Of late, there’s been no scarcity of scandal, whether proven or alleged, for Britain’s media to pore over and dissect.
Lockdown partying in Downing Street. A police probe into SNP finances. Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s difficulties with her speeding offence. And much, much more besides.
But the scandal that most gets to me is one that, despite having resulted in the UK’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice, generates less coverage, and certainly less outrage, than any of the above.
The source of this scandal is the Post Office’s adoption in 1999 of a Fujitsu-designed, computerised accounting system called Horizon. Soon, Horizon was throwing up all sorts of apparent discrepancies in the accounts of lots of subpostmasters – the people who run post offices of the kind serving small towns, villages and rural communities.
One of those people is Seema Misra, who took over a post office in West Byfleet, Surrey in 2005 and who, in 2011, was jailed for 15 months on charges of theft and false accounting – Horizon having shown, supposedly beyond all doubt, that some £75,000 had been abstracted by her from her post office.
That sentence upended the lives both of Mrs Misra and her taxi driver husband. Not until 2021 would it be accepted by the High Court that Mrs Misra, who’d insisted on her innocence throughout and who was expecting her second child when jailed, had been falsely accused and should have her sentence quashed.
Stories like Seema Misra’s – and there are hundreds of such stories – hit home with me because, in the West Highland community where I grew up, the community’s sub-post office was run by my mother. So, when I read or hear of the wrongs inflicted on people like Seema Misra, I think at once of how my mother and our family would have been shattered had Post Office bosses branded her a thief.
In my mother’s time, thankfully, record-keeping remained a pen-and-paper exercise – one resulting in my mother’s Friday evenings being devoted, as she put it, to “doing the books”.
Sometimes, her accounts balanced readily. But, sometimes, she’d find she was perhaps “a couple of shillings short”, and there would have to be repeated tallying of stocks of stamps, postal orders and the like before everything could be seen to be in shape.
Some nervousness, for all that, would surround the regular arrival of a Post Office auditor. This man (they were always men) would begin by steadfastly declining all offers of tea, scones and cakes until, my mother’s “books” having been given a seal of approval, he’d at once thaw out and get happily to grips with the home-baking.
Inspections of that sort no doubt uncovered occasional – very occasional – cases of embezzlement. But, with Horizon’s introduction, such embezzlement seemed suddenly to be endemic among folk who’d previously been seen as upstanding and well-regarded public servants – with more than 700 subpostmasters finding themselves confronting accusations of the sort the Post Office levelled at Seema Misra.
No evidence was ever produced
Year after year, between 2000 and 2015, despite mounting evidence that the explanation for this wave of apparent criminality was to be found in Horizon’s shortcomings, Post Office senior management took subpostmaster after subpostmaster to court.
No evidence was ever produced as to criminal intent on the part of those people. Nor was there evidence as to what they’d done with the proceeds of their alleged wrongdoing. Instead, it was simply insisted by PO representatives, and accepted by the courts, that more trust should be placed in the Horizon system than in protestations of innocence.
And, so, hundreds of people were found guilty of crimes they didn’t commit – on no firmer basis, in effect, than a printout from what turned out to be a hopelessly dodgy piece of IT kit.
People who allowed this injustice should pay the price
Just what led to this unprecedented miscarriage of justice is now being looked into by a public inquiry, headed by retired High Court judge Sir Wyn Williams.
“Sir Wyn,” states the inquiry’s website, “is tasked with ensuring there is a public summary of the failings which occurred with the Horizon IT system at the Post Office leading to the prosecution and conviction of subpostmasters.”
Interested in how the Inquiry finds and calls witnesses? Watch our latest explainer video to find out 🔎 #PostOfficeInquiry https://t.co/liojZ17faY
— Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (@PostOffInquiry) March 30, 2023
Already, however, it’s evident from court findings of the sort that led to the quashing of Seema Misra’s conviction that Post Office managers – in pressing on with prosecutions in the face of growing doubts about Horizon’s reliability – were themselves badly at fault.
Acknowledging “historical failings” on its part, the Post Office has said it’s “extremely sorry” for the wrecking of so many lives. So far, however, no one in Post Office management, past or present, has found themselves paying any price – financial or otherwise – for their part in creating rank injustice on an almost unbelievable scale.
Given the record to date, that’s unlikely to change. But it most certainly should.
Jim Hunter is a historian, award-winning author and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands
Conversation