Last night I watched the ITV drama documentary on the Post Office Horizon scandal. It was a rather long-winded presentation of the miscarriage of justice that arose from a defective computer system installed in sub-post offices. People were convicted and sent to prison on false evidence that they had stolen money. Many lost their livelihoods, were made bankrupt and lost their homes. Post Office management avoided accepting responsibility or failed to disclose all the facts until a legal case led by Alan Bates (see the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance web site) enabled full disclosure.
The IT system was developed by Fujitsu and I ought to now declare that I was on the payroll of ICL Fujitsu in the 1970s for work on the VAT system, a more successful contract, but I never had any contact with the Horizon project.
One of the key revelations was that although sub-postmasters were responsible under their contracts for any losses, Post Office staff could manually “correct” transactions without the knowledge of the sub-postmasters by remotely accessing the branch records.
What are the lessons to be learned from this case? There are several:
- Never sign a contract without reading the small print and understanding it fully. Clearly many postmasters did and the contracts they signed were in essence one-sided and unfair.
- Never trust big organisations to treat you fairly. The Post Office was so keen to protect their brand reputation that management hid all the bad news.
- The English legal system may ultimately provide justice but at enormous expense. The legal fight went on for years and is still on-going with litigation funding being used to finance the case. Justice was poorly served in essence and the legal battles were quite one-sided in terms of funding. The Post Office, despite being Government owned, used every tactic to defeat the complaints of those wrongly targeted as a result of a defective computer system. The legal system needs reform to reduce costs and enable justice to be pursued without needing someone like Alan Bates to dedicate his life to it.
The Post Office should have admitted the problems with the Horizon system much earlier and compensation should be comprehensive. It was a gross miscarriage of justice and also reflected poorly on the professionalism of the IT world that such a defective computer system could be developed without adequate testing and controls.
Roger Lawson (Twitter https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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