make up the shortfalls Horizon showed. It prosecuted more than 900. It got well over 700 of them convicted. Subpostmasters lost life savings, went bankrupt, sometimes were imprisoned, sometimes were driven out of their communities or even out of the country to escape the abuse heaped on them by neighbors who reviled them for what they had supposedly done. A few committed suicide.

But the Horizon system was, and for all we know still is, defective.

Subpostmasters who didn’t trust it and kept separate handwritten records of every transaction were able to fight back in court, but nearly everyone except the postmasters seems to have presumed the software was flawless.

A group of subpostmasters took this to court in 2019, saying they were wrongly convicted and the Horizon system was at fault. They won. The decision was appealed and in 2021 they won the appeal.

A public inquiry is grinding its way through the matter now. It is widely considered the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history. The government set aside money to compensate victims, but has been dragging its feet. Several subpostmasters have died before the accusations against them came up for reconsideration. The Post Office also charged tax on compensation payments it did hand out, which it shouldn’t have. It paid bonuses to its bosses who were in charge of the debacle and one was awarded a CBE, which she just relinquished a few days ago under public pressure. Nobody in the Post Office has been punished.

Recently ITV aired a television docudrama called Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Although this scandal has been in the news regularly, many people didn’t pay much attention to it until the show put it in front of them in a way that hit them in the gut. Public outrage erupted.

Suddenly it became a crisis. Suddenly it wasn’t okay any more to let the Post Office dither until its victims give up or die.

A general election has to be called within a year. This scandal is profoundly inconvenient for anyone who will have to face voters at the ballot box. Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all been in charge of government or in a coalition-based government while the misdeeds were happening. But Tories have been in government through the entire time when the Post Office was supposed to be rectifying the situation, so they feel especially urgent about getting it out of the public eye.

Suddenly the government feels compelled to take action to quell the uproar.

They’ve decided to pass a law that quashes en masse the convictions of subpostmasters using Horizon and provides all of them with at least some financial compensation quickly.

There are a few lingering issues, not all of which I’ve heard mentioned.

Horizon

There are some rumblings about holding Fujitsu responsible, too. One man came forward on BBC Radio 4’s Today show a few days ago to say he witnessed administrative personnel maintaining Horizon changing numbers for a branch. (I missed his name.) He said the design wasn’t supposed to allow them to be able to do that without any notice to the branch, but they did. After they realized what they had shown him, they ushered him out in a hurry.

I wonder whether Horizon keeps audit trails of transactions. It should.

I also wonder how Horizon was commissioned for use. Any halfway capable IT test professional would be able to readily find and document the types of errors the system reportedly made. Testing had to be poorly planned, poorly done, skipped or ignored.

Wrongful Takings by Post Office

MP Duncan Baker (Tory, North Norfolk) worked as a subpostmaster in Norfolk before being elected to Parliament in 2019. On 10 January, he said in the Commons:

One question that has never been answered is just how much money was taken unlawfully from thousands of innocent men and women.

The Post Office took that money, we have never known that figure.

Even the most basic accountant knows that it will run into hundreds of millions of pounds. So could the minister find out from the Post Office—force them to publish—just the grand scale of how much money they stole from people?

It’s a valid question and should be backed up by questions about how accountants and auditors for the Post Office developed annual reports. What Horizon said and what the balances in financial accounts said couldn’t have matched. How was that dealt with in financial reports? Was it all blamed on an abrupt surge in fraud?

Legal System

Some politicians and pundits are wringing their hands about Parliament erasing all convictions of subpostmasters in this scandal. They worry that perhaps a few who really were crooked will get away with it.

Why do they find that more distressing than having punished so many people for frauds they didn’t commit? Convicting someone who is innocent is supposed to be worse than missing the chance to convict someone who is guilty. In this instance, a great many innocents were wrongly thrashed. The Post Office has more cases actively going through the courts on these same grounds even though everyone now knows Horizon is not trustworthy.

Some politicians and pundits also worry that Parliament is overriding the judicial system by quashing those convictions. They mumble that it disrupts the separation of powers between different governmental systems.

This gets close to the issue that bothers me most and that I don’t hear anyone discussing, but their concern is the opposite of my concern.

This was a massive failure of the legal system. It hasn’t stopped. The Post Office is still pursuing cases against subpostmasters. We have a judicial system that swallowed the prosecution’s story hook, line and sinker even though it shouldn’t have taken much to see that defense assertions of flaws in the IT system were valid. The judicial system didn’t make this blunder a few times. It made this blunder several hundred times. It didn’t question why the rate of subpostmasters having accounts that didn’t look right went from a few per year to more than half a hundred as soon as Horizon was in place. It didn’t check the prosecution’s claim that Horizon worked properly. People were rammed through the judicial system and the judicial system either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The judicial system got this so very wrong… To be blunt, whether it looks bad for the judiciary to have Parliament legislate en masse clearing of the ruined names of the victims is not what anyone should be fretting about.

Looking at what happened to so many subpostmasters, does the rule of law still matter here or has that gone by the wayside? What else is the judiciary getting wrong? Could it be done to anyone? After watching ITV’s show, it begins to occur to ordinary people all over the country that this is what we should fret about.