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Journalism of Courage
Hundreds of British postal workers, wrongly convicted in “one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history”, will soon have their convictions overturned after a TV docudrama triggered a public outcry in the country.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday (January 11) said he will introduce measures to reverse the convictions of more than 900 subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted of theft and fraud due to a faulty computer system.
“People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation,” Sunak said.
Here is all you need to know about the scandal — and how a TV show might finally bring justice to its victims.
In 1999, the state-owned Post Office rolled out the Horizon IT system, developed by Japanese company Fujitsu, to automate sales accounting.
Soon, however, subpostmasters in charge of local post offices began finding unexplained losses in their accounts — losses that they were responsible to cover. The Post Office stood behind its new IT system and pointed fingers at its employees instead.
Thus, between 2000 and 2014, more than 900 Post Office workers were wrongly accused of fraud and false accounting and had their contracts terminated. Some were convicted and imprisoned, while others were forced into bankruptcy.
“In total, over 2,000 people were affected by the scandal. Some committed suicide or attempted it. Others said their marriages fell apart and reported becoming community pariahs,” The Associated Press reported.
In 2009, a magazine called Computer Weekly reported alleged flaws with Horizon, alongside the postmaster prosecutions.
This prompted the Post Office to investigate, but in 2015, Paula Vennells, CEO of the Post Office, told a parliamentary committee that there had been no evidence of any miscarriage of justice.
In 2016, a group of wronged postal workers took legal action against the Post Office. The High Court in London, in 2019, would rule in favour of the workers, saying that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects”, and that the Post Office “knew that there were serious issues about the reliability” of the system. However, to date, just 95 convictions have been overturned.
Things came to a head after a TV docudrama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, aired on ITV on January 1. It told the story of branch manager Alan Bates (played by Toby Jones), who spent nearly two decades trying to expose the scandal and exonerate his peers. It also cast a shadow on many politicians and senior executives who turned a blind eye to the victims’ plight.
The British public was outraged, and demanded justice. After about a week of harsh headlines and unprecedented media and public attention on the issue, the government decided to act. The police, last week, opened an investigation into the prosecutions carried out by the Post Office.
Prime Minister Sunak has now gone one step further, announcing new legislation which would overturn the conviction as well as a massive compensation package which will give each person wrongly accused a sum of GBP 75,000. A total of GBP 1 billion has been set aside for compensations, the government stated.
Some legal experts, however, have warned that legislating to quash convictions is unprecedented in Britain, and could open the doors for future political interference into the judicial process.
Under immense public pressure, Paula Vennells said on Tuesday that she will relinquish her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) title, one of the highest honours conferred by the British government.
While overturning unjust convictions will be a major step towards justice, many feel that charges should be brought against people who were aware of the software problems and still allowed the prosecutions to go forward. No senior Post Office official has been punished, till date.
“Will the government accelerate the investigations to convict those who are really guilty of causing this scandal by perverting the course of justice?” MP David Davis (Cons) told The AP.
Currently, an independent public inquiry led by a former high court judge is gathering evidence from postal workers, the government, the Post Office, Fujitsu and others. This is in addition to the previously-mentioned Police investigation into fraud offences arising from wrongful prosecutions.
Then there is also the question of what happened to the money that went “missing”. “One question that has never been answered is just how much money was taken unlawfully from thousands of innocent men and women,” MP Duncan Baker told The AP. “The Post Office took that money, we have never known that figure,” he said.
(With inputs from Reuters, The AP)
