The Great Post Office Scandal
How do you expose one of the UK's biggest ever miscarriages of justice?
The Great Post Office Scandal is the only definitive account of the fight to expose a multimillion-pound IT disaster that put innocent people in jail.
Author Nick Wallis came to Intellectual Forum on 11 October to tell a rapt audience the story behind his book. As IF Director Julian Huppert said in his introduction to the event: “This is the sort of story that could have been hidden completely if not for people like Nick who did so much to bring awareness”.
Nick began his talk by explaining the role of the Post Office, the oldest government agency in the UK. “The sense of it being bound up in the British national psyche is really important”, he said. The Post Office “had a sense of being solid, permanent, and something that you could trust”.
This reputation made joining the Post Office an attractive prospect. While a postmaster is usually the head of the main post office in a district, town, or city, in the 1800s, the public’s desire and need to send mail began to outstrip the capacity of these central Post Offices. Sub-postmasters were self-employed small business owners approved by the Post Office to run smaller branches catering to this excess demand.
For many sub-postmasters, Nick explained, becoming an agent of the Post Office was an investment, not just financially but socially, as the position brought community visibility and the opportunity to become part of a brand woven into the fabric of the nation. Many incoming sub-postmasters never saw the contract they agreed to, trusting to the Post Office to do right by them.
The Post Office, however, viewed sub-postmasters as trying to trade on the Post Office’s reputation to better themselves, a pernicious class-based social dynamic that took root in the nineteenth century and, as Nick argues, still persists within the Post Office to this day.
This cultural divide, and the Post Office’s willingness to mistrust sub-postmasters, came to a head in the 1990s, when the Post Office began to automate its systems. The government tendered a £1bn private contract to design and build an IT system that would look after all the accounting in a sub-postmaster’s branch: the Horizon IT system.
The system would have been brilliant, Nick said—if it had worked. Despite knowing there were major errors in the software, the Post Office rolled out Horizon in sub-post offices run by sub-postmasters unaware of its fundamental problems.
Immediately the new system began causing chaos, showing accounting deficits at sub-post offices around the UK. But the Post Office, which couldn’t let its investment fail, held the sub-postmasters accountable. Over a 15-year period, the Post Office prosecuted more than 900 people, more than 700 of whom were given criminal convictions.
Nick told the stories of just a few of the hundreds of people who were victims of these accounting errors in the Horizon IT system. One of these sub-postmasters, Jo Hamilton, had evidence of calling the Horizon helpline to ask about a deficit she had noticed in her branch’s accounts. The instructions she received from the helpline doubled the deficit, for which she was held liable. She was charged with false accounting and theft, despite an internal report saying there was no evidence of theft in that branch.
Most sub-postmasters thought they were alone in experiencing these accounting errors until May 2009, when the first investigation into the Horizon IT system was printed in Computer Weekly. Seeing this story galvanised sub-postmasters, who realised that they had all been experiencing the same problems with Horizon.
Nick concluded his talk with a summary of the slow and fitful road towards obtaining justice for the hundreds of wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters. Though many have dedicated years to bringing attention to the scandal, such as former sub-postmaster Alan Bates and journalists, such as Nick, from the BBC, Private Eye, and Computer Weekly, ten years after the first formal investigations into the Horizon software began, the process is still ongoing.
The Great Post Office Scandal has already been serialised by The Daily Mail and featured in the Sunday Times. An ITV drama production is in the works for 2023.
