The Great British Post Office scandal is a story about corruption, cronyism and corporate and political negligence, but, more than anything, it is a story about class and power and how it works in Britain.
Of course, the faulty computer software that made it look as though money was missing from the branches of more than 900 wrongly convicted Post Office managers (or sub-postmasters) did not target these individuals. It could have happened to anyone, given those circumstances. However, what happened next could not have happened to anyone – would not have happened to anyone – and can only be understood through the lens of class and power. It is not new or surprising. It is not accidental or unintentional. It is deliberate. It is calculated. It is what happens in Britain when powerless people threaten the interests of the powerful.
What is now considered a ‘scandal’ was overlooked by most of the mainstream media in the UK for a little over two decades until a television dramatization, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, forced the Post Office, the government and the technology company to admit publicly what they had long understood: that hundreds of people were wrongly convicted – and thousands more falsely accused – of theft and fraud because of ‘bugs and errors’ in an IT system that incorrectly indicated cash shortfalls.
The bugs were known about in 1999, when the faulty system was introduced, and were, according to Paul Patterson of technology company Fujitsu, recognized ‘by all parties’ for ‘many, many years’. In fact, glitches had been reported during trials of the software – and at least two sub-postmasters were accused of fraud – but national roll-out continued, nonetheless. In the meantime, the victims of these ‘errors’ faced financial and other sorts of ruin. Some lost their jobs, others their businesses and homes. Reputations were ruined. Some went to prison for false accounting, theft and fraud. Marriages broke down. Families were destroyed. Some victims killed themselves.
Most British readers are now familiar with the story, but campaigners had to battle for decades just to have their plight acknowledged.
Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office used its powers to prosecute 700 sub-postmasters based on falsely recorded information from a computer accounting system called Horizon. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service. Some 3,500 others were falsely accused.
The Horizon IT system was developed by Fujitsu and introduced by the Post Office in 1999. Within weeks, sub-postmasters had reported bugs in the system after it began falsely reporting shortfalls – often amounting to many thousands of pounds. Some even attempted to plug the gap with their own money, as their contracts with the Post Office stated that they were responsible for any shortfalls.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the Post Office insisted that the system was robust, even unimpeachable, and, instead of investigating for possible errors in the software, prosecuted the sub-postmasters or forced them to make good the amounts, threatening them with prison and forcing many into debt and bankruptcy. Some sold their homes to repay the money they were falsely accused of stealing. Some 230 innocent people were jailed. When the sub-postmasters asked the Post Office investigators if others had reported shortfalls they were told ‘No’. It was only them. But, of course, the Post Office knew otherwise and had from the start.
It was not until May 2009 that Computer Weekly had assembled sufficient evidence to break the story (it had been investigating since 2004). In September of that year, sub-postmaster Alan Bates set up a campaigning group, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. In 2012, the Post Office, finding itself under growing pressure to take the protests of the victims seriously, appointed a firm of forensic accountants, Second Sight, to conduct an investigation into Horizon. Although the accountants, in their interim report, found that Horizon contained faults that could result in accounting discrepancies, the Post Office continued to insist that there were no systemic problems with the software and to lay the blame squarely on the sub-postmasters.
In 2017, Mr Bates led a group of 555 sub-postmasters in a group action in the High Court against the Post Office. In 2019, the High Court ruled that Horizon contained bugs, errors and defects that were responsible for the shortfalls and that sub-postmasters’ contracts with the Post Office were unfair. The government ordered an inquiry into the affair in 2020 and courts began to quash convictions. In 2021, the UK Court of Appeal overturned 39 convictions in a single ruling. However, as of January 2024, only 93 people have had their convictions quashed, while the Post Office has continued to frustrate claims for compensation. It was only in the wake of the television dramatization that the Metropolitan Police saw fit to open an investigation of the Post Office and Fujitsu. The public inquiry is ongoing.
Private Eye, a satirical magazine that was one of the few British media outlets interested in investigating the scandal, has shown how the Post Office and the British establishment more generally sought to block the sub-postmasters’ pursuit of justice. From the start, the Post Office deliberately isolated victims, telling them they were the only case, while bullying them into paying huge sums to make good non-existent losses. When the Eye first covered the story in 2011 – a point at which the Post Office knew about the bugs in the system – the Post Office’s chief operating officer, Mike Young, replied: ‘The Post Office takes meticulous care to ensure the Horizon computer system in branches nationwide is fully accurate at all times’, adding, with respect to the conviction for false accounting and theft, that ‘In some cases, the sub-postmaster pleaded guilty; in others, the Post Office had to provide robust evidence otherwise the cases would have failed’ (Private Eye, No. 1615, 19 January – 1 Feb 2024).
In fact, as the Eye goes on to note, the guilty pleas were ‘effectively blackmailed out of sub-postmasters … in order to avoid jail’, while the ‘robust evidence’ on the basis of which people were sent to jail amounted to nothing more than the lie that the Horizon system was ‘robust’ and reliable. No direct evidence that the sub-postmasters in question had taken or spent large sums of money was sought or required for conviction (ibid.).
Young’s successor as chief executive, Paula Vennells, proved just as obstructive to the sub-postmasters’ campaign for justice. Even after the accounting team identified defects in Horizon, she continued to insist the system was ‘robust’. Second Sight’s second report uncovered yet more evidence that the Horizon system was ‘not fit for purpose’. However, a day before the report was due to be published, as reported by Private Eye in March 2015, the Post Office, under Vennells’ leadership, ordered Second Sight to end its investigation and to destroy all the paperwork that it had not handed over. Vennells resigned in April 2019, a year in which she was paid a reported £717,500 in pay, including £388,000 in performance bonuses (the Eye reports that £36,000 was deducted from a ‘short term’ bonus because of the ‘ongoing postmaster group litigation and its impact on the business’) and received a CBE for ‘services to the Post Office and charity’. Like Young, she went on to hold numerous other prestigious and lucrative leadership roles.
Vennells and Young are not alone in this. Numerous people in positions of authority, from Post Office directors and Fujitsu executives to politicians and civil servants (particularly those with oversight of the Post Office), prosecutors and journalists, and the police, failed to ask the right questions or to think particularly hard about the causes and consequences of the scandal or, for that matter, the culture of reckless profiteering and privatisation that characterises the Post Office and other organisations on the fringes of the British public sector (including industries formerly in the public sector such as water and public transport which investors regard as quick and easy ways to boost their fortunes at the British taxpayers’ expense).
The ITV television drama brilliantly highlighted the human consequences of the Post Office’s actions and prompted the Prime Minster to pledge to overturn the convictions of all the accused sub-postmasters and offer them compensation and the Metropolitan Police belatedly to open a criminal investigation of possible fraud offences within the Post Office (it remains to be seen who will investigate the police for their negligence and selective application of the law). Vennells said she would return her CBE.
Of course, for many of the victims this comes much, much too late. But why now? Why have people in power started to listen and why did they not listen before?
The obvious answer is the public outrage elicited by Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The facts were known to all relevant parties for years. The dramatization did not disclose new information. Vennells, who perhaps did most to keep a lid on the scandal, was honoured for her efforts only four years ago, when ministers knew everything. The whole system would have carried on regardless had the story not been set out in a compelling, dramatic way that did not require people to look too far behind the headlines.
But that alone would not have been enough to provoke so uniform a reaction, or to produce urgent, immediate action from the government (the same government, we should remember, that just a few weeks ago declined an opportunity to pass a ‘Hillsborough Law’ placing on police and public officials a legal duty of candour in testifying to major inquiries). It helps that this is a story about faulty software and that the government and the police were only indirectly implicated. Blame in the main attached to people who could be challenged, removed from post or even prosecuted without calling into question the way the whole system works. Acting now probably represents the government’s best way of making the scandal go away and keeping casualties among the great and the good to a minimum. Convincing Alan Bates to accept an honour would draw a line under things nicely (though it would damage him immensely as a campaigner for justice).
The real test, of course, is whether anyone is actually held to account in any meaningful way. The British governing class is exceptionally good as brushing these things under the carpet and protecting their own.
There is a direct comparison, of course, with other high-profile cases of injustice, such as Hillsborough and Grenfell. In both cases, the authorities disregarded the safety concerns of working-class people, football supporters and tower block residents, respectively. In both cases, enough was known about the dangers to warrant action that would have avoided these tragedies, but the risk to public life was considered a price worth paying in a culture of deregulation and corner-cutting. But most of all, these two terrible tragedies have in common the fact that no-one in power has ever been held accountable. Inquiries have come and gone, hands have been wrung, but no-one has been convicted on criminal charges. If anything, they have been rewarded.
In both these cases, the powerful closed ranks to avoid being held to account for the lives they ruined. In both cases, they tried to deflect blame onto the victims.
Hillsborough survivors, blameless in the events that led to the tragedy (and fully vindicated in subsequent inquiries which found police negligence to be the cause), had to cope not only with what they had experienced that day but also with the attempts of the police, the political establishment and much of the media to portray them as responsible. I don’t want to go into the lies again – they are too awful to describe – but as someone who attended the game and saw the tragedy unfold from a seat in the Leppings Lane stand, I want to say how painful it is not to be believed, how those lies, repeated still today and even put to song by rival football supporters, fester and burn. The lack of empathy is shocking. People have killed themselves because of it.
It wasn’t just the South Yorkshire Police, of course. The political authorities and the legal establishment colluded in the cover-up, as did the football authorities and the media. Successive prime ministers and home secretaries have dismissed the families’ demands for justice, put hurdle after hurdle in their way, closed door after door. Journalists (with notable exceptions such as David Conn of the Guardian) ignored it. Football fans put club rivalry before decency. It is hard for anyone who has not been through this to imagine how isolated and defeated campaigners felt at times. They kept going. But what they achieved they achieved despite the authorities not because of them.
A second inquest in 2016, at which police lawyers reheated the discredited narrative that the fans were to blame, found that there was no misbehaviour by Liverpool supporters that contributed to the disaster and that the 97 victims had been unlawfully killed due to gross negligence manslaughter by the South Yorkshire police officer in command, David Duckenfield. However, to this day, no police officer has been disciplined or convicted of any offence relating to the disaster or the subsequent cover up. One of the officers most heavily implicated in the promotion of police slurs against the fans, Norman Bettison, was, like Vennells, honoured by the British state (as were some of the politicians implicated in Grenfell). Duckenfield was acquitted of gross negligence manslaughter in 2019 following a hearing during which the judge, Sir Peter Openshaw, disallowed previous admissions of responsibility and allowed false and thoroughly disproven allegations that supporters had misbehaved to be again aired, to the families’ distress. Openshaw exhibited more sympathy for the ‘poor chap’ in the dock than for the victims or their families.
The wrongs inflicted on the sub-postmasters would doubtless also have gone unanswered had it not been for the television series. There was a chilling echo of Hillsborough in the revelation that the Post Office, like South Yorkshire Police, doctored witness statements to ‘remove details of “integrity problems”’. Nobody called it out. Nor did anyone seem to find anything unusual in the apparent mass outbreak of fraud among previously law-abiding citizens who lacked clear motive for the crime and appeared to not have benefitted from it in any way. The establishment, by and large, was happy for Post Office workers to be jailed or financially ruined rather than throw the spotlight on malfeasance among its own. At best, they viewed them with a sort of weary contempt. At worst, they didn’t think of them at all. They simply didn’t see them. They were too small, too ordinary.
While the chances of the wrongdoers being convicted are vanishingly slim, the odds of achieving justice are stack massively against the victims of their crimes. While the likes of Duckenfield can rely on public funds to support their case and pay lawyers to traduce their victims, the victims themselves face huge risk and enormous costs when they seek redress through the law. They often face an unsympathetic, even hostile, judiciary, indifferent politicians (David Cameron compared the Hillsborough families of to ‘a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there’) and an uninterested, cynical media populated by privileged client journalists who went to the same schools as the lawyers and politicians.
Meanwhile, members of Britain’s governing class simply step from one lucrative merry-go-round to the next, operating in a benign, self-serving context devoid of risk or consequence. There are no serious consequences to misbehaviour in public office. While the Speaker of the House of Commons will not tolerate the accusation of dishonesty from MPs, he is deaf to the everyday lies of politicians like prime ministers Johnson, Truss and Sunak – three titans of vacuous, self-deceiving bluster. Lobbying interests go undisclosed. Honours and influence are bought and sold. Tax and company rules are ignored. Anything for a bit more money. In breach of your respective code of ethics? Why not simply rewrite the code. No one will notice. And no one goes to jail. Everybody knows that no-one ever goes to jail. The gravy train moves on.
It doesn’t matter that the amounts of money the sub-postmasters were accused of stealing were relatively small, nothing compared to the hundreds of millions that should have been spent saving lives wasted on dodgy Covid contracts, for example. What matters is that they had no power and were in a position to embarrass those who did. The people who wield power know working-class people have no redress. That’s how the system is meant to work. They know that whistleblowers are not protected and that those who stand up against injustice are likely to face financial ruin. Outgunned and out-resourced. Ordinary people can be sacrificed, and the powerful feel no compunction about it because when they look at them they see only things, not people. They equate a lack of economic and social capital with a lack of worth. They are from ‘good’ people and deserve everything they have. The motto of the British ruling class remains the one Adam Smith ascribed to them more than 200 years ago: All for ourselves and nothing for anybody else.
Britain is not a fair place or a just one. The law does not apply in the same way to everyone, no matter who they are. The same value does not attach to every child. The same rules do not apply to every adult. Opportunity is horribly skewed in favour of the already privileged. Some can’t fail, while others can’t win. Not everyone counts. And that, by and large, is how the people who run Britain like it.
The Learning Age 