The long, slow process of redressing the Post Office Horizon scandal

As with everything else in the UK, for whatever reason, righting wrongs takes decades.

Any inquiry, be it for the Hillsborough disaster, the contaminated blood scandal and now the Post Office Horizon debacle, is interminable.

Labour have no room to complain, either. They are every bit as responsible for letting things slip over the years.

I will try to conclude with what we have discovered so far with the Post Office.

This is a long post.

Where we are

On January 7, 2024, The Sunday Times presented us with a summary of where we are, ‘Post Office scandal: pressure grows to exonerate hundreds of victims’. Two months on, and we have moved no further. Emphases mine below:

… [Justice Minister] Alex Chalk is looking at whether the Post Office can be stripped of its role in the appeals process, with many victims still attempting to overturn wrongful convictions …

All parties have had chances and opportunities to intervene over the years while persecuted sub-postmasters lost their jobs, their homes, the respect of their communities and endured court battles. Some took their own lives.

Kevan Jones, the Labour MP for North Durham, has been a staunch advocate for one of his constituents:

Tom Brown, a former sub-postmaster in Newcastle upon Tyne, was wrongly accused of stealing £85,000 by the Post Office in 2008, leading to him losing his home and being made bankrupt.

Jones, who sits on the Horizon compensation advisory board, said: “It is quite clear from the evidence presented to the public inquiry and in court, that the victims of this scandal should have their convictions quashed and their good names restored” …

Yesterday, it emerged that Scotland Yard is conducting a criminal investigation into the Post Office, which prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015 based on evidence from the faulty Horizon system. Since then, just 93 convictions have been overturned. Several hundred people are yet to see their convictions quashed, while 54 cases have resulted in the convictions being upheld, people being refused permission or the person withdrawing from the legal process.

Chalk is looking at potential ways for the Post Office to be stripped of its role in the cases of sub-postmasters who are seeking to appeal and overturn their convictions. This includes whether the Crown Prosecution Service could take over, which may make it easier for convictions to be quashed.

Even after the Horizon computer system was found to be defective, the Post Office has in recent years opposed a number of appeals by sub-postmasters.

A source said that Chalk had long held concerns about the ability of some arms-length bodies to mount private prosecutions, as well as the low rate of successful appeals among sub-postmasters. He is expected to discuss the issue with Kevin Hollinrake, the minister responsible for postal services, in the coming days.

The process is ongoing. Kevin Hollinrake advocates patience.

Here is one of the issues moving forward:

… ministers are said to be mindful that the CPS is independent of government and it is unlikely they could properly seek to order it to use the power. Even if the CPS were to take over, decisions on appeals would remain in the hands of prosecutors. This means there is no guarantee there would be a blanket quashing of convictions, as has been called for by some MPs and campaigners.

And, of course, questions remain over people like Keir Starmer, who was Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) during the early days of the scandal. Nigel Farage was right to ask this question nearly two months ago. Conveniently, there has been no response from Labour’s leader:

Post Office execs paid bonuses on convictions

Incredibly, Post Office executives were paid bonuses on spurious convictions of subpostmasters, The Telegraph reported on January 10:

Post Office investigators were offered cash bonuses for every sub-postmaster convicted during the Horizon scandal, it has emerged …

Investigators with the Post Office described the incentive scheme as “part of the business”, with everyone in the security team “on a bonus”.

Gary Thomas, who worked in the Post Office security team between 2000 and 2012, told the Post Office Horizon inquiry that the bonus targets affected how he went about his work. Mr Thomas branded all sub-postmasters “crooks” in emails concerning one victim who was posthumously cleared. The messages were handed to the inquiry, which resumes on Thursday.

… Rishi Sunak pledged on Wednesday to introduce a law that would exonerate sub-postmasters with an ambition to quash all convictions this year. In exchange for signing a document declaring their innocence, sub-postmasters will receive £600,000 in compensation – though some victims said the sum was insufficient recompense for their suffering …

Mr Thomas, of the Post Office security team, told the inquiry there were “bonus objectives”, including a 40 per cent “loss recovery objective”, available to his team.

Asked if that influenced his behaviour as an investigator, he said: “I’d probably be lying if I said no because… it was part of the business, the culture of the business of recoveries or even under the terms of a postmaster’s contract with the contracts manager.”

In an email sent by Mr Thomas in 2021 to Nick Read, the Post Office’s chief executive, and which was disclosed to the inquiry, he wrote: “My yearly objectives that were bonus worthy at the time were based on numbers of successful prosecutions and recovery amounts of money to the business.”

He also discussed “a proceeds of crime unit within Post Office Ltd that ensured some of these individuals lost their homes and families”.

Thomas was convinced the subpostmasters were criminals:

Mr Thomas was the lead investigator in the case of sub-postmaster Julian Wilson, who was convicted of false accounting and died of cancer five years before his conviction was overturned.

Mr Thomas did not include any of the problems Mr Wilson had reported with the Horizon system when writing his report after interviewing him in 2008. Years later, Mr Thomas told a colleague he was “pleased” to have his hands on documents relating to Mr Wilson’s case because he wanted to prove there was “no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subposters’” and that they “were all crooks”.

A second Post Office investigator confirmed the bonuses:

Dave Posnett, another senior post office investigator, last month said in his evidence to the inquiry that colleagues were given annual bonuses partly based on the amounts of money his team recovered under the Proceeds of Crime Act – orders to seize sub-postmasters’ assets once they had been convicted.

Asked if all financial investigators were on a bonus scheme, Mr Posnett replied: “Yes, and everyone within the security team was on a bonus, depending on their own objectives.”

This came as devastating news for wrongly convicted postmasters:

Della Robinson, 56, whose conviction for false accounting in 2013 over a £17,000 discrepancy in the Horizon system was overturned in 2021, said: “I didn’t know about the bonuses. I think it’s disgraceful, all of it. Every one of the victims is still struggling, we’re all waiting for compensation.” Mrs Robinson lost her home in the fallout as well as her job.

Marion Holmes, 82, the widow of Peter Holmes, a Post Office manager convicted of theft who died in 2015, five years before he was cleared of wrongdoing, said: “It [the bonus scheme] doesn’t surprise me because it’s the sort of thing they would do. They can’t stoop any lower, they really can’t in my eyes.

“The tactics they used were horrendous, and that just says it all doesn’t it? That really is the lowest of the low as far as I am concerned. I have got steam coming out of my ears” …

The Post Office said the bonus scheme was rightly being investigated by the public inquiry. A spokesman said: “We share fully the aims of the public inquiry to get to the truth of what went wrong in the past and establish accountability. It’s for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues that it is examining.”

Even worse, Post Office investigators received only three weeks of training before being unleashed on subpostmasters. We have more on Gary Thomas:

Post Office investigators were given just three weeks training before being unleashed on sub-postmasters suspected of stealing from their employer, The Telegraph can disclose …

The lack of training emerged in a witness statement given to the public inquiry by one of the Post Office’s senior investigators, Gary Thomas, who said he was recruited to the security team after a stint as a branch manager in Southampton in 2000.

After applying for the role of Post Office security manager, he said a witness statement supplied to the inquiry at the end of last year “underwent a fairly complex set of interviews” before being offered the job.

“This subsequently resulted in a residential training course lasting around three weeks, as I recall, and to be trained in various competencies,” his statement went on.

That included being trained in codes of practice in the use of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, as well as “interviewing under caution, voluntary searching of home, person and vehicles along with completion of notebook entries and the retention and storing of exhibits to name but a few I can … remember, some 23-plus years ago”.

He said his “role was to interview individuals who were Post Office employees, either as direct Crown Office staff or via their sub-postmaster contract, who were suspected or who had admitted to committing a criminal offence or to ascertain the facts surrounding an enquiry”.

Mr Thomas – as previously reported by The Telegraph – subsequently told the Post Office Horizon inquiry, which is examining hundreds of wrongful prosecutions and convictions, that investigators were given “bonus objectives” each year based on the numbers of successful prosecutions and money recovered.

It has since emerged that the Horizon IT system, developed by Fujitsu, suffered from defects and bugs that introduced accounting errors and discrepancies that led to the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Sub-postmasters were investigated and prosecuted by the Post Office when there was no evidence of theft or fraud.

In contrast to the three weeks of training provided by the Post Office, police detectives normally have at least two years with their forces before they can even begin on-the-job training … A Post Office spokesman said it could not comment on inquiry witness statements or individual cases and added: “We share fully the aims of the public inquiry to get to the truth of what went wrong in the past and establish accountability. 

“It’s for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues that it is examining.”

Labour: clean hands or not?

The Crown Prosecution Service knew about early prosecutions — even if Sir Keir Starmer and Adam Crozier, Tony Blair’s hand-picked Royal Mail exec in the early 2000s, deny it:

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) also disclosed for the first time on Wednesday that it had prosecuted sub-postmasters while Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, headed the organisation. While the vast majority of prosecutions were conducted by the Post Office, the CPS revealed details of a number of cases involving the defective Horizon IT system. Sir Keir said none of the cases had come across his desk.

It also emerged that Fujitsu, the Japanese firm at the heart of the scandal, had been awarded £4.9 billion of government contracts since a 2019 legal ruling that found its software was at fault. Ministers insisted on Wednesday that they had attempted to block the firm from securing government contracts but were stymied by procurement rules.

Separately, it was alleged that Adam Crozier, who was chief executive of Royal Mail between 2003 and 2010 when it owned the Post Office, would have been aware of the defective Horizon system. He said he had “no involvement” with it.

On January 18, Crozier’s No. 2, Alan Cook, who, like his boss, also rose up the corporate ranks after his time at the Post Office:

has apologised for his part in the Horizon IT scandal, saying: “I shall never forgive myself.”

Alan Cook, who was the state-owned company’s managing director before joining the Highways Agency and insurer Liverpool Victoria, has commented for the first time on the sub-postmaster scandal.

He was managing director of the Post Office between 2006 and 2010.

Over that period more than 160 sub-postmasters were prosecuted using faulty data from the Horizon system.

Speaking to The Telegraph on Thursday, he said: “My heart goes out to the individuals affected. And, you know, I hope that they will now be quickly compensated.”

Another Telegraph report from January 10 has this:

Sub-postmasters were taken to court by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) during Sir Keir Starmer’s time as its head, it emerged on Wednesday.

The CPS said it was involved in 11 cases in which it had prosecuted sub-postmasters for fraud, theft and false accounting involving the Horizon IT system …

In one case, in May 2009, a sub-postmaster – who has not been named – was sentenced to 21 months’ imprisonment for theft after pleading guilty.

In a second prosecution, also in May 2009, a sub-postmaster was given an eight-month suspended jail term and 180 hours of community service after pleading guilty to theft and fraud.

In the third case, the defendant was subjected to a curfew and ordered to do unpaid work in February 2012 for theft …

On Wednesday, Sir Keir said he was unaware of the cases, which had not crossed his desk during his time running the CPS.

He told reporters: “No, I wasn’t aware of any of them. I think it was a small number within a 20-year window, that’s all I know.

“I don’t even know, but I guess, I think, the CPS are helping with inquiries, how many of those may or may not have involved Horizon. That’s my only response to that, I’m afraid.”

‘Computer is always right’

Also on January 10, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was urged to amend the law which implies that a computer system, by definition, is accurate.

The Telegraph reported:

The Justice Secretary has been urged to scrap a law that was backed by the Post Office and requires courts to presume that evidence derived from a computer is reliable.

MPs and campaigners for the sub-postmasters wrongly convicted of financial crimes say Alex Chalk must amend the law to prevent a repeat of what happened to them.

The Post Office lobbied for the rule in the 1990s before the scandal in which hundreds of sub-postmasters were convicted of theft, based on evidence from the Horizon computer system used in their branches.

This evidence was later proved to be unsafe owing to errors in the software that created account shortfalls, for which sub-postmasters were blamed and some jailed. 

Nearly 100 people have so far had their convictions overturned and the Government is considering exonerating hundreds more.

The current legal rule stipulates that courts should presume a computer system has operated correctly unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

It replaced a law which said that prosecutors using evidence derived from computers had to verify that the system it came from was working correctly. It was introduced in 1999 by the then Labour government following a Law Commission recommendation.

Documents that the Post Office submitted to the Law Commission in 1995 show that it viewed these “technical requirements” as a barrier to successful prosecutions.

Yet, even here we see how Conservative ministers backed the status quo:

Mr Chalk commissioned a paper in August 2020, when he was a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice, on suggestions for improving the existing approach to the proof in court proceedings of computer-derived evidence.

It was written by barrister Paul Marshall, who represented sub-postmasters who successfully overturned their wrongful convictions.

It recommended that a prosecutor, like the Post Office, which deploys electronic evidence should automatically provide sufficient details of their systems to demonstrate that they were professionally managed.

However, in May 2022, the then justice minister James Cartlidge disclosed that the Government had “no plans to review” the presumption as it had a wide application and was “rebuttable” if there was evidence to the contrary.

It is understood officials argued it was akin to presuming that, for instance, breathalyser results or forensic tests were accurate unless proven otherwise.

Mr Cartlidge said the current public inquiry into the Post Office scandal would advise the Government on the matter.

“Given the concerns raised about the Post Office’s Horizon IT system, the Government wants to be fully assured that there is a public summary of the failings associated with the system and that lessons are learnt from this dispute,” he said.

Mr Marshall accused the Government of being “indifferent to the wreckage that the presumption caused.”

Fujitsu engineer sought immunity

On the topic of faulty software, on January 9, a Fujitsu engineer requested immunity.

The Telegraph featured the story, ‘Gareth Jenkins, architect of Horizon Post Office scandal, demands immunity’. I do not know what transpired in the end, but it is worth noting:

The architect of the faulty Horizon IT system, who gave evidence used to convict sub-postmasters, has demanded immunity before agreeing to appear at the public inquiry.

Gareth Jenkins, who is understood to have been instrumental in developing the software as a senior computer engineer at Fujitsu, is under police investigation over his role in the Post Office scandal.

His testimony given in court cases that the Fujitsu IT system was working correctly was central to convictions and repeatedly used by Post Office lawyers.

Tracked down by The Telegraph to his home in Berkshire, Mr Jenkins, 69, said, when asked if he was sorry for what had happened: “I don’t want to talk. I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Mr Jenkins has twice sought a guarantee that any testimony he gives to the inquiry cannot be used against him in any possible prosecution and his testimony has also been delayed twice …

Mr Jenkins had been due to give evidence to the public inquiry twice. But in each occasion it was postponed including as recently as November 2023, when the Post Office disclosed 3,045 documents on the evening before he was due to give evidence. Sources have speculated that the release of the documents was timed to prevent Mr Jenkins giving evidence.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed last week it was investigating “matters concerning Fujitsu Horizon and the Post Office… into potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice” …

The Telegraph understands that Mr Jenkins, who was chief Horizon architect at Fujitsu, told investigators as early as 2012 that the IT system designed for the Post Office could be accessed remotely by Fujitsu at its headquarters in Bracknell, Berks. But it would take until 2019 for the Post Office to admit that sub-postmasters’ computer systems could be accessed remotely, blowing a hole in the key prosecution argument that the system could not be tampered with and was failsafe.

Ian Henderson, a director of Second Sight, a forensic accountancy firm that first highlighted the unsafe convictions, told the BBC on Tuesday: “We were able to identify that there were bugs and defects in the Horizon system. This was disclosed to the Post Office by Fujitsu itself.

“I visited Fujitsu in September 2012 and met with the senior technical engineer and had a very detailed meeting looking at how they operated, what the problems were. It was at that meeting that Fujitsu disclosed to me that they routinely used remote access to branch terminals for troubleshooting purposes.”

The Telegraph has been told the senior engineer who briefed the Second Sight team was Mr Jenkins. Prosecutions were not halted until 2015.

Mr Jenkins was first due to give testimony to the inquiry on July 6 2023 but on the eve of his evidence the Post Office produced 5,000 documents it said had just come to light. The appearance was rescheduled for November 2023 but again more than 3,000 documents were found by the Post Office, this time days beforehand, forcing the postponement.

Mr Jenkins has twice requested that Sir Wyn Williams, the inquiry chairman, ask the Attorney General to grant him immunity from any comments he makes during evidence to the inquiry from being used against him in a court of law in any possible future criminal proceedings.

Both times, Sir Wyn has refused his request. In October 2023, Sir Wyn said he would not be seeking an undertaking from the Attorney General that “would restrict the use in criminal proceedings of evidence given to the inquiry, as requested by former Fujitsu engineer, Gareth Jenkins”.

He added: “I am satisfied that Mr Jenkins has not been the victim of unfairness as yet and I am determined that he should not become the victim of unfairness as the work of the inquiry progresses.”

Politicians have demanded that Mr Jenkins be made to give evidence.

Kevan Jones, the Labour MP and member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, said; “Gareth Jenkins should appear before the public inquiry. The inquiry sees him as a key witness and therefore he should give evidence. If he doesn’t appear then he should be made to appear. What has been amazing this week is deafening silence from Fujitsu as a company. They need to come forward and explain what their role has been in all this.”

David Davis, the former Tory cabinet minister who has been pushing for justice for the sub-postmasters, said: “He should appear and give evidence. I can’t think in what world he imagines he should get immunity given the fact of the matter is we’re going to have to investigate what happened.

“We can’t give immunity just because people are going to give evidence to the public inquiry. Giving evidence is a requirement of their involvement in this case.”

‘Mafia gangster’ and other abusive tactics

On Thursday, January 11, another eye-opener appeared involving a man named Stephen Bradshaw, who has been a Post Office employee from 1978 to the present day.

Incredible.

The Guardian reported that he appeared before Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry that day and had much to say:

An investigator accused of acting like a “mafia gangster” when securing false convictions against post office operators has admitted softer charges were offered in exchange for silence over the culpability of the Horizon IT system.

In several instances, the accused were told they could avoid a jail sentence if they kept quiet about the accounting system’s faults, as part of an aggressive strategy by the Post Office to protect their cases as they pursued them in the courts.

Giving evidence at a public inquiry in central London into one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice, Stephen Bradshaw – who remains employed by the Post Office, where he has worked since 1978 – denied calling one female suspect a “bitch” while working as a fraud investigator, but admitted to accusing another of telling a “pack of lies” during what he conceded were “not nice” interviews.

He further conceded that he had known of claims that the Horizon accounting system was at fault for discrepancies in branches’ accounts “from the beginning” but added that he had not received orders from the top to stop the prosecutions.

This is what transpired:

Edward Henry KC, who represents some of those falsely accused, said: “Mr Bradshaw, contrary to what you say, you and your department, the security department, were drenched in information that Horizon wasn’t working from the very beginning.”

“The information came through, yes,” Bradshaw replied.

He conceded it was “probably” wrong that Post Office lawyers offered more lenient charges to those who stated in court that there was “nothing wrong with Horizon”.

Bradshaw’s questioning at the public inquiry, which is now in its third year, had been delayed for months due to a failure by the Post Office to fully disclose documents relating to the scandal, some of which were pored over on Thursday.

The Post Office’s legal representative will be questioned on Friday after the chair of the inquiry, the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, raised the question of whether documents had been deliberately hidden.

In one apparently incriminating self-appraisal form seen by the public inquiry on Thursday, Bradshaw boasted of pushing for a post office operator who had made claims against Horizon to be charged with both accounting fraud and theft, as leniency “would give credence to the current campaign by former sub postmasters”.

Julian Blake, counsel for the inquiry, asked if this had been said to secure a bonus. Bradshaw said protecting the Post Office’s interest “may” have led to cash bonuses for him, but it “depends on who looks at the forms”, adding that his boast had been “flamboyant”.

He also conceded during questioning that he had signed a witness statement in 2012, which he had not written, in which he had testified to the court about his “absolute confidence” in the Horizon IT system, despite not being “technically minded”.

The statement had actually been drafted by external lawyers Cartwright King, with editing by the Post Office’s head of PR, Ronan Kelleher. “In hindsight … there probably should have been another line stating: ‘These are not my words’,” Bradshaw said …

The Post Office has been accused of maliciously prosecuting the workers even as evidence had mounted of the Horizon system’s faults, but Bradshaw denied claims submitted to the inquiry of “bullying” behaviour during the interviews he conducted with the accused under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

Jacqueline McDonald, who was sentenced in 2011 to 18 months’ imprisonment and handed a confiscation order for the sum of £99,759.60, accused Post Office investigators, including Bradshaw, of “behaving like mafia gangsters” in a witness statement.

The inquiry heard extracts of an interview Bradshaw conducted with McDonald. Bradshaw had asked her to tell him what happened to the money, to which she responded: “I don’t know where the money is, I’ve told you.” He had responded: “You have told me a pack of lies.”

Blake suggested it was language “you might see in [a] 1970s television detective show”.

Bradshaw responded that the interview had not been seen as “oppressive” by the defence when the case came to trial. He also denied telling McDonald that she was the only one using the Horizon system to suffer apparent shortages, an accusation made by 49 other operators of their Post Office interrogators.

“I refute the allegation that I am a liar,” Bradshaw told the inquiry, adding: “Ms Jacqueline McDonald is also incorrect in stating Post Office investigators behaved like mafia gangsters looking to collect their bounty with the threats and lies.”

Bradshaw was also accused by a Merseyside post office operator, Rita Threlfall, of asking her for the colour of her eyes and what jewellery she was wearing before saying “good, so we’ve got a description of you for when they come” during her interview under caution in August 2010.

Shazia Saddiq, who was wrongly accused of stealing £40,000 from the Post Office, claimed Bradshaw had hounded her and called her a “bitch” during a telephone call in 2016, “which I found extremely distressing”. Bradshaw said the claims were “completely untrue”.

It further emerged that Bradshaw had been asked in a separate case whether it was worth spending £2,500 to carry out a data trawl that could verify one of the accused’s claims about Horizon’s glitches. The extra work was not undertaken. Bradshaw said he could not explain the document trail. He denied acting unprofessionally.

The BBC had more on Ms Saddiq:

Extracts were read out from a statement by Shazia Saddiq, a former sub-postmistress originally from Newcastle, who used to run three Post Offices in the city.

“I have received … intimidating telephone calls from Stephen Bradshaw who began calling me before I knew he worked for the Post Office. He did not identify himself in his calls, he just made demands of me,” the statement read.

Recalling a date in 2016, Ms Saddiq, a single mother, said: “Stephen Bradshaw called me and I refused to speak to him because I did not know who he was or who he worked for.

“In that telephone call … he called me a bitch which I found extremely distressing.”

Mr Bradshaw called her claims “completely untrue”. He denied “hounding” her and insisted he would always say who he was on a phone call.

Ms Saddiq said she and her children – who lived above one of their Post Offices – were physically assaulted due to the false allegations.

“People chucked flour and eggs at us and after that, we fled and I’ve never been back. My daughter was eight and my son four, we left so quickly that all they packed were their teddies,” she told the BBC.

On January 21, The Sunday Times carried a report, ‘Post Office investigations team that refused to play by the rules’, about the Post Office Police:

The Postal Museum in Clerkenwell, central London, finds that the power for Royal Mail, the Post Office’s parent company until 2012, to investigate “crimes against the post” stretches back 335 years, making it the oldest criminal investigation force in the world.

The department’s Latin motto, Suaviter in Modo, Fortiter in Re, means “gentle in manner, resolute in deed” …

From the 1990s the investigation function was taken into a wider security department, with responsibility for other tasks.

It was included in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and had access to the Police National Computer system for intelligence and prosecution, allowing it to authorise “directed surveillance”.

The tactics employed by the Post Office investigators in the 2000s, however, recalled an earlier age of policing. A former investigator, who worked for HM Customs and Excise in the 1980s and 1990s, recalled a circular “offering us a promotion if we joined the POID”. The officer said: “A life investigating postmen stealing parcels did not appeal and no one applied.

“Certainly if they recruited ex-Met CID in the Eighties they would have known how the Met operated.”

The tactics and attitudes towards gathering information, including false confessions, heard by the inquiry may reflect those fears.

John Scott, former Post Office head of security, joined the police in 1984 as a uniformed officer. He became a detective sergeant before transferring to the POID in 1992.

Legal advice commissioned by the Post Office revealed that Scott, who played a key role in preparing cases, had ordered the “shredding” of emails and minutes. In response Scott said: “I have no recall from that period … but that is not me.”

Evidence of the old ways of policing were also evident in a racist investigations document, in which inspectors racially classified potential suspects, including “negroid types”, which was used until at least 2011 and possibly later …

Postmasters have told the inquiry they were bullied into confessing or pressured into being interviewed without legal representation. Nicki Arch, 29, a branch clerk, said she was pleased when the investigators came because she hoped they would find the cause of the £32,000 shortfall in her branch.

Instead, they drove her six miles down the road to Stroud, Gloucestershire, “because there was more space there”. Once inside she saw recording equipment and a locked door. She felt that she had been ambushed.

One of the two investigators told her he was ex-CID and knew “a liar and a thief” when he saw one. When Arch said she wanted to have someone there with her, such as a lawyer, he said she would only need someone if she was “worried or hiding something”. She agreed to being questioned alone.

The questioning went on for more than six hours without food or drink but Arch held firm and did not confess. She was charged with theft and fraud but was found not guilty by a jury at Bristol crown court.

Some Post Office investigators made wild claims in formal interviews as to where the cash had supposedly gone — holidays, “granny’s care bill”, a new car. One postmaster said an investigator had even asked if the cash had been diverted to the IRA.

Although some interviews were recorded, some postmasters claimed the Post Office refused to release the tapes to their legal team or they were lost entirely. Conversations that the police would usually conduct under strict conditions were done in unusual locations, including the passenger seat of the investigators’ car.

In her evidence to the inquiry, Gillian Blakey, whose postmaster husband, David, was convicted of false accounting, recalled: “They both sat in Paul Whitaker’s car and after he had told my husband that he was being charged, he looked over at my husband’s car and said ‘nice car’, or something similar. It was an accusation.”

Interviews were conducted like interrogations. A transcript of Blakey’s evidence revealed that Whitaker, a former postman, had said: “You know where the money’s gone because you’ve been taking it, haven’t you David?” Blakey replied: “God as my witness, no.” Blakey was convicted and received a nine-month suspended sentence. A union leader claimed the “interrogation” breached the Police and Criminal Evidence Act guidelines.

Whitaker was also involved in the case of Gillian Howard, with the same POID partner, Helen Dickinson, a team leader. Howard said: “I remember her arriving and telling us that she was the ‘Post Office police’.” She received a letter telling her she was being charged on the day of her daughter’s wedding. “I considered taking my own life,” she said.

Whitaker’s LinkedIn page, now deleted, said he works for the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the body that investigates complaints against officers.

Postmasters sometimes faced marked humiliation at the hands of the POID. Rita Threlfall, a former Liverpool postmistress who uses a wheelchair, told the inquiry she was still shaken by her interview experience and suffers “crippling anxiety and depression” due to the way in which [Bradshaw] treated her.

She said: “The interview room was up the stairs. I told them there was no way I could make it up the stairs. In order to make it to the interview room I was placed in a tiny parcel lift.” Bradshaw denied her claim, insisting that the building was “wheelchair accessible”.

In an email from 2015, Gary Thomas, a Post Office counter clerk before he became an investigator, wrote that the company was missing its profit targets because “we stopped getting £XX million from bloody good financial recoveries”. Explaining why he was pleased to receive the case files of Julian Wilson, who died before his wife, Karen, cleared his name in 2021, Thomas said: “Because I want to prove that there is FFFFiiinnn no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subpostmasters’ and that we were the best Investigators they ever had and they were all crooks!!”

The inquiry was told his team had a target to recover 40 per cent of the losses recorded and annual bonuses were dependent on the amounts of money recovered under the Proceeds of Crime Act. A document shown to the inquiry suggests they may have received a bonus based on the number of successful prosecutions …

His tone changed, however, after the convictions were quashed in 2021.

Thomas wrote to the Post Office chief executive about Wilson’s case: “This is just one case I struggle to sleep with at night … [The Post Office] made me 100 per cent believe that Horizon was correct.”

He added: “Whilst compensation is being correctly awarded now to these sub-postmasters, I feel the employees instructed to conduct these prosecutions, arrests and searches have been completely overlooked.

“I will await your response before taking further advice from my solicitor.”

Lawyers hesitant

Also on January 11, The Telegraph explored ‘Why Post Office investigators rejected Horizon review five years before witch-hunt ended’:

The Post Office chose not to investigate issues with its Horizon software five years before the witch-hunt ended over fears it would undermine prosecutions, documents reveal.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted by the organisation for false accounting, theft and fraud between 1999 and 2015.

However, internal emails show Post Office lawyers talked about investigating issues with the Horizon software as far back as 2010, but did not take action over fears it would undermine prosecutions.

It was eventually found that the software which flagged shortfalls was faulty.

The organisation’s head of criminal law stressed to colleagues the “consequences” of such a move would include pausing current and future prosecutions – an action which would attract “adverse publicity”.

Months later, an internal review commissioned by the Post Office stated that it was important to be “crystal clear” that any investigation launched into Horizon would “need to be disclosed in court”.

However, the Post Office did not divulge this information and continued to prosecute sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – including a sub-postmistress who was sentenced to 15 months in prison while pregnant.

Politicians branded the latest revelations as “dreadful” and accused the Post Office of “blocking justice”…

Emails disclosed to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry reveal how Rob Wilson, who joined the Post Office as head of criminal law in 2002, responded to “difficulties” regarding the Horizon system.

Mr Wilson wrote the email after not being invited to a conference call with colleagues about Horizon.

Responding to a memo from another colleague which suggested several actions which included “conducting full investigations into integrity issues”, Mr Wilson wrote on March 3, 2010: “If it is thought that there is a difficulty with Horizon then clearly the action set out in your memo is not only needed but is imperative.

“The consequence however will be that to commence or continue to proceed with any criminal proceedings will be inappropriate.”

Mr Wilson went on to say that “inevitably” defence solicitors for accused sub-postmasters would argue that any ongoing investigation would show the Post Office did “not have confidence” in Horizon and that to continue to prosecute would be “an abuse of the criminal process”.

He then suggested that proceedings for prosecutions could be paused pending an outcome, but added: “If this were to be adopted the resultant adverse publicity could lead to massive difficulties for POL as it would be seen by the press and media to vindicate the current challenges.”

Mr Wilson’s email was sent five months before pregnant sub-postmistress Seema Misra was sentenced to 15 months in prison after a false shortfall of £74,000 was recorded at her branch in West Byfleet, Surrey.

She later said: “It’s hard to say but I think that if I had not been pregnant, I would have killed myself.”

Her conviction was cleared at the Court of Appeal in 2021.

The bugs

The bugs in Horizon were well known from the start.

On January 13, The Guardian reported:

Horizon was the product of a flawed and sometimes clueless IT procurement system to which the British state has for decades been addicted. The system eventually procured – from an offshoot of ICL owned by the Japanese giant Fujitsu – was a sprawling, computer bug-filled monster.

The idea was to replace the paper-based accounting system in post offices. But the rollout, starting in 1999 – to 13,000 busy, non-technical subpostmasters – was hasty, and training was inadequate for the scale of the transformation in the workflows involved. Users rapidly discovered bugs and deficiencies in the system, but found that Post Office management manifested a semi-religious faith in the technology – which led to subpostmasters being prosecuted, having their lives ruined and in some cases killing themselves.

Horizon was an electronic point-of-sale system that replaced paper-based tills. It was also networked, theoretically enabling the Post Office to have an overall record of cashflow across the country. But from the beginning, as the Guardian’s Alex Hern has pointed out, it seems that the system was “simply not up to the tasks placed upon it”.

As early as 2001, a team led by one of the system’s developers had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced, but some examples surfaced in court proceedings. In one, the “Dalmellington Bug” (named after the Scottish town where a subpostmaster first fell prey to it), the screen would freeze as the operator was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed enter on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record – and the subpostmaster was then held responsible for the results. You can imagine the consequences.

The strangest part of the story is how long it took for the truth to dawn on the political system. Journalists had been doggedly telling the story of Horizon’s victims ever since Computer Weekly broke the story in 2009. Trade paper the Press Gazette reckons that the magazine has published about 350 storieson it since 2009, mostly by Karl Flinders. Seventy of these came before the end of 2018 and the rest followed after the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance brought a group action trial against the Post Office that year and a public inquiry began in 2020.

This appears to be part of a 2019 testimony about at least one of the bugs over a five-year period:

On January 16, The Telegraph reported that Fujitsu admitted to knowing about them:

A Fujitsu executive has admitted to MPs staff may have been aware of “bugs and errors” in the Horizon IT software before 2010.

Paul Patterson, Fujitsu’s Europe director, told the Business and Trade committee “Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice. We were involved from the very start.

“We did have bugs and errors in the system and we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of the sub-postmasters and for that we are truly sorry,” he says.

Asked whether staff knew there were bugs and glitches in the system before 2010, Mr Patterson initially said he didn’t know but later said “my gut feeling would be yes” when the question was repeated.

When asked if Fujitsu was an ethical company he said: “I believe we are an ethical company. The company today is very different to the company in the early 2000s.”

And yet, that same day, The Telegraph reported that another Fujitsu employee told the inquiry that Horizon data are still used in court proceedings:

Rajbinder Sangha was asked on Tuesday whether the controversial system still provides data used for prosecutions.

“Yes, I think it is,” said Ms Sangha, who is a former member of Horizon maker Fujitsu’s fraud and litigation support office …

Post Office and Fujitsu bosses are now facing accusations that they knew about the software’s problems but deliberately covered them up.

The Post Office stopped prosecuting its own staff in 2015 but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told The Telegraph that it continued with some postal prosecutions until as late as 2021.

Tuesday’s public inquiry hearing was shown internal messages sent by Gerald Barnes, a Fujitsu software developer, in 2008.

They recorded his concerns over “duplicate transactions” not being removed from Post Office electronic point of sale machines, and the potential for these to affect “a number of high-profile court cases in the pipeline”.

Two years later, Mr Barnes sent another message saying: “Our spreadsheets presented in court are liable to be brought into doubt if duplicate transactions are spotted” …

While the majority of these were brought privately by the Post Office, around 100 of them were pursued by the CPS …

The CPS is now identifying and writing to people it prosecuted based on Horizon data so that they can appeal against their convictions.

Technical essays

I won’t go into the detail of how Fujitsu workers were able to access subpostmasters’ accounts and make adjustments, but these three essays are worth reading, the first of which involves lawyers:

‘Where were the lawyers? 23 questions’ by Richard Moorehead

‘What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial’ at Bentham’s Gaze

‘How techies missed what’s wrong with Horizon, how that led to multiple deaths and what can we learn from it all?’ by Andras Gerlits

The damaged lives

On January 14, The Guardian traced the scandal all the way back to 1999, when the sainted Blair was Prime Minister:

… few early warnings could have been as prescient as a seven-page memo handed to a Post Office official 25 years ago.

During a fractious meeting at Newcastle rugby club in 1999, the note set out a litany of concerns from subpostmasters in the north-east of England who had been piloting the now infamous Horizon accounting system. The issues, including with balancing their accounts, were causing stress and forcing some to work well into the night.

Soon after those concerns were raised, subpostmasters gathered again to discuss the potential severity of the problems. “The difficulties and trauma being experienced by some subpostmasters were giving rise to concerns for their health and emotional wellbeing,” the meeting was told.

“It was felt by some that a tragedy was not far away if something was not altered soon. The software was considered to be poor quality and not intended to run such a huge network.”

The warning of a potential tragedy was made before the flawed software – subsequently found to be capable of producing erroneous losses that had been blamed on post office staff – had been rolled out across the Post Office network.

Yet from the moment of the fateful decision to press ahead, a ruinous cocktail of legal reforms, geopolitics, a crippling lack of political curiosity and – above all – apparent deceit ultimately led to thousands of innocent workers being victimised and prosecuted, with devastating effects.

This was the week that Westminster finally acknowledged that an unprecedented mass exoneration was needed to remedy 20 years or more of injustice – sadly too late for the dozens of wronged subpostmasters who have died, including at least four who have taken their own lives.

No one wanted to know:

During meetings with the Post Office, the focus was on cuts and budgets – unsurprisingly, “they never wanted to talk about the Horizon issue”, said one former minister.

Another former post office minister said: “You’ve got something as big as the Post Office saying: ‘No, no, no, no – it’s definitely stolen money.’ Then they’ve gone through a court of law and been convicted. Unless you’re sitting there going through all the court transcripts, you’re going to think: ‘It’s British justice. There must be something in it.’ It does take a hell of a lot of curiosity [to challenge that].”

Another post office minister said that they had become more concerned as time went on – not as a result of what their officials or the Post Office were saying, but by the trickle of letters from subpostmasters caught up in the crisis.

“These letters would be heart-rending and shocking,” they said. “There was absolutely no coordination between them. I’m sorry to say that the first few probably got the department-drafted response. And it wasn’t until I had a few that I started thinking that something’s wrong here.”

The ministers’ questions, however, led to the same reassurances from the Post Office that “there was no systemic problem”. Minister after minister accepted the Post Office’s line – together with an assumption that the British courts could not be getting things so wrong …

Richard Roll, who worked at Fujitsu and emerged as a key whistleblower, said the victims now needed compensation reflecting their ordeals. “A couple spent the last 20 years living in a mobile home because they lost everything – their business, their home. How can you repay that – £600,000 is not enough, is it? It’s just phenomenal. I don’t know what the solution is.”

The sudden peak of interest in the scandal has been welcomed by those who have been involved for years, but some are now urging attention on the stark unanswered questions, most notably focused on the Post Office and Fujitsu.

Speaking to the Observer, one figure involved in Horizon in its early days said there were clear issues left to resolve: “What exactly caused account balance mismatches to occur in some post office branches? Who was responsible for those errors occurring and who knew about them, but did nothing?”

Fujitsu said it is “fully committed to supporting the inquiry in order to understand what happened and to learn from it. Out of respect for the inquiry process, it would be inappropriate for Fujitsu to comment further at this time” …

It may be 25 years and counting, but the true facts around the extraordinary episode are still emerging.

One of the early victims was Lee Castleton from Yorkshire. Castleton’s character featured in the New Year’s ITV docudrama Mr Bates versus the Post Office.

On January 12, The Telegraph recounted his story, ‘Post Office emails say they pursued victim to High Court to “defend Horizon”‘:

Lee Castleton, 55, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2007 following the High Court case.

In 2004, he was accused of being responsible for a £26,000 shortfall in accounts at his branch in Bridlington, Yorks, and was suspended from work.

Subsequently, flaws in the Horizon IT system were uncovered, showing that it generated false accounting shortfalls for local Post Office branches, vindicating hundreds who had insisted on their innocence.

Mr Castleton, played by Will Mellor in the television drama, disputed the shortfall and said faults in the Horizon system, used for managing branch offices, were to blame for generating a fictional shortfall.

The Post Office launched a High Court case against him, telling the judge they wanted to recover a debt.

However, internal emails sent at the time show bosses wanted to “send a clear message” to staff about challenging the controversial IT system.

It comes after it was revealed the Post Office knew there were issues with the Horizon software as far back as 2010, but did not take action over fears it would undermine prosecutions …

Disclosed to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, the emails from Tom Beezer of the law firm Bond Pearce, who was acting on behalf of the post office, were sent to in-house lawyers.

They showed how the state-owned postal business was happy to run up a £321,000 legal bill against Mr Castleton, while the sub-postmaster spent his savings in the years-long court battle.

Mr Breezer wrote in the 2006 correspondence: “Accordingly the purpose of pursuing this claim now is not to make a net financial recovery, but to defend the Horizon system and hopefully send a clear message to other sub-postmasters that the P.O will take a firm line and to deter others from raising similar allegations.”

Mr Castleton was eventually ordered to pay £347,000 and as a result of the case had to close his shop.

His wife suffered stress-induced seizures and his children were forced to move schools after they were bullied …

Mr Castleton said: “They wanted me to sign a document that strictly made sure that Horizon was never to blame, and that I was mistaken.”

When asked if he signed it, Mr Castleton said: “No. Never. Not while I had breath in my body” …

Paul Marshall, the sub-postmaster’s barrister, said: “Lee’s case is a frankly stupefying instance of injustice and a terrible indictment of our civil justice system which totally failed him …”

A Post Office spokesman declined to comment, while a spokesman for law firm Womble Bond Dickinson, as Bond Pearce is known today, said it would be “inappropriate to comment” on Mr Beezer’s actions, adding: “However, it is important to restate that we have great sympathy for all those affected by Horizon’s failings.”

Fujitsu, whose expert witness Anne Chambers told the judge in Mr Castleton’s case that there was “no evidence whatsoever of any problem with the system”, declined to comment.

During his ordeal, Mr Castleton received highly unpleasant correspondence from Fujitsu:

A Fujitsu manager described sub-postmaster Lee Castleton as a “nasty chap” in an email shown at the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal.

The inquiry was shown a note sent from Peter Sewell to Andy Dunks in 2006 regarding sub-postmaster Lee Castleton. Mr Sewell was Mr Dunks’ manager at the time.

Mr Castleton was forced to declare bankruptcy after he was accused by the Post Office of stealing £25,000 from his branch in Bridlington, East Yorkshire.

The email read: “See you in Court then. Fetters Lane [City of London] is where they used to hang people out to dry. I don’t suppose that type of thing happens any more though.

“That Castleton is a nasty chap and will be all out to rubbish the FJ [Fujitsu] name, it’s up to you to maintain absolute strength and integrity no matter what the prosecution throw at you. We will all be behind you hoping you come through unscathed. Bless You.”

Barrister Julian Blake produced the email, shown for the first time, after asking Mr Sewell whether it was important to him to “protect the name of Fujitsu”.

He said: “I guess I did, but not purposely. Not purposely trying to protect Fujitsu’s name.”

Then there is Janet Skinner, put into a prison with hardened criminals. The Mail has her story:

She was among hundreds of Post Office employees wrongly branded thieves and fraudsters over apparent account shortfalls created by faulty computer system Horizon.

Now Janet Skinner, 52, from Hull, has spoken of her ordeal, having been falsely accused of stealing £60,000 from the Post Office she ran – resulting in the loss of her home and a stint in a drug-infested prison where she was forced to rubbed shoulders with child killers. 

The mother served three months of a nine-month sentence following a roundup of 230 former postmasters and postmistresses jailed in one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Britain’s recent history.

A four-part series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, has recently aired on ITV and focuses on the real-life story of accused postmaster Alan Bates, now 68, who was a key figure in bringing one of the scandal to the light.

Janet, whose testimony helped form the plot of the mini-series, hopes the big-money drama will reveal the true human impact of the Horizon scandal on staff. 

The former postmistress was sent to prison in 2007 over an alleged £59,000 shortfall at her post office in Hull, before she was released three months later on an electronic tag and her conviction eventually repealed in April 2021. 

Janet claims the scandal has ruined her life, as she is now disabled and reliant on benefits due to her finances being crushed in the wake of the wrongful fraud accusation. 

Recounting her story to The Sun, she explained that she was working as a postmistress in Bransholme when Horizon was introduced by the Post Office and Royal Mail.

Already suspicious that the flawed supercomputer was making mistakes and identifying apparent anomalies in cash passing over the counter, Janet had started to use her own written ledger system. 

But, when bosses accused her of stealing in 2006, she had her keys revoked, was suspended from her branch and was eventually taken to Hull crown court accused of false accounting and theft.

Skinner felt she could trust the advice of her lawyer Karl Turner, who is now a sitting Labour MP. He told her to plea guilty and she would escape jail. Turner was wrong:

She revealed that her lawyer, Karl Turner, now a Labour MP in Hull, advised her to plead guilty in a bid to avoid jailtime.

She said: ‘It was against everything I knew was true, but I followed the advice. That was a terrible mistake.’

Standing in the dock at Hull crown court the following year, Janet, who was 35 at the time, was sentenced to nine months in prison. 

Within hours, the mother was transported to one of Britain’s toughest prisons – New Hall prison in Wakefield, Yorks – where Rose West, wife of late serial killer Fred West, is a current inmate.

Janet described how, for the first couple of weeks, she went into shock, and is unable to recall what her experience was like upon settling in …

She was then moved to another women’s prison, Drake Hall, in Staffordshire, after several weeks, where she admitted to having to begin getting used to her new ‘tough’ environment. 

The former Post Office employee said that although she was reminded of her so-called crimes by unbeknown fellow inmates, a sympathetic prison officer professed that Janet should not have been locked up. 

In April 2007, Janet was released – but her humiliation and ordeal were far from over, having been instructed to wear an ankle monitor and abide by a 6pm to 7am curfew for the remainder of her sentence. 

In less than a year, Janet’s situation took a twisted turn when she found herself back in the dock and facing a five year stretch for failing to repay ‘proceeds of crime.’

The defeated mother had been left with no money, no house and no income, however, eventually, the charges were set aside.

Soon the Horizon scandal started to unravel, with dozens of convicted and jailed ex-Post Office staff brought to justice by a campaign led by Alan Bates.

After years of campaigning, some 86 of them, including Janet, had convictions quashed …

However, the strangest of the stories might be that of Robin Garbutt, who has been in prison for 12 years, accused of the murder of his wife Diana, with whom he ran a Post Office in North Yorkshire. On January 12, The Telegraph featured ‘”Innocent” postmaster convicted of wife’s murder “using Horizon evidence” from Post Office’:

Robin Garbutt is either a cold-blooded murderer, rightly languishing in jail for battering his wife to death and then inventing a robbery at their Post Office to cover it up.

Or else he is the victim of the greatest miscarriage of justice yet perpetrated by the Post Office’s defective Horizon IT system.

Garbutt, 57, has spent the last 12 years in jail after being convicted in 2011 of the murder of his wife Diana, 40, at their home above the Post Office they ran together in the pretty village of Melsonby in North Yorkshire.

He protests his innocence and claims that the Post Office produced evidence against him – drawing on the Horizon IT system – to show that he was stealing money to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Without the Post Office’s analysis of the Horizon evidence, claim Garbutt’s supporters, then a huge chunk of the motive for the murder – and the manner in which it was staged – disappears too.

Garbutt has taken his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) three times in an attempt to force a retrial.

Three times they have kicked it into touch, most recently in November last year when the CCRC concluded that “figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his conviction for murder”.

But the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has lit a fresh fire under the Horizon scandal and given Garbutt, his lawyers and supporters renewed hope that his conviction could yet be overturned.

The Crown case (Sir Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions at the time, while the village sits in Rishi Sunak’s constituency) was that Garbutt had killed his wife, who was the postmistress, in March 2010 over suspicions she was having an affair and fears that his theft of thousands of pounds of Post Office money was about to be discovered.

Post Office investigators, who it is understood had been involved in the unsafe convictions of sub-postmasters for fraud and theft, gave evidence against Garbutt.

Mr Justice Openshaw, in his summing up to the jury at the time, said: “It is the case for the prosecution that money was being stolen from the Post Office and that the theft was concealed by a series of false declarations as to the amount of money in the safe.”

Appeal documents, seen by The Telegraph, show that Horizon data was used to show a “pattern of fraud”.

Garbutt’s claim that he had been robbed at gunpoint and that his wife had been battered to death by a second assailant was rejected by a jury on a 10-2 majority.

Garbutt has his defenders, including his brother-in-law:

Dr Michael Naughton, a law academic at Bristol University who runs the campaign website CCRC Watch and has studied the case, said: “The prosecution used the Horizon evidence to support its claim that the motive for the murder was that Robin Garbutt was stealing money from the Post Office side of the business and he needed to kill his wife to cover it up.

“Horizon was used to show he was defrauding the Post Office. I don’t know if Robin Garbutt did or did not kill his wife, but I do know that the evidence that led to his conviction is no longer reliable and every aspect has been discredited.”

Mark Stilborn, Garbutt’s brother-in-law, said on Friday: “The prosecution said there was a shortfall which gave him a motive to stage the robbery. They said Diana was doing the accounts and she found out and that is why he killed her.”

But in the light of the Horizon scandal, he said the evidence given by Post Office investigators may never have been put to the jury – or at least would have been vigorously challenged – removing a key motive for the murder.

“I am 100 per cent sure Robin is innocent,” said Mr Stilborn. “Everybody who knows Robin knows he is innocent. Robin is the nicest person you will ever meet” …

The prosecution alleged Diana was killed in the middle of the night – rather than at 8.30am at the time of the robbery – and that her husband then opened the Post Office as normal and served dozens of customers. But the forensics report giving the time of death is now hotly disputed while not a single customer served that morning noticed anything strange about his demeanour.

For now, Garbutt remains in jail, still protesting his innocence. He was sentenced to life and ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years in jail. “He struck three savage blows, smashing her skull and causing her immediate death as clearly he intended,” said the trial judge, adding: “This was a brutal, planned, cold-blooded murder of his wife as she lay sleeping in bed.”

A CCRC statement issued in November 2022 on its refusal to refer the case said: “Much of Mr Garbutt’s application to the CCRC focused on the Post Office Horizon scandal, which has led to several fraud and theft convictions of former Post Office workers being overturned, many after referral by the CCRC. The CCRC decided that this argument could not assist Mr Garbutt, as figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his conviction for murder.”

But the CCRC is itself under fire. It has been slow to process appeals against convictions by the hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office …

He may or may not be a victim of the Horizon scandal but campaigners say only a retrial will get to the truth.

On the more ordinary end of the spectrum were subpostmasters who looked forward to retiring in their jobs.

On January 9, The Telegraph carried the stories of Ian Warren and Peter Holmes:

An elderly former sub-postmaster who says his life was ruined by the Post Office scandal has urged the Government to “get cracking” with compensation as victims are “getting older”.

Ian Warren, 75, was wrongly convicted of stealing £18,000 from his village post office in Essex in 2008.

His conviction, which landed him with a nine-month suspended prison sentence, was overturned in 2021, but he has yet to receive a full settlement.

Mr Warren believes the stress caused by the ordeal contributed to his wife’s early-onset dementia, which he says has left him “completely heartbroken”.

He also partly blames it for his diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2014, which left him needing chemotherapy.

Writing in his witness statement to the official inquiry, he said: “I think that the stress of the Post Office scandal has probably contributed to my outcome.”

Calling on the Government to speed up its compensation to victims, Mr Warren said: “Be true to your word, and get independent mediators in to assess levels of compensation” …

Mr Warren’s income was also sorely affected by the scandal, as he had planned on running the branch until his retirement at 70.

He was a chartered accountant before he became a postmaster, but was never able to practice again after his criminal conviction.

“Families were destroyed over this,” he said …

Peter Holmes had been the manager of the post office branch in Jesmond, Newcastle, for 13 years before he was accused of stealing and sacked.

Post Office officials claimed there was a £46,000 shortfall in his accounts, but the former policeman and father-of-three blamed an error in the Fujitsu-developed Horizon accounting system.

He was offered a plea bargain by the Post Office, which said it would drop a charge of theft for the money that was allegedly missing in exchange for him pleading guilty to four counts of false accounting.

In 2009, aged 67 and diabetic, “there was no way he wanted to go to jail, so he said yes he would take that,” his wife, Marion Holmes, said.

He had to wear an ankle monitor for three months and was restricted to a curfew at home from 7pm to 9am each day.

Mr Holmes died in October 2015 from a sudden brain tumour. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing in April 2021.

Mrs Holmes, 78, said: “It affected Peter more looking back, all he had to do really was sit in the house, watch television or sit on the computer. He had nothing else to do, his passion was driving, which he couldn’t do because we had no money for petrol …

She added: “I would like everybody to get what they deserve, the bad as well as the good. A lot of people have to pay the consequences for this. They have got away with it for too long.”

In Northern Ireland, a subpostmistress suffered a ruptured thyroid because of the stress of being investigated:

Maureen McKelvey, a sub-postmistress who reported £30,000 shortfalls in the Horizon system, was found not guilty after a five year investigation.

Ms McKelvey required major thyroid surgery following extreme stress onset by the ordeal.

Suzanne Winter, who was involved in an investigation into Ms McKelvey, is currently being questioned.

Ms Winter also investigated Mr McLaughlin, a former sub-postmaster, who had a fraud conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2022.

He has previously said the Post Office had “done everything in their power” to cover up the scandal which had taken up 20 years of his life.

Meanwhile, north of the border in Scotland, the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, claims that not every Horizon case was one of a miscarriage of justice. On January 17, The Times reported:

Dorothy Bain KC, the lord advocate, said that “not every case involving Horizon evidence will be a miscarriage of justice” and stressed the importance of the courts in reversing previous prosecutions.

Her position, set out to MSPs on Tuesday, is at odds with the first minister’s promise last week to mirror the UK government’s plan to exonerate every person who was convicted using evidence linked to the faulty Horizon computer system.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted across the UK after falsely being accused of embezzling money because of flaws in Horizon. Bain said that 54 people might have been wrongly convicted in Scotland, which she said had been reduced from about 100 cases linked to Horizon.

In a statement to Holyrood, she stressed the importance of the “established route of appeal” through the courts system.

“This is an important process because not every case involving Horizon evidence will be a miscarriage of justice and each case must be considered carefully and with regard to the law,” she said.

“It is also important to recognise the important and established constitutional role of our appeal court in Scotland and that due process must be followed.”

Her statement was in marked contrast to the tone struck by [SNP First Minister Humza] Yousaf, who, in a letter last week to Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said that his ministers were “keen to work with the UK government to deal with the impact on sub-postmasters convicted in Scotland, ensuring that a UK-wide approach is taken to exonerate those wrongfully convicted in Scottish courts” …

Bain apologised to those prosecuted in the Horizon scandal who were “failed” by the justice system as she attempted to shift most of the blame from the Crown Office, which oversees all prosecutions in Scotland, to the Post Office, which has powers of prosecution in England …

Bain’s statement came as the UK boss of Fujitsu, the IT company behind the Post Office’s faulty computer system, apologised to postmasters and admitted it had a “moral obligation” to pay victims compensation.

Conclusion

What started out as promising news in 2021 — the beginning of the public inquiry — seems to be nosediving into a complicated weft that appears to be as indecipherable as the Horizon software itself.

Former Post Office Chairman Tim Parker was accused of a potential conflict of interest as he was the Chairman of the then-Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service at the same time.

On January 18, a barrister apologised for having accepted expert evidence from the Post Office on the Horizon system in good faith. Meanwhile, police investigations continue — and not into subpostmasters, thankfully.

Unfortunately, the Post Office has been slow to return subpostmasters’ paperwork so that they can make detailed compensation claims.

One subpostmaster has thrown in the towel, even though the Post Office has compensated him for shortfalls. Graham Livesey says, ‘I can’t be in league with the devil’.

And few will be surprised to learn that the hero of this story, Alan Bates, has hit out at the ‘madness’ of the compensation scheme delays.

End of series — until there is a final resolution (sometime later this year)