Post Office Horizon IT scandal: who's really to blame?

Rishi Sunak promised on Wednesday to bring in a new law granting an unprecedented blanket acquittal and compensation to all victims of the Post Office scandal in England and Wales. 

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office (PO) accused up to 3,500 operators of sub-post offices of theft and false accounting, on the basis of faulty software that had made it appear that money had gone missing from their tills. The PO demanded that the operators repay the non-existent cash shortfalls or face being sued or prosecuted by the government-owned firm. More than 700 sub-postmasters were ultimately convicted; many were jailed. Only 93 of them have had their convictions quashed and many have yet to receive any compensation.

The scandal came under the spotlight last week thanks to a new four-part ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. In the wake of the broadcast, more than 100 new potential victims came forward, and more than a million people signed a petition calling for the former PO boss, Paula Vennells, to be stripped of her CBE. Vennells announced on Tuesday that she would voluntarily relinquish the honour.

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What the papers said

"They say you shouldn't make a drama out of a tragedy," said The Times. Thank goodness that ITV did in this case. The appalling miscarriage of justice has been known about for years, thanks to the dogged campaigning efforts of the sub-postmaster Alan Bates, various journalists and the Tory peer James Arbuthnot, but it's only now getting the attention it deserves. It shouldn't have taken an ITV drama to prompt urgent action to correct this wrong, said The Independent. Vennells has "done the right thing" by giving back her CBE, but she still has many questions to answer.

So, among others, does Ed Davey, said the Daily Mail. The Lib Dem leader is always calling for people to resign or be sacked for their shortcomings – he has done so on more than 30 occasions since April 2019. Yet as postal affairs minister under the coalition government from 2010-2012, he hardly covered himself in glory. Bates wrote to him at least five times raising concerns and urging him to intervene. Davey rebuffed his request for a meeting, saying it "would serve no useful purpose". The PO scandal is a story of bureaucratic cruelty and inertia, said The Guardian – and a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when businesses put blind trust in computers.

Having followed the PO scandal closely, I'm not surprised by the strength of the public reaction to the ITV drama, said Ruth Sutherland in the Daily Mail. The drama brought home the "sheer scale of inhumanity and corporate bullying involved". That this situation could have come about, and persisted so long, is "unfathomable". Did PO executives never wonder why so many hitherto law-abiding postmasters had suddenly gone rogue? Did it not trouble them that "this so-called crimewave coincided with the introduction of a new computer system"?

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the PO acted "in bad faith" throughout, said Gerald Warner on Reaction. Doubts were raised about the faulty Horizon software from the moment of its 1999 rollout. Bates reported his suspicions to the journal Computer Weekly in 2004. Yet PO officials, well aware of these concerns, refused to admit that there was a problem, opting instead to ruthlessly pursue postmasters. When postmasters complained of accounting irregularities, helpline employees were instructed to tell them, falsely, that they were alone in experiencing problems. While this "skulduggery" continued, innocent people lost their livelihoods, homes and reputations. "Marriages foundered, bankruptcies proliferated, health deteriorated, some died prematurely, their lives wrecked, at least four took their own lives."

Both the PO and Fujitsu, which supplied the Horizon system, must be held to account, said Stephen Pollard in the Daily Express. Fujitsu is still being awarded government contracts despite the fact "it appears to have repeatedly told the biggest lie of all – that the Horizon IT system could not be accessed by anyone other than the sub-postmaster using it". That falsehood alone "renders every one of the more than 700 convictions unsafe". There is a lot of blame to go around in this story, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. None of the main political parties' hands are "entirely clean". This, along with the complexities of the case and the instinctive reluctance of governments to "pay out for their predecessors' mistakes", helps explains why it has taken so shamefully long to deliver redress to the victims – at least the surviving ones.

What next?

Under Sunak's plan, PO victims will sign a form confirming that they are innocent in order to have their convictions overturned and claim compensation. Anyone who does so falsely could be prosecuted for fraud. Critics fear the bypassing of the judicial process sets a bad precedent, but PO Minister Kevin Hollinrake said exonerating victims on a case-by-case basis would take too long.

Ministers are considering getting Fujitsu to fund some of the compensation, depending on the outcome of the public inquiry into the scandal, which is expected to report later this year. MPs have called for a moratorium on new government contracts involving the firm until then.