The Post Office scandal: bugs, lies and a ruthless cover-up
When Lee Castleton started to notice anomalies in the computerised accounts of his sub-post office in Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 2003, he got in touch with a helpline for users of the Horizon system, said The Guardian. He rang it 91 times, but much good it did him. The Post Office insisted he must be responsible for the shortfalls, and when he refused to accept liability for them, it took him to court. He couldn’t afford a lawyer, and ended up being ordered to repay the supposedly missing £26,000, plus the Post Office’s costs. The bill came to £321,000; it bankrupted him. Thanks to the inquiry into the scandal, we now know that the Post Office had been aware that he’d not be able to pay costs. But it had run up its vast legal fees regardless, because it wanted to send a warning to anyone else who might try to challenge the reliability of its IT system.
As it pursued 983 sub-postmasters over the next 16 years, the Post Office continued to insist that Horizon was “robust”, and that individual accounts could not be accessed remotely. These assertions were central to the success of its prosecutions, but neither was true. In fact, serious concerns about Horizon’s reliability had been raised even before it launched, said Tom Witherow in The Times. The British firm ICL – which had been acquired by Fujitsu – had won the tender to build the system in 1996; at the time, it was “the largest non-military IT project in the world”. When he came to office, Tony Blair was told that trials of the software had revealed scores of problems. He could have cancelled the £1bn procurement contract – but Fujitsu (see page 35) was “lobbying hard”. Japan’s ambassador warned No. 10 that to back out would have “profound implications for jobs in the UK, and bilateral ties”. The deal went ahead, but the “spectre of bugs had not been left behind”, and before long they were ruining lives.
This scandal should serve as a wake-up call about the level of trust we place in technology, said Harold Thimbleby in The Spectator. Our lives are increasingly dictated by decisions made by computers – and in England and Wales, the legal presumption is that they’re right. It makes “a bit of sense”: if computer evidence was not presumed to be reliable unless proven otherwise, there’d be chaos in the courts. But it neglects the fact that these computers are programmed by humans who may be incompetent, and not even know it. We see the consequences of botched IT time and again, said Charles Arthur in The Independent: from customers of the energy firm EDF suddenly getting bills for £39,000 late last year, to an Australian government system that wrongly concluded that benefits recipients were being overpaid, and issued demands for a total of £385m in repayments. But as the Post Office scandal has shown, bad programming is only one half of the problem. Bugs can be fixed – but for commercial reasons, they may not be. This leads to the second half: the “lying cover-up” to protect the company and its profits, its commercial partners, and the reputations of its executives. In court, the sub-postmasters could have rebutted the presumption that Horizon’s figures were correct – had they been given access to the system’s internal “error logs”. But the Post Office’s lawyers failed to disclose these logs.
At the inquiry last week, we got a sense of the ruthless tactics the Post Office used to “break” its victims, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. On the stand was one of its investigators, Stephen Bradshaw, who was financially incentivised to persuade subpostmasters to confess to false accounting, and agree to pay the supposedly missing sums. He is said to have interrogated them like a “mafia gangster”. One victim says he phoned her 60 times in a day, and called her “a bitch”. But the most shocking part of his testimony was his admission that he’d signed witness statements that he’d not written: they’d been drafted by the Post Office’s lawyers. Bradshaw may be “a thug”, but he was small time. It wasn’t him fabricating witness statements, failing to disclose evidence, and privately prosecuting people long after it was understood that Horizon was faulty. How could this have happened? Where was the oversight?
“At the inquiry last week, we got a sense of the tactics the Post Office used to ‘break’ its victims”
It fell to “independent-minded heroes”, including the redoubtable Alan Bates and several MPs and journalists, to expose the scandal, said Camilla Cavendish in the FT. What lessons can we learn from this? One is the need for officials to keep an open mind – and not assume that people are deluded or lying, even if their stories seem a bit shaky. Another is the need for real accountability. Fujitsu has won £5bn in Government contracts since 2019, when the High Court ruled that Horizon was flawed; Post Office CEO Paula Vennells was awarded her CBE, and moved to a high-level job at the NHS. This is the problem with the system: individuals may get censured, “but the machine just rolls on”.