The Post Office Scandal is not over

Nick Wallis, author of The Great Post Office Scandal, wrote about the search for justice in Radio Times magazine in 2021.

By Nick Wallis

Published: Tuesday, 09 January 2024 at 16:30 PM

This feature was originally published in Radio Times magazine in May 2021.

The scenes outside the Royal Courts of Justice on 23 April were something to witness. A group of 39 sub-postmasters and Post Office workers who had been wrongly prosecuted for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting finally had their convictions quashed. Many of them had been campaigning for years. There were banners, tears and (understandably, given the circumstances) non-socially distanced hugs.

Not all of them made it. Three of the 39 – Dawn O’Connell, Julian Wilson and Peter Holmes – did not live to see their names cleared. They spent the last decade of their lives as convicted criminals, whose assets were taken by a justice system that should have been there to protect them.

Over the past ten years it’s been my privilege to report on this story for the BBC via Panorama, Inside Out and last year’s Radio 4 documentary series, The Great Post Office Trial. But the scandal itself goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began a process of digitisation by installing custom-built networked computer terminals into its 18,000 branches.

At the time, the Horizon IT system was described as the “largest non-military IT system in Europe”. It didn’t work. As soon as the system went live, dozens of branches around the country began experiencing accounting discrepancies.

Subpostmasters and mistresses outside the High Court
Subpostmasters and mistresses outside the High Court in Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story.
Littlegem TV/ITV

Sub-postmasters were contractually liable for the figures Horizon generated. Over a 14-year period, more than 700 postmasters and Post Office workers were successfully prosecuted using Horizon data. Many were advised they should plead guilty to avoid a prison sentence. Doing so blighted their lives.

Unpicking this scandal has been unconscionably slow. The institutional unwillingness to acknowledge pernicious malpractice or misfeasance is a hallmark of the many great outrages committed by the state against its citizens.

Victims of potential injustice need access to documents. The failures at the Post Office happened because there was no effective independent scrutiny of its activities and no one could force it to hand over vital information

Even after the possibility arose, no one in power wanted to ask difficult questions about unsafe prosecutions – least of all the ministers who had ultimate responsibility for holding the Post Office to account. It was down to MPs and journalists to continue trying to shine a light on what campaigners were saying.

It’s not over, even now. The Post Office seems determined to keep the details of this scandal hidden. Its former chief executive, Paula Vennells, was allowed to leave office with a six-figure payoff, a CBE, a place on the board of the Cabinet Office and the chairmanship of an NHS Trust. The Government has said it does not intend to hold anyone to account.

One of the many lessons of this case is that we need investigative programmes as part of the broadcast mix. Without them, how can we stop serious dysfunction in public life being swept under the carpet? Sadly we have lost the BBC’s Inside Out, dropped last year. Its proposed replacement appears worryingly anodyne.

Individuals with authority must be made accountable for their actions, including any decisions they take that seek to delay or stop the truth from reaching the public domain. Otherwise we will keep seeing miscarriages of justice like the Post Office Horizon scandal, and more innocent people will go to their graves before their names can be cleared.