Public Inquiry into the Post Office scandal.

Archibald Knox

Archibald Knox

Well-known member
I am surprised we have not yet had a thread on the Post Office scandal.
It’s being described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in many decades.
www.theguardian.com

Wrongly convicted Post Office workers say former bosses should face jail

Victims of scandal give evidence on second day of inquiry into human impact of Horizon IT system failings
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

There were dozens of senior people in the Royal Mail, such as the CEO, board directors, senior managers and PO investigators (who have powers similar to the police) who conspired to maliciously prosecute innocent subpostmasters for theft, even when they knew the evidence was corrupt and the charges false because the Horizon IT system was the cause.

I wonder if they will eventually be tracked down and charged for their misdeeds? Such as those who decided on prosecution and those who lied on oath in the witness box? What the hell were the various Postmasters General in the different governments doing?

So far, the Post Office elite seem only to have been given large bonuses, pensions and gongs like the CBE given to ex-CEO Vennells in 2019 ! While the innocent (over 740) were sent to jail, had all their assets seized, lost homes, livelihoods and reputations and in 4 documented cases committed suicide.

This is what really embarrasses this country. Corruption and incompetence hand in hand.
 
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Bliar was PM when this started and did nowt to get to the bottom of it.Useless Labour twunt.
 
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Catastrophic for many people’s lives. The greedy miscreants at the top of the Post Office should be on trial.
This is not a party political issue, it is a result of privatisation which both Tories and Labour (through PFI) promoted.
 
It is/was truly shocking.

These people had their lives and reputations destroyed and the frustration and injustice of knowing you were always honest must have been awful coupled with knowing that nobody was listening.

Yes, there needs to be some accountability for this.
 
This has now been going on several years since evidence in the first appeal showed faults with Horizon. I cannot for the life of me understand how all convictions based on Horizon have not been overturned or pardoned. Those poor, hard working people putting their own money on the line to run a business, were both cheated and criminalised.

As for those at the top being held accountable, we all know the likelihood of that. There is no justice in the UK.
 
Paula Vennells, the Post Office CEO while most prosecutions happened, was handed a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office, given the prestigious job of Imperial College CEO the same year while also being promoted to the Cabinet Office.

Tim Parker, the chairman who aggressively sued the postmasters, has decided to retire at 66 worth 250 million with no legal case against him days before the inquiry began.

This is how the world works, justice and democracy are a myth, keep voting though kids.
 
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Its absolutely ruined so many people and for the rest of their lives. There has to be proper justice and not an inquiry when most of the protagonists are dead or too long after the event . I am not normally one for retribution but I make an exception in this case. Vennells should do bird in a Cat A prison for several years and see how she likes the consequences of her incompetency and inept management. I fear she will live a life of luxury holidays and restaurants and does not deserve that.
 
Fujitsu were the IT supplier at the time. Large scale IT projects were a bit wild west back then. The boom of the Internet and sudden unbounded ambition for large scale projects led to a lot of disasters as nobody had the benefit mature development practices we now use today.

I remember being on a project around that time which had about 10,000 bugs needing to be fixed before it went live. Today, things are done differently which eliminates errors earlier in the development lifecycle so less chance of similar failures of old making it into a live system.
 
BigHandsOliverKahn said:
Fujitsu were the IT supplier at the time. Large scale IT projects were a bit wild west back then. The boom of the Internet and sudden unbounded ambition for large scale projects led to a lot of disasters as nobody had the benefit mature development practices we now use today.

I remember being on a project around that time which had about 10,000 bugs needing to be fixed before it went live. Today, things are done differently which eliminates errors earlier in the development lifecycle so less chance of similar failures of old making it into a live system.
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I admire your optimism of the shiny new way of working but Horizon wasn't the first and won't be the last.
 
I listened to this subject on radio 2 a couple of months ago. I was shocked to the core, there were victims who were ringing in and whilst telling their story breaking down. It was heart breaking stuff.
 
And the ones at the top get to hide away in their mansions stroking their Knighthoods for services to persecuting the innocent.
 
electric_eel said:
I admire your optimism of the shiny new way of working but Horizon wasn't the first and won't be the last.
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You don't get systems going live with thousands of bugs anymore like that. There will always be a fair few bugs but not in their thousands anymore. Test driven development, code coverage test tools, automated testing and countless other things have vastly improved the finished products compared to back then when things just got written once and only, hopefully, manually tested.
 
BigHandsOliverKahn said:
You don't get systems going live with thousands of bugs anymore like that. There will always be a fair few bugs but not in their thousands anymore. Test driven development, code coverage test tools, automated testing and countless other things have vastly improved the finished products compared to back then when things just got written once and only, hopefully, manually tested.
Click to expand...

That sort of highlights my point. The issue with the Horizon scandal was that they claimed the system was infallible so therefore the accounting discrepancies must be down to fraud. Don't know the detail of the Horizon failure but I think they mentioned two significant bugs - that's all it takes.
 
I really feel for these people, especially the poor guy who spent 3 years in jail.
The PO should give him £1M, although that wouldn't help the health problems he is left with.
As an ex P.O. worker, as was my Dad and my sister, I am appalled by this.
Forgot, I met my first wife when she worked at Marton P.O.😞
 
This gets even worse, with revelations daily in the Public Inquiry...
www.theguardian.com

Falsely convicted postal workers must be ‘fully compensated’, says committee

MPs raise concerns over lengthy amount of time taken for payout to wrongly accused former Post Office workers
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

A group of 555 former workers won a high court battle against the Post Office in December 2019. The group of 555 who brought the legal action were awarded £57.75m, but the vast majority (£46m) was swallowed up in legal costs, leaving only about £20,000 in compensation for each person, which MPs said the victims view as “inadequate”.

At the time of the high court verdict, the government decided this group could not apply for compensation through another scheme, known as the historical shortfall scheme (HSS). The MPs condemned how this had led to the “perverse situation” that workers who were part of the legal action faced receiving less compensation than others. “There is no valid reason to exclude the 555 from being fully compensated and the chancellor must come forward with the required funding now.”
 
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Archibald Knox said:
I am surprised we have not yet had a thread on the Post Office scandal.
It’s being described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in many decades.
www.theguardian.com

Wrongly convicted Post Office workers say former bosses should face jail

Victims of scandal give evidence on second day of inquiry into human impact of Horizon IT system failings
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

There were dozens of senior people in the Royal Mail, such as the CEO, board directors, senior managers and PO investigators (who have powers similar to the police) who conspired to maliciously prosecute innocent subpostmasters for theft, even when they knew the evidence was corrupt and the charges false because the Horizon IT system was the cause.

I wonder if they will eventually be tracked down and charged for their misdeeds? Such as those who decided on prosecution and those who lied on oath in the witness box? What the hell were the various Postmasters General in the different governments doing?

So far, the Post Office elite seem only to have been given large bonuses, pensions and gongs like the CBE given to ex-CEO Vennells in 2019 ! While the innocent (over 740) were sent to jail, had all their assets seized, lost homes, livelihoods and reputations and in 4 documented cases committed suicide.

This is what really embarrasses this country. Corruption and incompetence hand in hand.
Click to expand...
I was following this story for a while in Private Eye magazine. It’s truly appalling how so many senior figures appeared to know about problems with the software for so long yet let innocent people go to prison and see families destroyed so they could cover their own arses.

Vennells ought to be ashamed. More concerning is that allegedly people within Fujitsu who reported the glitches were told to keep schtumm 😡
 
Vennells and those senior figures must be prosecuted. That is definitely in the national interest. Let’s see how they like their next few years being hounded by the CPS with the prospect of huge legal costs and possibly jail time eventually, just like the innocent subpostmasters.
 
electric_eel said:
That sort of highlights my point. The issue with the Horizon scandal was that they claimed the system was infallible so therefore the accounting discrepancies must be down to fraud. Don't know the detail of the Horizon failure but I think they mentioned two significant bugs - that's all it takes.
Click to expand...
Yes, I have read that one example was that the Horizon system did not record the receipt of payments for car tax discs. So although they recorded the issue of tax discs there was no balancing payment though they had been paid for. So the PO senior management decided that 736 subpostmasters must have all have simultaneously decided to steal the tax disc payments starting exactly one week after the Horizon system was installed.
 
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I think one of the worst aspects was that the PO investigators (with police powers) had been instructed by PO management to tell each subpostmaster investigated that theirs was a unique case, no-one else had the problem, in order to bully them into pleading guilty to false accounting charges. This surely has to be criminal deception.

It might appear that the subpostmasters were not unionised. If they had been, a trade union would have recognised that there was a widespread problem from all the requests for help and could have told each victim that they were not alone and that the Union would coordinate the fight. This case shows that workers can realistically only hold corrupt management to account by collective action, as individually they were picked off and victimised.
 
Lytham_fy8 said:
Paula Vennells, the Post Office CEO while most prosecutions happened, was handed a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office, given the prestigious job of Imperial College CEO the same year while also being promoted to the Cabinet Office.
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CEO of Imperial College Healthcare Trust not the University.
 
Archibald Knox said:
I think one of the worst aspects was that the PO investigators (with police powers) had been instructed by PO management to tell each subpostmaster investigated that theirs was a unique case, no-one else had the problem, in order to bully them into pleading guilty to false accounting charges. This surely has to be criminal deception.

It might appear that the subpostmasters were not unionised. If they had been, a trade union would have recognised that there was a widespread problem from all the requests for help and could have told each victim that they were not alone and that the Union would coordinate the fight. This case shows that workers can realistically only hold corrupt management to account by collective action, as individually they were picked off and victimised.
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Don't the CPS also have some questions to answer?
 
Lytham_fy8 said:
Don't the CPS also have some questions to answer?
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Actually no, the CPS does not. The Post Office launched their persecution of all the subpostmasters as private prosecutions. But the court system and government does in allowing these to proceed, as the Post Office has special legal status as an organisation, almost quasi-CPS.
en.m.wikipedia.org

British Post Office scandal - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
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