The Guardian view on the Post Office scandal: justice delayed, redress demanded and a nation's shame exposed
The public inquiry into the Post Office IT Horizon scandal, seen as one of the worst miscarriages of justice, began in 2021. In a searing 162-page first volume its chair – the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams – laid bare the human toll, and the often sluggish, inadequate attempts to put things right. Between 1999 and 2015, nearly 1,000 people were prosecuted – and convicted – using data from the flawed Horizon system. Some were jailed. At least 13 may have killed themselves. Many more were ruined – wrongly imprisoned and bankrupted with their health and reputation shredded. The report makes clear: this was not a technical slip. It was a systemic failure that destroyed lives – and one that the Post Office let happen.
Sir Wyn can't assign legal guilt, but he leaves no doubt about blame. Victims, he writes, suffered 'wholly unacceptable behaviour' at the hands of 'the Post Office and Fujitsu'. Post Office executives and Fujitsu staff knew early on that Horizon was faulty. Still, prosecutions went ahead. Unreliable data was used to discipline, sack and jail subpostmasters. Complaints were brushed aside. Shortfalls were assumed to be theft. Victims were isolated and disbelieved.
Compensation schemes have followed, but these too have been marked by delay, confusion and red tape. Sir Wyn criticises all three of the major schemes as failing to deliver 'full and fair' redress – and retraumatising many victims. He calls for clearer definitions, swifter payments and a permanent public body to handle compensation for people harmed by state wrongdoing. The judge says there are about 10,000 eligible claimants for financial redress.
It seems astonishing that it took a television drama about the scandal to move the government to act. The judge concurs with a barrister acting for the victims who noted that 'until a change in political momentum in January 2024, behind the scenes an overly legalistic, slow and potentially obstructive attitude operated to constrain the amounts of compensation paid'.
Sir Wyn also proposes restorative justice: not only money, but acknowledgment. How this is framed has yet to be determined. But there seems much to be gained from public apologies and human understanding. There must be a moral reckoning with the damage caused.
This isn't the end – more volumes will follow – but even this first report reveals something badly broken in British public life. The real failure wasn't tech, but people and institutions. The government-owned Post Office, once a trusted part of society, emerges as secretive, punitive and unwilling to admit fault. It failed its reputation for being a pillar of civic life. It was, instead, the state that Nietzsche warned of – the 'coldest of all cold monsters' – wearing the people's face, but turning on them with indifference. The question now is not whether this happened, but what a country should do when it learns what it allowed to happen.
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The National
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- The National
Post Office Horizon scandal broke more than just the legal system
Going out on circuit around the country, inquiry chair Sir Wyn Williams heard sad stories from Ilfracombe to Inverness – each individual, but each with much in common. Postmasters' stories normally started well – in hope and new beginnings. I've had my eye on the shop for a while now. We'd like to operate our own branch. I think it's time to lay down roots in the community. We've been saving. This looks like a sound investment. Many of these men and women spoke of their plans to settle down with their families, settling what modest assets they had on the hope of securing a stable living in the heart of communities across the country – only for this very ordinary promise of living a very ordinary life to sour, and sour quickly. Security was the last thing these people got in return for their investment in the Post Office. READ MORE: Pat Kane: Scotland is heading back into a cycle of 'extraction without consent' The kit failed. Helplines gave them no help. Callers were told they were the only postmaster in the country whose Horizon terminals showed signs of bugging out. Phantom shortfalls in branch accounts accumulated, and inevitably, Post Office security goons came knocking. They came with audits, print-outs, sceptical faces, threats of dismissal, a change of locks and demands for full repayment under threat of prosecution. It seems fitting, therefore, for the first volume of the Post Office inquiry's findings to focus on the human impact of what went wrong, and the faltering and partial attempts by the British state to properly recognise and put right the terrible wrong this state company dealt to postmasters, their staff and their families over decades. In this volume, the judge focused on two key issues: the human impact and compensation. The human stories are now much better understood than they used to be, just a few years ago. It is still surprisingly difficult to pin down precisely how many people were affected by the Horizon scandal. Some were prosecuted, convicted and jailed for crimes they did not commit based on the failings in Fujitsu's system. Others found themselves in the dock but were acquitted – something like 50 to 60 people, by Sir Wyn's reckoning last week. Many others escaped the attentions of Post Office prosecutors, but instead, faced the sack. Postmasters whose contracts were terminated on the basis of their alleged dishonesty lost their shops, lost their business, and often as not, the mortgaged homes they relied on their livelihoods to service, becoming homeless. Many found themselves subject to other kinds of legal threats, facing civil court action demanding repayment of phantom debts they did not owe. Alan Bates tenaciously campaigned against the Post OfficeThis scandal was deadly. Sir Wyn concluded that at least 13 suicides were directly connected to Horizon shortfall allegations. Many postmasters disclosed suicidal ideation in the aftermath, which often involved huge financial and psychological stress as people sifted through the flotsam and jetsam of their lives, trying to keep themselves and their families afloat in the wake of the Post Office's allegations and sanctions. In some of the most powerful sections of last week's report, Sir Wyn reflects on the many 'genuinely moving accounts of the impact this had upon their immediate family'. Alan Bates, Jo Hamilton, Seema Misra – some of the most prominent postmasters are 'now well-known public figures'. But, he said, it is important to 'shine a light' on the significant number of other people who are 'far less well known but whose suffering has been acute'. Of Sir Wyn's 17 case studies, two focus on Scottish cases. The first is Susan Sinclair. She moved to Scotland in 1998 from America. In 2001, she began working as a court clerk in Ellen. Within months, she'd become postmistress of the branch nearby. Over the next year and a half, Horizon began to report shortfalls. A February 2003 audit disclosed an apparent shortfall of £10,700. Sinclair was interviewed by Post Office security goons, suspended and locked out of her branch. Later that month, she had her second encounter with PO investigators, who referred her case to the procurator fiscal, culminating in in her prosecution for embezzlement in 2004. She pled not guilty but was convicted by the sheriff. She ended up paying more than £10,700 to the Post Office. In September 2023, Ms Sinclair was the first person in Scotland to have her conviction quashed by the High Court. READ MORE: Keir Starmer's Donald Trump pandering proves the UK's global influence is fading The second Scottish case which Sir Wyn chose to highlight was Robert Thomson's. Rab has been quoted extensively in the Scottish media since interest in this story caught light. He was persuaded by his lawyer to plead guilty to charges of embezzlement from his Alloa Post Office. Following his conviction, there was significant adverse publicity in the local media. He was 'branded a thief'. Mr Thomson lived in a small rural community and the whole community knew of and believed in his conviction. This stigma was felt not only by Rab and his wife, but his two children, who were bullied at school in consequence of his conviction. This is one feature of this scandal that feels particularly troubling. Driven by its exaggerated suspicion of its own staff and misplaced faith in the infallibility of its accounting system, the Post Office did terrible things to its staff. But its false allegations also induced other people to act in ways which in retrospect do nobody any credit. Its suspicions were catching. In the Scottish human impact session in Glasgow, one postmaster – who eventually found himself being accused of being on the take after Horizon declared an apparent shortfall – talked about his sense of guilt at having accused and then dismissed two of his blameless staff after he concluded that if money was going missing and he wasn't responsible, one of them must have been responsible. 'I've apologised to them,' he said pointedly – but I was left with the distinct impression that this admission didn't entirely clear his conscience. Perhaps it shouldn't. I wonder how others in similar situations feel, confronted with the negative impact their own actions had on people affected. In Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has consistently depicted itself as a secondary victim of this scandal, whose good faith and trust was abused by the cynical manoeuvres of the Post Office. But even if you were misled, it was you who did the prosecuting, you who were the instrument of this injustice, you who remains – at least on some level – implicated. Local journalists who wrote up stories of postmasters being sent down may reasonably retort that they covered local court cases in good faith and in the public interest. Nobody would seriously suggest, I think, that they were not entitled to report who was convicted in local courts, particularly if the people involved had some community standing, particularly if they plead guilty. You wonder what all the local gossips and pharisees make of their behaviour now they know the targets of their whispering campaigns didn't deserve any of the hard words visited on them and their children. I suspect quite a few schoolyard bullies look back on their teenaged behaviour with regret. But it is difficult to escape the impression that it is was the whispered conversations in the supermarket, the pointed stares and being cut dead in the street by former friends which inflicted a significant part of the harm this scandal caused on people who found themselves caught up in it, their social identities spoiled by official suspicion and condemnation as crooks, thieves and embezzlers, exploiting public trust and helping themselves to the contents of your favourite granny's pension book. Even if you were deceived, even if you honestly believed these postmasters were guilty as charged, it was still you who stigmatised these people, still you who played an indispensable part of the great harm done to them, even with all this mitigation. READ MORE: Richard Murphy: Passing laws that destroy our freedoms is tyranny Continued denial, I suppose, is one response. Talking to one affected postmaster last year, she told me that she and her husband were still subject to a degree of community mistrust and hostility, even after ITV had broadcast its game-changing drama about the scandal in January 2024 and widespread community awareness spread that these people did nothing wrong. There's always a committed sceptic on hand to say 'no smoke without fire', determined in the teeth of all the evidence to believe some of these postmasters must have been guilty, and are only jumping on a convenient bandwagon to clear their convictions and get themselves some unmerited damages. But you wonder if even this reaction isn't its own kind of evasion. Dimly conscious of the monstrous self-reflection required by realising you've played a key part in what made this injustice go so deep down, all the way to the social nerve, it is easier to pretend you have no regrets, and nothing to answer for.
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