The British public may now be familiar with the plight of former subpostmasters that suffered life-changing hardship at the hands of the Post Office, which blamed and punished them for accounting losses caused by its own computer system.
The overturning of the wrongful criminal convictions of subpostmasters for crimes such as theft and fraud are understandably dominating the headlines, as there have been 63 so far with many more expected out of a total of 736 convicted based on computer evidence. The wrongful prosecution of subpostmasters is described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history, and it has no match in terms of number wrongfully prosecuted.
However, there is another major injustice playing out in the background that the government seems less eager to resolve.
The same faulty computer system, which led to subpostmasters wrongfully receiving criminal convictions and in many cases prison sentences, also caused financial losses and destroyed the lives of thousands more.
A Computer Weekly investigation in 2009 first revealed the plight of the subpostmasters in interviews with seven of those that suffered at the hands of a computer system, which at the time the Post Office claimed had no faults but was later proved to be error prone (see timeline below for more).
It was a decade later in December 2019 that a High Court trial came to an end, with 555 former subpostmasters successfully suing the Post Office. The subpostmasters claimed the Horizon IT system used in branches was to blame for accounting shortfalls, the Post Office said this was wrong.
High Court judge Peter Fraser said Horizon errors certainly could cause unexplained accounting shortfalls. He went further. In his judgement, he described the Post Office’s denial that Horizon could be to blame as “the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat”.
Big news
It was at this moment that the Horizon scandal, which had been playing out since the computer system from Fujitsu was introduced in 2000, became big news.
The 555 subpostmasters, grouped together in the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), had defeated the Post Office and its government backers in court, paving the way for potentially hundreds of former subpostmasters to criminal convictions overturned. Without this group of subpostmasters the scandal that is known today may never have come to light.
All those that have convictions overturned will receive compensation with all of them offered an interim sum of up to £100,000 before the final sums are calculated
The 555 subpostmasters also forced the Post Office to open a compensation scheme for any subpostmasters affected by Horizon errors to be compensated for their losses. About 2,500 subpostmasters have applied for the scheme, known as the Historic Shortfalls Scheme and an estimated £300m in taxpayers is expected to be used to pay what these people rightly deserve.
If it had not been for the 555 subpostmasters that took the Post Office to court and won, despite the government owned organisation throwing an estimated £100m in legal costs defending itself, none of this would have been achieved.
It is for this reason that the Post Office’s decision to exclude the 555 from the compensation scheme is seen as a massive ongoing injustice.
The government says that the compensation of £57.75m awarded to the 555 subpostmasters after the High Court battle, was a full and final payment. What it does not publicise is that after the subpostmasters paid their legal costs, which were ramped up by the Post Office’s attempts to avoid defeat, they were left with just £11m.
Legal costs
The government is refusing to pay the £46m legal costs for the subpostmasters, meaning these victims are being left with paltry sums, which in many cases do not even cover the sums paid to the Post Office covering unexplained shortfalls and in some cases the travel costs that individuals have amassed during their campaigns for justice.
These people lost businesses, homes, life savings and for many their health deteriorated due to stress. They were forced to pay back thousands of pounds of unexplained losses, which did not actually exist. Many avoided prosecution because they fought the Post Office in court, but were ruined financially.
Former subpostmaster Nicola Arch, who suffered unexplained accounting shortfalls, is an example.
In 2002 when the Post Office prosecuted her for theft and false accounting, she was found not guilty in Bristol Crown Court, but lost everything in the process. She now finds herself in a position where she does not fall within the Post Office’s Historic Shortfalls Scheme as one of the 555, and as she was not convicted so is outside the compensation for those wrongly convicted.
“I am getting penalised for defending myself. If I’d have lost and been sent to prison, I would be better off. That’s our justice system,” she said. “I seem to be exempt from any group of victims.”
Litigation settlement
Due to the costs of defending herself and the failed prosecution, she lost her business, home, health and reputation. As one of the 555 that took the Post Office to court, she received £8,500 almost 20 years after her original court battle with the Post Office. This was part of the High Court litigation settlement after the money left after costs was awarded to claimants.
The emotional strain has been huge on Ms Arch and others. “My father died 16 years ago so will never know any of this and my 16 year old son only knows his mum involved in the Post Office scandal,” she said.
Former subpostmaster and JFSA member Jo Hamilton, also one of the group of 555, had her criminal conviction for false accounting overturned in the Court of Appeal in April.
She will receive compensation for the wrongful conviction. On the 555 denied fair compensation, she said: “Until there is no breath in my body I will continue to fight this. It’s so wrong, it’s disgusting.”
There is wide public and political pressure for the government to right a wrong by fairly compensating the subpostmasters that exposed the scandal’s true extent. Conservative peer James Arbuthnot, who has been campaigning for justice since taking on Hamilton’s case as her MP many years ago, said the settlement in the litigation was unfairly forced upon subpostmasters and the government should “stop hiding behind it but instead set it aside”.
“The Prime Minister has said that the subpostmasters must be looked after, and the minister in charge of the Post Office, Paul Scully, has said that all of them must be fairly compensated. If both ministers now break their word then it will add still more disgrace to the way in which the sub postmasters have been treated.
The government is well aware of this injustice and has discussed it directly with some of the victims. In a Zoom meeting in May, attended by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) minister Paul Scully promised former subpostmasters Tracy Felstead, Dionne Andre and Michael Rudkin that the government would work with them and other victims to ensure they were quickly and fairly compensated for the devastation the Horizon scandal had caused to their lives.
Totally unfair
During the meeting, Rudkin told Scully and Johnson: “It is totally unfair. I know you are looking at the legal term that it is a full and final settlement for the 555, but when you take out the legal expenses, most subpostmasters actually got less than the amounts they paid back that they were wrongly blamed for taking.” Scully said: “I totally get that, and this is something we have to go away and think about. I want to do this as quickly as possible because you have waited long enough.”
Andre told Johnson and Scully: “We battled for years and years through the courts to get people to see what happened, and now you have gone to all the others, not involved in the litigation, and said, ‘OK, we will give you your money’. We don’t want anything we don’t deserve, we want what’s right and what’s fair.”
She added that it need not be complicated for the government to work out fairer compensation because all the calculations were done by the 555 subpostmasters’ legal team as part of the GLO. It is now four months since Scully’s particular promise to sort things out as quickly as possible and Rudkin said he has not even been contacted about it.
In a message to members of the JFSA, Alan Bates who formed the group in 2009 and led the 555 in court, said: “It is highly doubtful that there is even one of the original 555 victims who brought the initial civil action against Post Office who feels they have now had justice and financial redress for what Post Office did to them
“Despite the utterly damning judgments by the Court, the experience of the 555 victims over many years is that Post Office and government has little more than malice aforethought when dealing with the 555, determined to make them continue to financially suffer for daring to publicly expose their failures to manage and oversee Post Office in the way they had a statutory duty to do so.
“The evidence for that can clearly be seen in the way they have refused to pay the £46m costs of the legal action the victims group had to pay because Post Office and government failed in their duties. Post Office has even refused to allow the victims group to enter its Historic Shortfall Scheme to recover the £8.5m wrongly taken from them due to Post Office’s flawed Horizon system during the time they were serving subpostmasters.”
Arbuthont told Computer Weekly: “This ghastly saga of unfairness, intimidation, deception and cruelty needs to end, right now.”
