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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was a guest on a television program on Sunday 7 January he said that the government is considering a series of measures to protect and compensate over 700 postal workers wrongly accused of stealing money in their respective branches between 1999 and 2015. The prosecution’s hypotheses supported in the trials, some of which are still ongoing and others resulting in prison sentences were based on information provided by a computer accounting system that later turned out to be faulty. Hundreds of people, even those not tried, suffered heavy consequences: some went into debt to cover the false shortfalls reported by the system. Various media also associated the story with at least four suicides.
It’s a long-known story, defined dal Guardian the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history, but is attracting new attention after a miniseries aired on 1 January, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, made it known to many more people. One of the most striking facts, on which the Metropolitan Police Service (the police force responsible for the London area) opened investigation, is that the trials against the employees were continued despite information about the software flaws having been circulating since at least 2010.
Alan Bates – played in the miniseries by English actor Toby Jones – was deputy post office manager in County Conwy, North Wales, between 1998 and 2003. After years of maintaining his innocence, he founded the group in 2009 Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance together with other former employees reported by the Post Office, the company that provides postal and financial services in the United Kingdom through branches spread across the country (since 2012 independent by Royal Mail, the company that delivers parcels and letters). In total, about 3,500 postal workers were accused of stealing money at work between 1999 and 2015, and more than 700 were reported and stood trial for theft, fraud or false accounting.
Bates and hundreds of other employees had immediately raised doubts about the functioning of Horizon, a software developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu and introduced by the post office in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s to have centralized accounting. Some branch managers had noticed that the system was reporting false shortfalls, sometimes amounting to thousands of pounds, but the post office rejected this claim for years, arguing that the software was efficient. The Horizon system is still used by the post office, which define the most recent version, introduced in 2017, is reliable and free of previous defects (in 2023 Fujitsu signed a £37m contract to keep the data centers powering Horizon running for another two years).
Hundreds of employees had to make up the shortfall out of their own pockets, because their contracts stipulated that they would be held liable in cases like this. Many fell into debt and ended up in bankruptcy; some, among the hundreds who stood trial, were sentenced to prison or community service. The accusations, media attention and sentences generally had a very heavy impact on the employees and their families.
In 2019, a group of employees won a lawsuit against the postal service and obtained the annulment of their convictions, which were judged illegitimate because the responsibility for the shortfalls was attributed to a defect in the IT system. The sentence was then confirmed on appeal to the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2021 and led to the quashing of the convictions of 39 employees. Meanwhile, in an independent investigation into the responsibilities of the postal service, which should be concluded this year, it was discovered that despite knowing about the software flaw, numerous appeals by employees who considered themselves unjustly convicted were opposed.
“The last nine years have been hell, a complete nightmare,” these after being exonerated Vipinchandra Patel, former deputy manager of a post office in Oxfordshire who in 2011 was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison after being found guilty of stealing 75 thousand pounds. Seema Misra, a post office worker in Surrey, was pregnant with her second child when she was condemned for theft to 15 months in prison. The activists led by Bates have also supported that in some internal documents, postal managers used racist terms and classified branch managers and employees based on ethnicity.
A total of 142 appeal case reviews were completed between the start of the matter and the end of 2023, resulting in 93 convictions being quashed and a total of £24 million in compensation. However, the posts received different criticisms for delaying payments, also because dozens of employees died before they could receive compensation. At this time, no postal workers have been formally charged in connection with the Horizon scandal: the Guardian he wrote that the investigation launched by the Metropolitan Police Service also involves two former experts from Fujitsu, the company that produces Horizon, heard as witnesses during the trials.
Sunak said on Sunday that the Government was considering specific steps to allow postal workers involved in the scandal to be cleared of charges. He also confirmed that Justice Minister Alex Chalk could deprive the post office of the ability to bring legal proceedings privately, like any company and citizen. More than a million people have meanwhile signed a petition calling for former postal chief executive Paula Vennells to be private of the title Commander of the British Empire (CBE), an honor he received in 2019 for his services in the post office and his charitable activities. Many lawsuits against the Post Office related to the Horizon scandal were already underway at the time.