LAST UPDATE | 10 Jan
THE UK POLICE have launched a fresh investigation into the scandal at the country’s postal service that saw hundreds of workers falsely accused of fraud.
More than 700 subpostmasters, who are charged with operating individual post office branches, were convicted on charges including false accounting and theft when it appeared that money was missing from branches – but it later emerged that the discrepancies were due to an issue with the service’s software.
Dozens of more potential victims have come forward in the wake of a drama series about the scandal that aired on ITV last week, the BBC has reported.
The police are investigating the prosecutions of hundreds of subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015, which are now believed to have been miscarriages of justice.
Here’s everything you need to know about how the scandal happened, what it meant for the people involved, and what the latest developments are.
In 1999, a new IT system known as Horizon started to be rolled out in post offices in the UK. The software, which was owned by Japanese company Fujitsu, automated accounts after subpostmasters inputted sales figures through a touchscreen.
It wasn’t long before issues arose.
Branches found unexplained shorftalls in their accounts. The Post Office accused subpostmasters of theft, or at least false accounting, and ordered them to pay back the money, threatening them with prosecution if they did not comply.
Alan Bates, the subpostmaster at the centre of ITV’s new drama “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, reported problems at his branch in Wales as early as 2000.
Bates was obliged under his contract to pay back the “losses” from his own money. His contract was terminated in 2003 when he refused to accept liability.
It took until 2009 for the scandal to fully emerge in a news report by Computer Weekly magazine.
By then, at least seven subpostmasters had began to speak out about their experience and push back against the Post Office — a number that would grow to hundreds. Bates and other affected workers set up a group called the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance.
The Post Office was taking subpostmasters around the country to court on allegations of theft and fraud, but the discrepancies were in fact due to flaws with the Horizon system.
A new Post Office CEO named Paula Vennells was appointed in 2012. In 2015, Vennells appeared before Westminsters’ business select committee and claimed there was no evidence of miscarriages of justice.
555 subpostmasters launched legal action against the Post Office in 2017.
Two years later, a High Court judge ruled that the Horizon system had “bugs, errors and defects”. The judge said there was a “material risk” that the shortfalls at post office branches were caused by the flawed system.
In response, the Post Office agreed to pay £58 million to the 555 subpostmasters who took the case.
Dozens of appeals against convictions have been filed in the years since the High Court case. A total of 93 subpostmasters have had their convictions overturned so far.
A statutory inquiry began in 2021 looking into the failings of the system and the wrongful convictions.
Hundreds of affected subpostmasters were compelled to pay the “missing” money back to the Post Office out of their own pocket. Around 2,400 subpostmasters have applied to the Historic Shortfalls Scheme to recover money they had paid to Post Office.
Many had their contracts terminated and faced legal threats, with more than 700 convicted on charges of theft or false accounting.
Seema Misra, for example, a pregnant subpostmaster in West Byfleet, Surrey, was jailed in 2010 after she was accused of stealing £74,000.
Lee Castleton of Bridlington in East Yorkshire looked after a branch that was accused of having a £25,000 shortfall within a year after he purchased the branch in 2003. Castleton went bankrupt in 2004 after losing a legal battle with the Post Office.
Last year, the UK government announced that all wrongly convicted subpostmasters would be offered compensation of £600,000 each.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme yesterday, Castleton called for the Horizon compensation scheme to be independently administered, demanding “a completely isolated, separate review and compensation scheme”.
“I would love it to be taken out of the hands of the people that really caused it in a way. “This is not just a computer issue, this is a people issue,” he said.
A public inquiry into Horizon is ongoing in the UK.
Both Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police are investigating matters linked to the scandal.
Scotland Yard said on Friday that it is “investigating potential fraud offences arising out of these prosecutions”, such as “monies recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions”.
The Metropolitan Police is investigating potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently confirmed that Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was considering ways of helping subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted. Chalk met with Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake on Monday to discuss the matter.
Sunak said at the weekend that the ordeal was an “appalling miscarriage of justice” and that the UK Government was “keen to do everything we can because this was absolutely appalling”.
“It has been an appalling miscarriage of justice and appalling treatment of all the people affected and it is right that they get the redress that they deserve,” Sunak said.
“The government has put in place three different compensation schemes that have already paid out almost £150 million to thousands of people who are affected, and are keen to go as quickly as possible. More broadly, the Justice Secretary is also looking at other options for how we can provide support for people.”
Now, this afternoon, Sunak announced that the UK government will introduce legislation to ensure wrongfully convicted subpostmasters are “exonerated and compensated”.
Speaking in Westminster during Prime Minister’s Questions, he called it “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice” in the UK’s history and said the government would “right the wrongs of the past” and ensure that “victims get the justice they deserve”.
While the details of the scandal have been long known by now, the recent ITV drama attracted renewed attention to it.
Keir Starmer told ITV News he thought the programme was “really powerful in exposing a scandal, a miscarriage of justice on a very wide scale”.
“I actually know some individuals who’ve been caught up with this, and I know the impact it’s had on their mental health as much as anything else,” Starmer said.
Signatures on a petition calling for the UK’s Honours Forfeiture Committee to strip former Post Office boss Paula Vennells of her CBE reached more than one million in the wake of the ITV drama.
Vennells previously said she is “truly sorry” for the “suffering” caused to staff who were wrongly convicted.
Facing pressure, she said yesterday that she would hand back her CBE.
Additional reporting by Press Association
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