British Post Office Scandal
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government.
Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows.
But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts are constitutionally independent - and that means a second option could be difficult too.
Parliament could pass an act declaring that all the Horizon convictions be quashed, but that would be an unprecedented meddling in the work of judges - and it would pave the way for politicians to do it again.
The third option is a mass appeal with a crystal clear submission to Court of Appeal judges that the state no longer believes the convictions should stand. There’s a precedent for this - 39 post office cases were overturned in one go in 2021.
But running such a case would not be easy - and it could still take years to resolve.
Because we have no way to detect all the cases.
A lot of the cases were handled in the "Post Office courts" (I don't remember the correct name, not a British), and there are more or less no records of them. So you need to ask people affected to come up and find ways to validate them, then create a case for quashing it. It is a total FUBAR mess.
The more important factoid is that, until the renewed outrage this week, no one in the current UK government was seriously pushing to fix anything whatsoever.
That is, the minimum standard they need to meet in order not to be perceived as carrying water for the government is not just lying and misleading the public in order to get the ruling party kicked out, but doing so as aggressively and shamelessly as the most aggressive and shameless of their competitors (which includes social media to some extent).
I really cannot parse all the double negatives in this. Is this an allegation relating to the BBC's ties with the ruling party? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approvin...
Actually, the government has just announced that they are going to pass such a law, and this helps further demonstrate what I mean. After they announced this, the Guardian ran an analysis piece pointing out all the same reasons why this is potentially a bad idea that the BBC talked about before: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/no-precedent... Their top headline article is also about this announcement and leads by pointing out the same problems: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/rishi-sunak-... The way in which the BBC is more pro-Tory than publications like the Guardian is that they're less likely to ignore these problems when talking about activists calling for this prior to it becoming government policy. That is, in order for a British media publication to be adequately anti-Tory in the eyes of the press, whether they treat a proposal as bad or good has to depend on whether it's coming from the Tories.
Defrauding public institutions is quite a different kettle of fish. There will be people convicted who really did have their hands in the till.
Maybe, but if any of the evidence used to convict them came from the Horizon system, which has been proven to be flawed and unreliable, then IMO the verdict is still unsupportable. If there is any reason to suspect someone of actually having their hands in the till over the Horizon period, I would still be entirely in favour of requiring that they be immediately set free, and for prosecutors to have to bring an entirely new trial, from scratch. And any jail time resulting from new guilty verdicts to be reduced by time served from the original conviction.
There's no way reasonable doubt remains, what is the legal barrier that an appeal court is trying to deal with?
> But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction
This is untrue. Judges may not like it but I don't really care. The parliament is legally soverign and the courts are subservient to interpret and apply the laws as written in the legislation. If they write a law that says these convictions mean nothing, then they mean nothing.
Common law constitutionalism is based on the fact that individual rights exist - not the right of a judiciary to have separate powers.
There is however one detail, what is passed must be internally consistent with other legislation otherwise it will fall at Judicial Review. For example if you want to pass legislation that contravenes the UK's Human Rights Act, you need to include a "notwithstanding" clause to show the courts you intended to override that law.
They could pass a bill to vacate these convictions quite easily but unlike the Buggery Act and Offences Against the Person Act 1828, they still want to be able to prosecute and protect the convictions of a subset of these people who actually did commit false accounting so the legislation is going to need to be more complex.
Only certain legislation, and that is in doubt after the Act of Union with Ireland case.
Generally the rule of Implied Repeal applies. Later statutes trump earlier ones.
Or that Rwanda is a safe country for migrants?
Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes against the post office. So they were both the prosecutor and the victim.
This gave them overwhelming incentives not to reveal all evidence to the defence, and indeed they hit many reports on these computer systems.
That is a crime; and I imagine senior staff at the post office should be themselves prosectued.
But the underlying issue is the gap in the law where private prosecution by companies is permitted even when they're the victims and when they hold all the evidence. This is the mechanism which created the insanity.
While the incentives are not to reveal evidence the law is absolutely clear that all evidence identified must be revealed. The difficulty is that forcing and unlimited discovery to identify the evidence would break the whole legal system, and this is what parties can hide behind (for a while at least). We'll have to see when and how anybody will face the consequences of any failures to reveal the evidence.
I very much recommend reading the Judgements in Bates vs Post Office. As litigation progressed you can notice how it becomes apparent to the judge how Post Office legal tactics and behaviour undermined the prosecutions.
"10. Finally, disclosure is very expensive. The court will be astute to guard against it becoming either satellite litigation or a weapon in the interlocutory arsenal."
A few years ago, someone brought a crowdfunded private prosecution of Boris Johnson for "misconduct in public office". The whole thing was incredibly silly and a massive waste of time. (MIPO isn't there for politicians lying/misleading people, though that does indeed suck.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_v_Johnson
Also, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the CPS decided to not prosecute for lack of evidence. The Lawrence family brought a private prosecution which failed. Jeopardy attached at that point.
Later evidence emerged which made the case a lot stronger, but had the Criminal Justice Act 2003 not been passed allowing limited exceptions to the double jeopardy rule, it would not have been possible to bring much stronger cases against the perpetrators.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence
The CPS have the power to take over and stop an ongoing private prosecution, but the ability to bring private prosecutions sits really uncomfortably with the principle of double jeopardy. Like, someone could do a bad job of bringing a prosecution in a case where the CJA2003 double jeopardy exception doesn't apply and then the person can't be retried by the CPS.
Not UK, but this is (usually, I think) the case with private prosecution. When the public prosecution decides not to prosecute, the options for the victim are either do nothing, or go the private prosecution way. In the latter case, the victim will be the prosecutor too.
There are also some parallels with one of the Government's train companies, Northern, who use similar scare tactics as the Post Office with threats of court action and some rail enthusiasts/experts have called their tactics "extortion" [0]
(Northern is directly owned and operated by the Government. So they may flap and act indignant about the Post Office, but that makes them hypocrites.)
[0] A thread on railway private prosecutions in light of the Post Office Scandal: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/should-the-railways-pow...
how did they get convicted with flimsy evidence?
why is no one in the post office or fujitsu (including the directors) being prosecuted
Software bugs ruin lives, but corruption allows it to happen.
People, normal people, small postmasters, killed themselves after being wrongly disgraced for financial fraud while the C-suite of the Post Office falsified their accounting to award themselves bonuses.
The current activities and proposals probably have to be seen as crowd management and might not be an honest attempt for a solution, again.
The whole case, after so many years, is as ridiculous as it gets for a government scandal - I agree. At the same time, I kind of understand why this needs to be carefully thought as a legal manoeuvre.
Edit: My wife who is a pretty hard nosed commercial litigation lawyer was thoroughly shocked by it - so much so that she actually went off and read the court judgements to get more details.
All the mainstream press reported "MET opens investigation!" as if it was a new thing, and then in the article "the invitation was opened in 2020 and has interviewed 2 people". Great.
Link, if anyone is curious about the production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
> Due to our broadcast and content licences, you can only watch ITVX in the UK.
I really wanted to pay and see it. Oh, well, I'm going to be a pirate again...
"One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for."
https://clarotesting.wordpress.com/tag/dalmellingto-bug/
"The Dalmellington Bug entailed a user repeatedly hitting a key when the system froze as she was trying to acknowledge receipt of a consignment of £8,000 in cash. Unknown to her each time she struck the key she accepted responsibility for a further £8,000. The bug created a discrepancy of £24,000 for which she was held responsible."
It only mentions a few bugs out of the hundreds that were discovered (a full list hasn't been published), but it appears that the bugs weren't the only issue:
> In 2015, for instance, the Post Office told the House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, and the Post Office admitted as such four years later during a high court case.
> In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard.
It's truly a scandal that no-one in charge at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been prosecuted for providing false testimony that led to so much misery and death for the sub postmasters. The MET has finally started to investigate fraud and perjury charges which seems like they only bother investigating crimes that have been made into a popular four-part series.
I worked in core banking systems for a bit. This is beyond basic, it demonstrates Fujitsu do not have controls in place to design compliant systems. Fujitsu should forever have their reputation tarnished and never let near financial systems. I don't often advocate selling a business to Tata, but this might be one of those times.
> Two people have been interviewed under caution but nobody has been arrested since the investigation was launched in January 2020.
Exactly what I said.
It seems like the classical mega-corp system issues:
"These flaws included rounding errors, data corruption, and issues with synchronization between local and central databases."
it seems like, on top of the buggy software, Fujitsu had contractors logging in to Post Office systems to manually 'fix' accounting errors the buggy software had produced
one of them described how while they were logged in to the POS system it would appear to be working to the real user but would actually be doing nothing because it was in some kind of remote admin mode, seems like the sort of remediation that's likely to make things worse
sounded like a total shit show
The wrong people went to prison.
All the existing convictions must be considered unsafe.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
The judgement in question: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
[edit: added judgement proper]
https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/technical_a...
But we can't blame this scandal on a software fault, or even an averagely terrible government IT contractor - there were some monsters in the Post Office who chose to take this as far as they did.
(for dang) I'd change this link to the main source on this story since the mid-2000s - https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...
> One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
> Another bug, called the Callendar Square bug – again named after the first branch found to have been affected by it – created duplicate transactions due to an error in the database underpinning the system: despite being clear duplicates, the post office operator was again held responsible for the errors.
There isn't a full list of the bugs produced, but it does look like a lot of bugs directly involved incorrect accounting to be recorded.
But these bugs suggest that at least some of the errors would likely have been obvious in a ledger, and the Post Office simply didn't care. That rather makes Fujitsu look not quite as bad here, and the Post Office look worse.
Sounds like a rather complex distributed system which no one fully understood combined with the failure of the database to meet ACID requirements.
There isn't, as far as I can tell, a single interesting "bug" that was causing incorrect figures to be saved in a database, which is the impression you get from skimming the coverage.
> One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
> Another bug, called the Callendar Square bug – again named after the first branch found to have been affected by it – created duplicate transactions due to an error in the database underpinning the system: despite being clear duplicates, the post office operator was again held responsible for the errors.
There isn't a full list of the bugs produced, but it does look like a lot of bugs directly involved incorrect accounting to be recorded.
The article gives one example of a bug where the UI would freeze/get stuck, but still respond to key presses, so a user might think the system had crashed but press 'enter' repeatedly, which would silently create several records.
"Despite Fujitsu suing the Government over its failed NHS IT project on his watch, Mr Blagden, who was said to have dined regularly with PM Theresa May, was awarded a CBE in 2016 for services to the economy."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fujitsu-exposed-real-...
The case management software now used within the justice system itself is deeply flawed and poses a risk to large numbers of cases including child protection, benefit appeals, divorce and probate.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Barrister-Stories-Law-Broken...
HMCTS is spending ~50 - 100x the amount required (on private consultants) to create these broken IT systems whilst other parts of the justice system are starved of resources.
A radical change in culture and leadership is required.
As in this story, despite people immediately claiming issue with some of the methods, it was pursued for years. And again, in several cases it tragically resulted in suicides.
In the end, after ~$1.8B of repayments and a royal commission, a couple of people resigned but there was - at least in my view - no significant repercussions for the decision makers and responsible parties at the time.
This scandal would not have happened if the people in power had rightly been skeptical of the output of an accounting system that had been called into disrepute by several employees.
People did this. People chose to prosecute. People lied. The courts accepted dodgy evidence. The scandal is the post office employees, the solicitors, the courts, and the Fujitsu employees, not the buggy accounting system. People took the output of an accounting system as though it had come down from a mountain on a stone tablet.
Banks had been doing this sort of stuff (distributed transactional integrity) for years by the time the Horizon system was conceived. SAP and Oracle were in widespread use, and Oracle (the database underlying Horizon) was explicitly exonerated as a source of the bugs.
Not any more.
Putting an innicent person in jail should carry the maximum sentence the innocent person could have received.
The problem is then they cover up even more.
Gosh dang it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0h48cft
“UK to bring in law to quash wrongful Post Office convictions”
According to the BBC Global News Podcast “The legal step followed public outrage after a TV”
Once they've mailed out the magazine they can't delete a story, no matter what - and if someone doesn't like the content? Two weeks later it's disappeared from news stands.
Newspapers that rely too heavily on advert revenue also often have conflicts of interest (which you'd know about, if you were reading the Eye) so I suspect they like having enough subscriber income that they only need to sell ads for wool sweaters and reading lights - advertisers who are unlikely to want a story spiked.
Its a great souce for stories of wrong doing in national and local government, business, schools, the NHS, transport, farming and the Media. They regularly report on miscarriages of justice which you'll never usually hear about and get to the root of certain stories that are only very superficially reported on nationally.
Its also a fantastic source of scurrilous gossip and rumour about politics and media which is usually accurate. They've been doing it for years now, since the early 1960's.
Still waiting to hear why a certain young person (of very modest accomplishments) made it into the House of Lords. Given the absence of any reporting by PE on this, it seems that rumours of a 'super injunction' might be true.
That said, part of the great value I get from Private Eye is seeing things unfold over multiple issues or even multiple years as is the case of the Post Office/Fujitsu thing.
I’m not a massive fan of Politics JOE but I enjoyed this interview with Eye editor Ian Hislop, which I think is a good overview of his attitudes and politics https://youtu.be/IbXQWqZ2RvA
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2010/feb/05/pri...
He may have been smitten by Heather Mills who was the journalistic driving force behind that crusade.
FWiW when I see Private Eye I still think Peter Cook.
> ... when we wrote about the concerns of Wakefield
This really undersells the situation, it suggests he was just a concerned doctor who innocently pursued a theory that turned out to be wrong. You're likely aware of how it went down but for everyone else: Wakefield completely fabricated some evidence to raise fears that a combined measles/mumps/rubella vaccine was causing autism via some hitherto unknown gastro-intestinal disease (giving some pretty invasive and unnecessary procedures on kids in the process) with the intent of profiting from a vaccine of his own. He was struck off and prevented from practicing medicine in the UK (still active in the USA) but the damage had been done and he basically laid the groundwork for modern day antivax movement.
This doesn't discredit Private Eye altogether, of course. It's just a bit annoying that they have this. A reminder, perhaps, that nobody's perfect?
A recent example is the story that an MP walked in on Carrie blowing Boris in his office as Foreign Secretary while he was still married to another woman, and that at the time he was also trying to get her a paid job in his office.
The Times had that story and printed most of it (though referred only to a 'comprimising situation') in their early edition of the paper the next day but it vanished from the later prints which end up in newsagents. The Mail also had the story online for a couple of hours before deleting it.
Private Eye printed the whole saga including the gory detail and the article getting spiked.
You might say this is just lurid gossip but as a taxpayer I would like to know if our leaders are giving paid jobs in government to women who blow them on the side, and I won't find out about it from any newspapers.
(The cartoons are pretty funny too!)
If a Post Office had £20,000 in takings on a day, but the buggy system reported takings of £30,000, then that's £10,000 of money reported missing, which the postmasters were prosecuted for stealing.
But that £10,000 didn't "go" anywhere. It never existed.
Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions
Something's obscenely wrong here.
(posted in another comment here)
> the actual technical fault
There were numerous issues, no single fault.
They all now jump in on it and elide the years of work put in by the PE. This is a common tactic in media outlets, esp. here, for the major sources to try to "own" issues with nearly zero work put in on them.
The thing that is so upsetting about all of this is that it's been pretty much ignored by government since 2009, the post office systematically lied and covered this up while knowing it was destroying innocent people. And the only reason they got traction was due to a docu drama last week. I don't normally feel like this, but I really hope people from the post office go to prison and lose their pensions over this. They deserve worse.
Horizon cost £2.4bn and was apparently developed by a team of eight, three of whom were described by the team lead as "incompetent."
Fujitsu also screwed up an IT system for the NHS. £10bn was wasted on "the biggest IT failure ever seen."
But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts.
Which is an even bigger scandal. There's a real stench of corruption around these deals, and of government procurement in general in the UK.
See also HS2, PPE procurement, Test and Trace, and others.
This isn’t terribly surprising: government contracting is a hard business to qualify for and relatively few companies have done so. They all have failures along with successes so any attempt to ban one of them will be opposed by the people who’ve found some semblance of a working team as well as any politicians they’re close to, and it’s hard to argue that most of the replacements would be substantially more likely to deliver working systems.
The underlying problem here is that this work should be run by civil servants who are familiar with the domain and have the proper incentives. This is politically anathema to the Tory/New Labor types (or Republicans here in the US) who are committed to the fiction that there are enormous cost savings to be had from outsourcing government functions and they aren’t going lead a serious procurement reform effort because the first answer would be “most things are less efficient when contracted out” and the second would be “you need to pay market rates for technical talent even to contract effectively and empower those experts”.
Where did most of that money go? Was there 8000 middle managers?
The brand is getting a bit too tarnished though. I wouldn't be surprised to see them rebranding soon.
Heads need to roll over this. Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?
Well, yes? Have you seen the kinds of people elevated to the House of Lords lately? These institutions are now profoundly corrupt.
Private Eye definitely did a lot of work, but they were not the only ones, and multiple freelancers and journalists worked on it "in the shadows" for years.
The Post Office tactics of calling editors to make threats and play down the stories were also quite influential.
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/
The scandal has hit the headlines many, many times across all the outlets, particularly in 2019-21 with the litigation and appeal cases. It was the subject of an episode of BBC Panorama in 2015 (fronted by Nick Wallis).
But it all comes to nought. The victims are still out of pocket and still have criminal prosecutions. If the media are to blame, then so is the judiciary, and so is the government, who have had it in their power to provide financial redress. And of course the Post Office and Fujitsu are the culprits.
There is talk of legislation to quash all of the convictions, which is nice, but it's unlikely most sub-postmasters will see any real compensation.
And the people who made a fortune off this will almost certainly keep it.
This story wasnt glamourous for them and they only swooped in when well after the court cases when it looked like there would be political dimension. Its sad that proper investigative journalism is only found in the smaller publications these days.
I'll tell you more: it's only being pushed now, after the tv production, because it tangentially involves the two leaders of the opposition.
Ed Davey, more damningly, was a minister with responsibility for postal matters at the time the scandal was really breaking. He basically made no effort to help the victims, and just parroted the Post Office line. He now says he was lied to "on a massive scale" which, as a line of defence, is a bit weak. Tbh, the LibDem record, in that government, is pretty bad anyway; simply reminding people of that "Coalition" government is probably enough to blow a few holes in their electoral boats.
There was a BBC Panoram program in 2015: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4961332/
It's scandalous that a £billion computer system had basic accounting errors.
It's scandalous that Fujitsu pressured the government to accept the system, and scandalous that the government gave in to this pressure.
It's scandalous how the private prosecution hid evidence.
It's scandalous how long it takes the courts to rectify miscarriages of justice.
It's scandalous that it took a popular TV show to get the government's attention.
I'm glad the victims are getting justice, but I hate that it might only have gotten this level of scrutiny because it's a fight that makes the Government look responsible...