Who’s to blame for the Post Office scandal?

This article is part of our Opinions section.

On 19 January, the co-CEO of Fujitsu Europe, Paul Patterson, told the Post Office Horizon IT public inquiry: “To the subpostmasters and their families, we apologise, Fujitsu apologises and is sorry for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice.” You can see this for yourself if you click on the video below.

He goes on to say that “we are determined to support this inquiry and get to the truth, wherever it lays”. Which is great. And we’ve heard similar words emerge from the mouths of politicians and Post Office management in the past fortnight too.

But a fat lot of good that will do to all the subpostmasters who went bankrupt or were sent to jail. Or both. And let’s not forget that these problems started in 1999, so we’re talking about nearly a quarter of a century of harm. Many victims have died, with a tragic few taking their own lives.

It’s easy to point the finger at the politicians who dithered over this. At the media for not taking notice. At the public for not caring until an ITV drama turned dry facts into real people. To Fujitsu, for its complicity. And most of all to the Post Office, for its shameful prosecution of innocent people who served their community.

So who is to blame? And is too early to learn any lessons?

Who is to blame

The Post Office

We now know that the Post Office was aware of bugs in the Horizon accounts system as early as 1999. How far up the management structure that knowledge went is more difficult to ascertain. Adam Crozier, who was CEO of the Post Office from 2003 to 2010, has stated that he “did not have any involvement in the Horizon issue during my time at Royal Mail”.

(Note: the Post Office and Royal Mail were one entity until 2012, at which point they were split into two companies. The Royal Mail, which delivers parcels and letters, was privatised in 2012. The Post Office – that is, the nationwide network of branches – remains 100% owned by the UK Government.)

Although the mainstream media has focused much of its ire on former chief executive Paula Vennells, she was only in charge from 2012 to 2019. Undoubtedly she bears blame – I will leave the inquiry to decide how much – but she was not involved at the start. She was not the one who decided to pursue subpostmasters.

I suspect that the true villains of the piece are those who knew about the flaws in the software yet still decided to carry through prosecutions. Without sharing evidence with the victims’ defence teams.

My hope is that members of the Post Office management will ultimately be named if they were involved in the prosecutions and subsequent cover-ups. I certainly believe many are to blame, along with the Post Office’s lawyers. Let’s not forget that they deliberately set out to isolate subpostmasters and tell them that they alone had any issues with the Horizon software.

Fujitsu

Then we have Fujitsu. Yes, its paymaster was the Post Office, and with a big-money contract at stake, it would have taken a brave member of Fujitsu’s management to publicly admit the Horizon software’s failings. Not least because that would bring damaging publicity against its ability to create and support such software.

Nevertheless, Fujitsu knew about the problems with Horizon. It did not make that information available to courts during trials. And any attempts by individual whistleblowers within the company to bring the bugs to management’s attention were, it seems, brushed away.

The union

While it hasn’t come under as much scrutiny as you might expect, the National Federation of SubPostmasters is supposed to be the voice of post office operators. Its board is even made up of serving postmasters. And yet it initially failed to support its members, with the initial Computer Weekly article stating that the union “has refused to help them [the victims] investigate their concerns”.

The media

Was it the media’s fault? To an extent, yes. Two bodies emerge with credit: Computer Weekly, which gave journalist Rebecca Thomson the freedom to explore a story, despite protests from the Post Office and Fujitsu that she misunderstood the problem. Gaslighting at its most obvious, but only in retrospect.

The Post Office’s efforts were undeniably successful, however, at delaying coverage. It took five years from the moment that Alan Bates, the central protagonist in the ITV drama, alerted Computer Weekly to it publishing the first article. 2004 to 2009, during which many innocent people were convicted.

Then there’s the BBC’s Panorama team, led by Nick Wallis, who has written a book on the scandal. I also commend everyone to listen to his excellent podcast on the topic, which you will find on BBC Sounds.

However, what about all the other publications and media outlets? And I hold myself accountable here, as I have been editor of the British technology magazine PC Pro since 2004 (on and off) and never suggested we cover it as an investigation.

The politicians

The Post Office is 100% owned by the UK government, giving the scandal political overtones. Now, there should be big questions over why it has taken 15 years – during which many subpostmasters were imprisoned – for this to reach “urgent” status.

To put it into perspective, since the Computer Weekly story broke in 2009 – at which point MPs became aware of the issue, as it affected their constituents – we have had six Prime Ministers. And this isn’t a party political issue: Gordon Brown was PM until 2010.

However, it wasn’t until the ITV drama aired that Rushi Sunak announced a law that would quash the convictions. It took 11 years for an independent public inquiry to begin. And due to perpetual feet dragging, compensation has come in fits and starts. What’s more, it has never come anywhere close to covering the true losses the postmasters suffered.

All of us

Then we come to the public. You, me, our next-door neighbours. Why is it that we can have documentaries about this scandal, countless articles, a successful podcast, a public inquiry – yet it has taken a heartstring-pulling drama to bring it to life?

To be clear, I don’t think the public is to blame for the scandal. It’s more a matter of understanding our psychology. But it’s important to note that until the public reared up in anger, the politicians took their sweet time about compensating victims. And until this point, I’m not aware of any Prime Minister talking about it.

Lessons to learn from the Post Office Horizon Scandal

IT projects go wrong. Any assumption of perfection is wrong, and yet that’s exactly what the Post Office did. So that perhaps is our first lesson: start from a position of zero trust.

Our next lesson is that the heart wins over the head. Tens of thousands of people read those articles. No doubt hundreds of thousands watched the BBC Panorama documentary. Another bucketload will have listened to the podcast. But all that “content” was factual. Even though the production teams made sure to put people at the heart of the stories, something didn’t resonate in the same way. Or at least, not at the same scale.

And then we come to effecting change. It’s all very well to have a public inquiry, but it will take years to complete and unless there is a driving force of public opinion behind it then the “players” – including the government, which must dole out the money – will find reasons to pay out slowly.

The problem – and this is what drove me to write this article – is that it’s too late for so many of the affected people. Some have died. What use to them for public outrage now? And it’s also too little. While proposed “compensation” of £600,000 sounds a lot, consider that many people lost not merely their job, their future earnings and a sizeable amount of their pension, but also their reputation, their houses, even their lives.

But then again I look at myself. Why am I writing this now rather than in 2009? Or at least when I first heard of the scandal, which was in the late 2010s? To echo the Fujitsu co-CEO, I can only say sorry.

Update 12 February 2024: replaced main image (previously showed Royal Mail van), added a clarifying paragraph on the privatisation of the Royal Mail and corrected three typos.