Between 2000 and 2015, more than 700 Post Office counter staff and branch Subpostmasters were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting on fallacious evidence generated by the organisation’s Horizon IT system. Many were jailed, although they had done nothing wrong.
The Post Office refused to accept that what it proudly called ‘the largest non-military IT system in Europe’ was riddled with bugs and coding errors. It used the shaky electronic data from Horizon to wrongfully charge its own Subpostmasters with crimes that simply didn’t exist.
For a decade, journalist and broadcaster NICK WALLIS followed every move in the campaign to bring this massive injustice to light. In the second extract from his shocking and insightful new book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he describes how the truth was finally dragged out of the Government-owned organisation . . .
For the Post Office, switching to a modern IT system was always going to be a giant undertaking: 20,000 offices would need 40,000 new computers; 67,000 people would have to be trained to keep handing out £56 billion in benefits alone to their 28 million customers.
The software would process millions of transactions every year.
With the Horizon system, a custom-specced PC running Microsoft Windows would sit under every counter, each one connected to a keyboard, a barcode scanner, a receipts printer and a touchscreen, which would sit on top of the counter. Every night, all the information collected from the branch would be uploaded to a central Post Office mainframe computer.
For the Post Office, switching to a modern IT system was always going to be a giant undertaking NICK WALLIS writes in his new book
Noel Thomas,71, former sub-postmaster who was convicted of false accounting
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of postmasters were sacked or prosecuted after money appeared to go missing from their branch accounts (file image)
Horizon, an IT system developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was rolled out by the Post Office from 1999.
The system was used for tasks such as transactions, accounting and stocktaking. However, subpostmasters complained about defects after it reported shortfalls - some of which amounted to thousands of pounds.
Some subpostmasters attempted to plug the gap with their own money, even remortgaging their homes, in an attempt to correct an error.
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of subpostmasters were sacked or prosecuted due to the glitches. The ex-workers blamed flaws in the IT system, Horizon, but the Post Office denied there was a problem.
In case after case the Post Office bullied postmasters into pleading guilty to crimes they knew they had not committed.
Many others who were not convicted were hounded out of their jobs or forced to pay back thousands of pounds of 'missing' money.
The Post Office spent £32million to deny any fault in their IT system, before capitulating.
However, the postmasters and postmistresses said the scandal ruined their lives as they had to cope with the impact of a conviction and imprisonment, some while they had been pregnant or had young children.
Marriages broke down, and courts have heard how some families believe the stress led to health conditions, addiction and premature deaths.
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To implement this was a huge task — but it was seen as a solution to the rampant fraud that bedevilled the benefits system, which in those days was administered in large part through the Post Office. Here was a silver bullet that would future-proof every postmaster’s business (and income) for decades.
But from the outset there were major problems. Margaret Davison was one of the first to use Horizon, in a live trial in 1999 at her tiny post office in the Tyneside village of West Boldon, supervised by a team of Post Office computer geeks.
‘There were so many faults in the system which you were expected to cope with, learning on your feet with a queue of customers in front of you . . . how I avoided a nervous breakdown at the age of 60 in a one-position, very busy little village Post Office, I do not know . . . from day one the system was flawed,’ she declared.
Incredibly, two months before the project went live, an internal analysis had listed six ‘high severity’ hitches that were causing accounting discrepancies, lost transactions, system freezes and ‘lock-ups’, printer failures and general losses of accounting integrity.
It warned that there were ‘gaps in data’ which would ultimately be reflected in balance sheet accounts.
What’s more, Fujitsu — the global IT company that had won the contract to build the new system —did not yet understand the ‘root cause’ of the problems.
Acknowledging these serious doubts about the reliability of the software, in September 1999 the Post Office board refused to sign off the project. Yet just a month later, it gave the go-ahead to roll out the system.
How Horizon’s major problems could be fixed to the satisfaction of the board so quickly (and conveniently) is a mystery. The document, presentation or written assurance that gave them this comfort has not yet been made public.
Nevertheless, the board signed it off and Horizon would soon be wreaking its havoc across the Post Office network.
The program was supposed to be foolproof but with IT, nothing is. Computers on this scale are complex live systems which rely on perfect humans, perfect hardware, perfect communication pathways, perfect environments and perfect software to ensure perfect outcomes.
As nothing is perfect, some level of failure or malfunction must be an expected outcome. The larger and more complex the system, the more likely the failure.
But I learnt from a whistleblower, Clint (not his real name), just how bad Horizon was. He had been specifically hired by Fujitsu to find out what was stopping Horizon from working and fix it.
He was blunt in his appraisal. ‘Everybody in the building knew it was a bag of s***,’ he told me. ‘It had gone through the test labs God knows how many times and the testers were raising bugs by the thousand, including Category As.’
Computer bugs are errors mistakenly written by the developers into the software codes that tell electronic devices what to do. One misplaced character can make a computer do the wrong thing. Category A means the system might be unusable.
‘They had a team of eight system developers who were some of the worst people I’ve ever seen. A couple of good lads knew how to code properly but, as for the rest, it was just like kindergarten.’
The Appeal Court overturned the convictions of stealing of 39 ex-subpostmasters, who were sacked, some bankrupted and others even jailed, earlier this year
Former post office worker Wendy Buffrey (left), from Cheltenham, celebrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, after having her conviction overturned by the Court of Appeal
Clint was aghast. ‘There were no specs getting written, no development controls going on, no design written down, nothing.’
The biggest problem was with something called a message store, which contained some of the computer’s fundamental operating instructions. This was a recipe for disaster, particularly for the Cash Account — a programme which crawled through every transaction on each Horizon terminal at the end of every day to come up with a figure which was supposed to correspond exactly with the amount of cash on the premises.
Thanks to poor coding, this crucial piece of software could crash, send the wrong information to the wrong place or cause numbers to halve, double or multiply. The software had no integrity. It was unreliable.
Clint told his bosses at Fujitsu the Cash Account had to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. They refused, saying it would take too long and cost too much. He was told to repair it and did his best until he was moved to a different job.
I listened to him with mounting alarm as he summed up Horizon. ‘It was a prototype that had been bloated and hacked together afterwards for several years, and then pushed screaming and kicking out of the door. It should never have seen the light of day. Never.’
The Post Office persisted in maintaining the fiction that Horizon was, to all intents and purposes, faultless according to NICK WALLIS
Welsh postmaster jailed for nine months 'fell off the ladder' after conviction - before picking himself up and seeking challenge to Post Office prosecution
Noel Thomas was jailed for nine months in 2006 after he was accused of stealing £48,000 while he was working for the Post Office in Gaerwen on Anglesey.
He told the BBC that he admitted to the charge because he never reported discrepancies he noticed, but insisted he did not take the money and blamed the Horizon computer system.
'I want everyone to have their name cleared and to get to the bottom of what has happened and where the money has gone to,' Mr Thomas told BBC Newyddion 9.
'Thirteen years after jail, I must admit it was hard but I gradually got my confidence back through family, friends and work colleagues.
'Yes, I do feel bitter, and not just for myself - the Post Office have been coming and telling people that they have taken money, that they are a thief.'
Family of postmaster who killed himself after being wrongly accused of theft demand Post Office bosses are held accountable
Martin Griffiths, 59, took his own life in 2013 after he was falsely suspected of stealing money from Post Office
Father-of-two Martin Griffiths, 59, took his own life in 2013 after he was falsely suspected of stealing money from a Post Office in Ellesmere Port, where he had worked for around 20 years.
Mr Griffiths was one of hundreds of postmasters who were suspected of false accounting and theft, with some fired or wrongfully convicted, after amounts appeared to vanish from their tills.
The family of Mr Griffiths said he delved into his own savings and those of his parents to pay back around £60,000 he was wrongly suspected of taking from the branch.
The turmoil lasted for four years, between 2009 and 2013, and had a huge impact on the father-of-two's physical and mental health, his family said.
In 2013, Mr Griffiths parked his car on the A41 in Ellesmere Port after leaving a note for his loved ones and took his own life.
His family have called for a stricter line of review from the Government and asked for a judge-led enquiry to get to the bottom of the injustices behind the scandal.
Postmaster caught up in major IT scandal which saw many falsely accused of accounting fraud suffered a STROKE after he was hounded for £65,000
Peter Murray said he suffered a series of breakdowns and a stroke after he was hounded for £65,000
Peter Murray said he suffered a series of breakdowns and a stroke after he was hounded for £65,000. The 53-year-old, from Wallasey in Merseyside, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
He said he was suspended without pay and forced to take out loans and borrow from friends to make monthly repayments to the Post Office.
He paid £1,000 a month before learning that he was among many sub-postmasters to face false accusations.
'It left me completely devastated,' added the father of three. 'It caused absolute havoc for my family, I have had several nervous breakdowns. It made me feel like a convict, but I'm not going to let it beat me.'
Wife finally clears name of her postmaster husband after he died while still facing false Post Office claim he had stolen £46,000
Marion Holmes, 78, won justice for her late husband, Peter Holmes, who was a respected postmaster in Jesmond, Newcastle, before the Post Office Horizon scandal 'destroyed' his good name
Marion Holmes, 78, won justice for her husband, Peter, who was a respected postmaster before the Post Office Horizon scandal 'destroyed' his good name.
Ex-police officer Peter Holmes had successfully
