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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The most talked-about holiday TV viewing in Britain was not a Hollywood blockbuster or a Netflix fantasy drama. It was a dramatisation of the real-life scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of theft and false accounting that were in fact the result of a faulty computer system. Many were jailed or ruined. Some convictions have been overturned, and a public inquiry is under way. Yet the TV drama has galvanised public outrage and pressure to end delays in compensating victims. This is one of the UK’s widest miscarriages of justice in recent years. It is a lesson for organisations everywhere, especially in the era of AI, in the perils of putting blind trust in technology.
Between 1999, when the Post Office introduced the Horizon IT system supplied by Fujitsu, and 2015, more than 700 local sub-postmasters — who provide post office services often as part of wider businesses — were prosecuted for alleged shortfalls in accounts. For historical reasons, the Post Office can bring its own prosecutions, without the police, and sub-postmasters’ contracts with the state-owned company made them liable for making good any losses. Lives were destroyed and reputations besmirched. At least four people took their own lives.
Only 93 convictions linked to the flawed IT system have been overturned. The first priority must be to quash the rest, to end victims’ torment and enable them to apply for compensation that is now available. The case for “mass exoneration” is compelling. This might mean acquitting a few genuine wrongdoers among those convicted. But such people have already been punished, and this would be a small miscarriage of justice compared with the mass wrong against innocent victims.
One option is legislation in parliament to declare an amnesty. This could be done quickly, and overcome some fearful victims’ reluctance to pursue appeals. Some victims, however, want their names cleared by the same judicial system that found them guilty.
A preferable route, if ministers could be confident of a swift outcome, might be to group remaining cases into mass appeals to be fast-tracked by the courts. The government is considering removing the Post Office as a participant in appeals. An advisory board on compensation suggests the Post Office’s mishandling of prosecutions was so egregious that it would constitute a “cogent ground” for overturning convictions.
Quashing convictions would speed up compensation payments. But others were not prosecuted yet still lost jobs and savings, and payments need to be accelerated. Some victims have died without being properly compensated.
A final priority is to secure accountability, via the public inquiry and a police investigation, for what went wrong. No executives of the Post Office or Fujitsu, which took control of the British computer company ICL in 1998, have been punished. Yet Post Office managers, including former chief executive Paula Vennells, continued to insist Horizon was “robust”, and to allow sub-postmasters to be hounded, even as evidence to the contrary piled up.
It is surely time to strip the Post Office of its anachronistic right to bring private prosecutions. Police are now investigating potential “fraud offences” related to the Post Office’s clawback of millions of pounds from sub-postmasters that was never actually missing. But that process could take years.
The human suffering caused by the Horizon scandal has dented citizens’ belief that the courts and public authorities will protect them from abuse by those in authority. Speeding up action to provide redress is vital to rebuild that confidence — and to deter other organisations, public or private, from ever behaving in similar fashion again.