How a computer glitch sent hundreds of British postmasters to jail
Former Post Office worker Deirdre Connolly is seen at the Clayton Hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, on May 18, 2022.
Biran Lawless/PA/Reuters
Britain is no stranger to public inquiries. From the phone hacking by British newspapers in 2011 to the ongoing inquiry into the death of 72 people in the fire at Grenfell Tower in London, successive British governments have regularly turned to such inquiries to examine particularly troubling injustices.
Now, an inquiry is underway into the wrongful accusation of hundreds of British postal workers of theft, in what has been described in the media as Britain’s biggest miscarriage of justice in its history.
What is the postmaster scandal?
In 1999, the British Post Office introduced a new accounting system, Horizon, to tally transactions. Staff running local branches, known as subpostmasters and mistresses, soon noticed that the computer software did not match the amount of money they had manually recorded at the end of a working day.
Why We Wrote This
When the British Post Office trusted computer accounting over the word of its employees, it ended up ruining hundreds of lives on faulty data. Now those harmed are seeking justice.
When the Post Office higher-ups became aware of the discrepancies, they began taking local staff straight to court, accusing them of theft, false accounting, and fraud. Many were sent to prison, with an average of 30 subpostmasters jailed every year between 2000 and 2014. A total of 736 subpostmasters were prosecuted.
However, years later it came to light that the problem was not wrongdoing, but Horizon. The software contained faults that made it appear money was missing from Post Office branches, when all was in fact accounted for.
Why did the faulty software go unrevealed for so long?
A complex web of staff loyalty to the company, unreciprocated trust by subpostmasters toward management, and a culture of blame all fed the situation.
Many subpostmasters had served as Post Office employees for much of their careers, or had opened up postal branches with family members, particularly among many migrants of Ugandan-Indian origin who had relocated to Britain in the 1970s. Postmasters say they felt a deep loyalty toward the community-centric role played by the Post Office – so much so, that some topped up company accounts with their own money to shore up discrepancies on the computer system.
Such loyalty was not reciprocated by senior management, who focused on closing branches in sweeping cost-cutting measures influenced by what was widely seen as the Post Office’s profit-driven culture, which was introduced at the same time as Horizon.
In addition, the Post Office held all the information and, crucially, was the entity that investigated and then brought the prosecutions against employees, rather than the police. Testimonies from the inquiry have shown big problems with the way Post Office investigators treated postmasters.
Tony Edwards, one of Britain’s most senior criminal lawyers, says the Post Office should have followed police best practices.
Post Office “investigators either didn’t know or chose not to observe the rules about making it clear that people were not obliged to do anything [when questioned]. They were free to go,” he says.
Those prosecuted say they were bullied into believing that they were the only ones complaining of a corrupt computer system. “There must have been a point, very early on, when Post Office investigators knew it was not true,” adds Mr. Edwards.
What has been the human impact of the scandal?
It has been devastating. Former postal worker Baljit Sethi said on the first day of the inquiry he considered taking his own life after Horizon showed a £17,000 ($20,900) shortfall in a branch he operated, but stopped short because of his family. One woman, jailed while pregnant for “stealing” £57,000, said she resisted suicide for her unborn child. Others said they faced bankruptcy, addiction, chronic illness, and depression.
“Lives were ruined, families were torn apart, families were made homeless and destitute. People who were important, respected, and integral part of the local communities that they served were in some cases shunned,” said Jason Beer QC, counsel to the public inquiry.
Victim testimonies recount the toll taken on personal relationships and health, with divorces, miscarriage of births, and social isolation also commonplace.
Some had died before the state publicly recognized that they were wrongly convicted. Eighty-one people have so far had their convictions quashed by the government.