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The National
13-07-2025
- Politics
- 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.
Canada News.Net
11-07-2025
- Business
- Canada News.Net
At least 13 people committed suicide in UK's Post Office scandal
LONDON, U.K.: At least 13 people are believed to have taken their own lives as a result of the U.K.'s Post Office scandal, in which nearly 1,000 postal workers were wrongly prosecuted or convicted due to a faulty computer system, a public inquiry report revealed on July 8. Another 59 individuals considered suicide over the scandal, which has been described as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters and postmistresses were falsely accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting based on data from a defective accounting software called Horizon. Many were imprisoned, driven into bankruptcy, lost their homes, or suffered mental health crises, broken relationships, and social isolation. Retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, who leads the public inquiry into the case, said families linked the 13 suicides to the devastating consequences of the Post Office's reliance on Horizon, which wrongly reported cash shortfalls in branch accounts. The Horizon system, developed by Japanese tech firm Fujitsu, was rolled out across Post Office branches in 1999 to automate sales and accounting. However, when errors occurred, the Post Office held individual employees responsible—demanding they repay the missing sums and initiating prosecutions. Despite internal knowledge of the system's flaws, the Post Office insisted for years that its data was infallible. "The Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate," Judge Williams said. "Some senior staff knew—or should have known—Horizon was unreliable." The scale of the injustice was known in legal and technical circles for years, but public awareness surged in 2023 following a widely viewed television docudrama that sparked outrage and support for the victims. Jo Hamilton, a former sub-postmistress wrongly convicted of false accounting, and now a prominent campaigner, said the new report "shows the full scale of the horror that they unleashed on us." In a statement, Post Office chairman Nigel Railton apologized, acknowledging the institution's failures: "The Post Office did not listen to postmasters and, as an organization, we let them down. Postmasters and their families have suffered years of pain. It has taken too long for them to clear their names and receive justice." The government has passed legislation to overturn wrongful convictions and offer compensation. This week's report is the first from the official inquiry, which has the authority to demand testimony and documents from all involved. A subsequent report is expected to assign responsibility and determine accountability.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- New York Times
At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
At least 13 postal workers in Britain died by suicide amid a post office scandal in which about 1,000 postal workers were wrongfully prosecuted for theft and other crimes, according to a report released this week as part of an inquiry into the scandal. Wyn Williams, the retired high court judge who is leading the inquiry, wrote in the report, published on Tuesday, that by his estimation, more than 10,000 people were eligible for some kind of redress and that he expected that number to grow. The victims range from postal workers held liable for tens or hundreds of pounds in financial discrepancies to those who were wrongly tried, convicted, imprisoned and made to pay back tens of thousands of pounds. They were all blamed for apparent shortfalls at their postal branches across Britain that, it turned out, had actually been caused by a flawed information technology system. More than 1,000 people were prosecuted from 2000 to at least 2013, but thousands of others were blamed and held responsible, according to the report. The 166-page volume, the first from the inquiry, which began in September 2020, focuses on the victims, including exasperating efforts to get compensation from the postal service. The scandal burst into the public eye last year after an ITV television series, 'Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,' dramatized the stories of the victims. Soon after, the British Parliament passed a law quashing the convictions. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Glasgow Times
09-07-2025
- Business
- Glasgow Times
Government urges Fujitsu to pay compensation to victims of Post Office scandal
The call came as critics pointed out the Japanese tech giant had 'paid not one penny' for the 'havoc and misery that it helped to cause'. They also argued the under-fire company 'should be nowhere near' new Government contracts as it emerged it continued to secure lucrative multimillion-pound deals with Whitehall, bankrolled by the taxpayer. The company has already acknowledged it has a 'moral obligation' to contribute to compensation, pending the outcome of the public inquiry led by Sir Wyn Williams. Chair Sir Wyn Williams (Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry) The firm has come under renewed pressure after the publication of the first part of Sir Wyn's final report. It found around 1,000 people were wrongly prosecuted and convicted after Fujitsu's defective Horizon accounting system made it appear as though money was missing at their Post Office branches. Some victims were sent to prison or financially ruined, others were shunned by their communities, and some took their own lives. The long-running battle for justice accelerated dramatically after ITV broadcast the drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which highlighted the scandal. Sir Wyn said around 10,000 people are eligible to submit compensation claims following what has been dubbed as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Labour former MP Kevan Jones, who now sits in the upper chamber as Lord Beamish, has been a long-standing champion for the subpostmasters. Kevan Jones (PA) He said: 'To date, the Government and taxpayers have paid over a billion pounds, quite rightly, to those victims. 'Fujitsu have not paid one penny piece. They may have a moral obligation, but moral obligations do not pay compensation.' He added: 'So when will the Government get on and force Fujitsu to act on its moral obligations, put its hands in its pockets and at least pay some interim payments? Responding, Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent said: 'With regards to the payments by Fujitsu, we urge them to make interim payments, but there are ongoing conversations with Fujitsu, including regular meetings with the Crown representative, the Cabinet Office and DBT (the Department for Business and Trade) and we will continue to have such meetings.' Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, who played a pivotal role in exposing the scandal, said: 'Fujitsu has paid not one penny towards the victims of the havoc and misery that it helped to cause. 'Is the Government – is the country – over a barrel to Fujitsu? If not, why is Fujitsu still winning government work? If we are, what are the Government doing about it?' Lady Anderson said: 'They have accepted that they have a moral obligation to give funds, but he will be even more aware than I am that we are yet to see a penny. 'Fujitsu have agreed that they will have to make a financial contribution, but I am urged not to give a running commentary, although we will welcome any interim payment in due course.' In addition to extensions available under Fujitsu's existing contracts, a further 12 new deals had been struck with the company over the last year. The Government has said the majority are for services already provided by Fujitsu and were put in place to ensure continuity of services. Liberal Democrat Lord Clement-Jones raised concerns over HM Revenue & Customs continuing to award contacts to Fujitsu. He said: 'In the light of the Horizon report, which condemns Fujitsu's conduct as a key contributor to the suffering of thousands of innocent people, isn't it already very clear that Fujitsu should be nowhere near any new contract?' Lady Anderson said: 'Some of this is about continuity of service, to make sure that we are still able to have business supply secured.' Given the 'human tragedies' caused by the wrongful convictions of subpostmasters, Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick pressed the minister over due diligence measures 'to ensure that contractors with a history of significant failures or legal issues can demonstrate that they have addressed these concerns before being awarded new contracts'. Lady Anderson said new procurement legislation provided buyers with more scope to exclude suppliers who had performed poorly on previous contracts. She added: 'Due diligence on such failures is also more straightforward as the act now provides for the sharing of information on poorly performing suppliers.' A Fujitsu spokesperson said: 'We remain committed to providing our full cooperation to the inquiry as Sir Wyn prepares his final report and we are engaged with Government regarding Fujitsu's contribution to compensation.' They added: 'We continue to work with the UK Government to ensure we adhere to the voluntary restrictions we put in place regarding bidding for new contracts while the Post Office inquiry is ongoing.'
The Herald Scotland
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Government urges Fujitsu to pay compensation to victims of Post Office scandal
They also argued the under-fire company 'should be nowhere near' new Government contracts as it emerged it continued to secure lucrative multimillion-pound deals with Whitehall, bankrolled by the taxpayer. The company has already acknowledged it has a 'moral obligation' to contribute to compensation, pending the outcome of the public inquiry led by Sir Wyn Williams. Chair Sir Wyn Williams (Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry) The firm has come under renewed pressure after the publication of the first part of Sir Wyn's final report. It found around 1,000 people were wrongly prosecuted and convicted after Fujitsu's defective Horizon accounting system made it appear as though money was missing at their Post Office branches. Some victims were sent to prison or financially ruined, others were shunned by their communities, and some took their own lives. The long-running battle for justice accelerated dramatically after ITV broadcast the drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which highlighted the scandal. Sir Wyn said around 10,000 people are eligible to submit compensation claims following what has been dubbed as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Labour former MP Kevan Jones, who now sits in the upper chamber as Lord Beamish, has been a long-standing champion for the subpostmasters. Kevan Jones (PA) He said: 'To date, the Government and taxpayers have paid over a billion pounds, quite rightly, to those victims. 'Fujitsu have not paid one penny piece. They may have a moral obligation, but moral obligations do not pay compensation.' He added: 'So when will the Government get on and force Fujitsu to act on its moral obligations, put its hands in its pockets and at least pay some interim payments? Responding, Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent said: 'With regards to the payments by Fujitsu, we urge them to make interim payments, but there are ongoing conversations with Fujitsu, including regular meetings with the Crown representative, the Cabinet Office and DBT (the Department for Business and Trade) and we will continue to have such meetings.' Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, who played a pivotal role in exposing the scandal, said: 'Fujitsu has paid not one penny towards the victims of the havoc and misery that it helped to cause. 'Is the Government – is the country – over a barrel to Fujitsu? If not, why is Fujitsu still winning government work? If we are, what are the Government doing about it?' Lady Anderson said: 'They have accepted that they have a moral obligation to give funds, but he will be even more aware than I am that we are yet to see a penny. 'Fujitsu have agreed that they will have to make a financial contribution, but I am urged not to give a running commentary, although we will welcome any interim payment in due course.' In addition to extensions available under Fujitsu's existing contracts, a further 12 new deals had been struck with the company over the last year. The Government has said the majority are for services already provided by Fujitsu and were put in place to ensure continuity of services. Liberal Democrat Lord Clement-Jones raised concerns over HM Revenue & Customs continuing to award contacts to Fujitsu. He said: 'In the light of the Horizon report, which condemns Fujitsu's conduct as a key contributor to the suffering of thousands of innocent people, isn't it already very clear that Fujitsu should be nowhere near any new contract?' Lady Anderson said: 'Some of this is about continuity of service, to make sure that we are still able to have business supply secured.' Given the 'human tragedies' caused by the wrongful convictions of subpostmasters, Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick pressed the minister over due diligence measures 'to ensure that contractors with a history of significant failures or legal issues can demonstrate that they have addressed these concerns before being awarded new contracts'. Lady Anderson said new procurement legislation provided buyers with more scope to exclude suppliers who had performed poorly on previous contracts. She added: 'Due diligence on such failures is also more straightforward as the act now provides for the sharing of information on poorly performing suppliers.' A Fujitsu spokesperson said: 'We remain committed to providing our full cooperation to the inquiry as Sir Wyn prepares his final report and we are engaged with Government regarding Fujitsu's contribution to compensation.' They added: 'We continue to work with the UK Government to ensure we adhere to the voluntary restrictions we put in place regarding bidding for new contracts while the Post Office inquiry is ongoing.'
