The Post Office scandal must be the biggest miscarriage of justice that anyone can remember. True, some people who were wrongly convicted in the 1970s – the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, for example – spent longer in prison than the 86 subpostmasters who have been cleared so far. Further back, innocent people were sometimes hanged – as Timothy Evans was in 1950 for a murder that could only have been committed by his neighbour John Christie.
But it is the sheer scale of the Post Office scandal that makes it unique. ‘Many hundreds of people suffered disastrous consequences,’ said Sir Wyn Williams this week, ‘and thousands more suffered very significantly.’
Williams is chairing a statutory inquiry into the failings of the Post Office’s Horizon IT system. Any computer program may have bugs and coding errors. But the Post Office insisted that its point-of-sale system could do no wrong. If ever it recorded a shortfall, then subpostmasters must have had their hands in the till. They were coerced into making ‘repayments’; sacked; bankrupted; and, over a 14-year period, some 700 were prosecuted by the Post Office itself. But Horizon was deeply flawed.
That led to a group claim against the Post Office by 555 subpostmasters. Though vigorously defended at first, it was eventually settled. Ministers agreed to set up a public inquiry.
Before going any further, I should explain that the Post Office does not deliver letters. That is the job of Royal Mail, founded by Henry VIII and sold off in 2015. The Post Office is a nationwide, state-owned network of branches offering a range of postal, government and financial services. Many post offices are run as businesses by subpostmasters – self-employed men and women who have long played a pivotal role in their local communities.
As chair of the public inquiry, Williams has shown a deeply personal commitment to doing justice. He acknowledged in an interim report on compensation this week that his terms of reference mention just one of the three payment schemes that are now running in parallel. But even though this might be seen as peripheral to his statutory inquiry, Williams is insisting that ministers and Post Office executives make good on repeated promises that there will be ‘full and fair’ compensation for all with a legitimate claim.
The retired High Court judge has now made a number of formal recommendations to the government. One is designed to ensure that claimants are not put under pressure to settle their claims before an ‘artificial’ cut-off date next summer. He also wants assurances that claimants will not be taxed unfairly.
Earlier this month, his inquiry team discovered that the Post Office had not handed over documents he had requested. This emerged by chance after campaigner Eleanor Shaikh made a freedom-of-information request relating to past investigations by Post Office security staff.
One of the documents disclosed to her in May required investigators to add racist and offensive identity codes to suspects they processed. Sheikh passed the document to journalist Nick Wallis, who established that it had been in use as recently as 2011.
When Wallis broke the story a few days later, the inquiry team immediately realised that this was a document they had never seen. It did not come up in our searches, the Post Office claimed. In oral evidence on 4 July, its general counsel apologised and promised to ‘remediate the issues’ – meaning they would search again.
Late the following evening, the Post Office told the inquiry team it had now identified more than 4,700 new documents that might be relevant to a key witness who was to be questioned less than 12 hours later. Gareth Jenkins, who worked as a software engineer for the company that supplied Horizon, is under investigation by the police. Unusually, he has agreed that what he says to the inquiry can be used in any criminal proceedings that may be brought against him. As a result of the late disclosure, though, his oral evidence had to be postponed.
Normally, a public body can be trusted to obey the law. But we can now see how the Post Office has squandered that trust. Williams said he was keeping an open mind on whether its non-disclosure was deliberate. In future, though, all requests for documents or information will be made under his statutory powers. Failure to comply without reasonable excuse is a criminal offence.
Subpostmasters and their supporters hope that those responsible for the scandal will eventually face more serious charges. Later this year, Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, will ask lawyers who acted for the Post Office when they knew that things were going wrong and what they should have done to put them right.
However uncomfortable they may find the witness box, it is not as painful as sitting in the dock.
joshua@rozenberg.net
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