Over a 16-year period the Post Office wrongfully accused about 3,500 branch owner-operators of theft, fraud and false accounting, resulting in more than 700 prosecutions, despite knowing from at least 2010 that there were faults in the Horizon IT system.
To date no Post Office staff or suppliers have been punished. Here are some of those involved who still have questions to answer for their role in what has frequently been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history.
Paula Vennells
Paula Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, when the organisation routinely denied there were any problems with Horizon and pursued prosecutions against hundreds of sub post office operators.
During this time she collected more than £4.5m in pay, £2.2m of which was performance-related bonuses.
The former parish priest was awarded a CBE for services to the Post Office at the start of 2019 and left the Post Office a couple of months later, before a damning high court judgment that said that the Horizon system was not “remotely robust”, had “bugs, errors and defects”, and that there was a “material risk” that shortfalls in branch accounts were caused by the system.
In December that year, 10 months after Vennells’s departure, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants to end a long-running series of criminal cases over the Fujitsu-developed IT system, admitting it “got things wrong”, which marked the first turning point for victims.
More than 1 million people so far have signed a petition calling for the honours forfeiture committee to remove her CBE.
Ed Davey
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, has come under increasing criticism for his lack of action when he was postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012, during the coalition government with the Conservatives, when the software issues started coming to light.
In May 2010, Davey refused to meet Alan Bates, the post office operator who led the campaign to expose the scandal and whose story has now been told in an ITV drama, saying he did not believe it “would serve any purpose”.
Bates has described the Lib Dem minister’s 121-word response as not just “disappointing” but “offensive”.
Davey, who did later meet Bates in October 2010, has said he regretted not doing more at the time and claimed Post Office executives had blocked him from meeting campaigners.
Jo Swinson
Swinson was postal minister from 2012 to 2015, replacing Norman Lamb, who lasted a little more than six months in the role.
This was a period when an external review of the Horizon IT system was carried out by the forensic accountants Second Sight, brought in by the Post Office as pressure mounted from a small group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) set up by victims to campaign for their innocence.
Second Sight’s interim report found evidence of flaws and bugs in Horizon. On two occasions, “defects” in the system had resulted in a shortfall of about £9,000 at 76 branches.
However, the Post Office maintained that there was “absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system”. Swinson backed up this position in a statement to the House of Commons.
Second Sight’s final report described the Horizon system as “not fit for purpose” in some cases and said it experienced 12,000 communication failures a year. Its authors warned of “potential miscarriages of justice and misconduct by prosecutors acting on behalf of the Post Office”.
Swinson, who is no longer an MP, subsequently said that she had been misled by the Post Office regarding Horizon.
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Jarnail Singh
The Post Office’s senior criminal lawyer, who was involved in a string of prosecutions, sent an email to a number of executives celebrating the conviction of Seema Misra, a post office operator, in 2010.
Misra collapsed in court when her sentence was handed down, spent 15 months in jail and has said she would have taken her own life if she had not been eight months pregnant while incarcerated.
Emails have revealed that Post Office lawyers had a report about a Horizon bug creating shortfalls at 40 branches but this was not disclosed to the defence at Misra’s trial.
The judge-led inquiry into the scandal was shown an internal email exchange celebrating winning the case, which it said “destroyed the attack on the Horizon system” and would deter others from bringing cases. “It is hoped the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon,” wrote Singh, in one exchange.
The inquiry, which restarts hearing testimony this Thursday after a break, heard that Post Office executives replied to Singh that the outcome of the case was an “excellent result” and “brilliant news”.
It took 11 years for Misra to prove her innocence; she was cleared in 2021.
Rod Ismay
The former Ernst & Young auditor joined the Post Office in 2003 and was the author of the first report into the Horizon IT system.
Ismay was tasked with writing the report in 2010 in response to questions being raised about the Horizon IT system by some MPs, the JFSA and the first media investigation into flaws in the system, published by Computer Weekly in 2009.
The report, which became public only in 2021, determined that Horizon was “robust”.
Ismay told the public inquiry that he had not been engaged in a “whitewash” process, saying that he had been asked by bosses to only find assurances that the accounting system was working correctly. His report concluded that the Post Office could remain satisfied that “money was missing due to theft in the branch”.
Ismay admitted to the Horizon inquiry that the report was a missed opportunity to discover “a decade earlier than we did” the flaws in the Horizon IT system.
Gareth Jenkins
The former chief architect at Fujitsu, which supplied the centralised computer system to the Post Office to replace paper-based accounting, gave evidence defending the Horizon computer system in a number of prosecutions.
In the meantime, the Post Office continues to use the Horizon system. The loss-making business has asked the government for £252m of funding to keep it afloat, including money to cover the cost of updating the IT system, which it uses with support from Fujitsu.
