Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Panorama programme exposing scandal, the broadcaster says
Nicola Slawson
The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in 2015 ahead of a Panorama programme with a Horizon whistleblower which exposed the scandal, the public broadcaster said.
The BBC said experts who were interviewed for the programme were sent intimidating letters by Post Office lawyers who also sent letters to the broadcaster, threatening to sue Panorama.
According to the BBC, senior Post Office managers also told the broadcaster at the time that no staff or the company who developed Horizon, Fujitsu, could access post office operators accounts, despite being warned four years earlier this was possible.
The BBC says the claims did not stop the programme, titled Trouble at the Post Office, but it did delay the broadcast of the show.
The Post Office has been contacted for comment. It told the BBC it will not comment while the public inquiry continues.
The Post Office scandal has been described without exaggeration by the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history: the hounding and prosecution of thousands of people who owned and ran smaller post offices for alleged fraud between 1999 and 2015, the overwhelming majority of whom were falsely accused.
More than 700 post office operators were handed criminal convictions after faulty Fujitsu accounting software made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Victims have described being shunned by their communities, financially ruined and having their families destroyed.
The Post Office public inquiry into the scandal continues in London today.
I will be looking after the politics blog today. If you have any tips or suggestions, please get in touch: [email protected].
Key events
The Liberal Democrats have called for a retrospective vote on the military action in the Red Sea and called for MPs to be recalled to parliament.
The party’s foreign affairs spokesperson Layla Moran said:
Parliament should not be bypassed. Rishi Sunak must announce a retrospective vote in the House of Commons on these strikes, and recall parliament this weekend.
We remain very concerned about the Houthis’ attacks. But that makes it all the more important to ensure that MPs are not silenced on the important issue of military action.
Alex Hern
Ministers need to “immediately” update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say.
In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases.
Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: “It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.”
Mason, along with eight other legal and computer experts, was invited by the government to suggest an update to the law in 2020, following a high court ruling against the Post Office, but the recommendations they submitted were never applied.
He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009.
Mason said:
My view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn’t in place.
The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that “mechanical instruments” should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work.
For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began.
Read the full story here:
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is taking further evidence this morning.
The inquiry was set up in 2020, and upgraded to a statutory inquiry a year later, and has been holding public hearings for almost two years. But the scandal is now getting much more media attention than before as a direct result of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office broadcast after Christmas.
Sir Wyn Williams, chair of the inquiry, announced his intention to hold the hearing after evidence from representatives of the Post Office, Herbert Smith Freehills and KPMG revealed process failings and potentially “deeper rooted problems” relating to the Post Office’s disclosure.
The chair said:
There is a need for close monitoring of the disclosure process during the remainder of the Inquiry especially as it relates to disclosure by the Post Office.
He has therefore called Chris Jackson, partner of Burges Salmon LLP, to give evidence. Burges Salmon replaced Herbert Smith Freehills as the Post Office’s recognised legal representative from 1 September 2023.
You can watch the inquiry here:
Robyn Vinter
Keir Starmer has said Labour will not build the Manchester leg of HS2 if the party gets into power this year.
The opposition leader said the current government had “blown the budget” and that “contracts are going to be cancelled”.
However, speaking on BBC North West Tonight, he said Labour was “committed” to Northern Powerhouse Rail to improve connections in the north.
He added:
I want that designed and built in the North and therefore I’m talking to Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram about what are the needs of the people in the North West so that the plan can actually deliver what works for them.
Libby Brooks
Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf is calling for parliament to be recalled to discuss the UK action in Yemen.
Yousaf said it was “pretty frustrating” that he was not briefed in advance of the UK and US strikes carried out last night.
He said there was “no equivocation” that the SNP aligns itself with the UN security council resolution calling for an end to Houthi rebel attacks in the Red Sea but that the UK’s record of military intervention in Middle East “is not a good one”.
The correct and appropriate thing to have done would have been to have recalled parliament to have given serious detail about any proposed military action because there are significant questions.
He said that, despite the UK insisting that this has nothing to do with the conflict between Israel and Gaza “that is a complete fallacy and the concern is that there will be a wider regional escalation because of the action taken”
My concern also is that we see thousands of children are dying in Gaza, and I just wish the UK government would care as much about those children that are dying.
You can follow our liveblog on the crisis in the Middle East here:
Rishi Sunak is making a surprise visit to Ukraine to meet Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as the UK announced it will provide £2.5bn in military aid to the country over the coming year.
It comes as the Ukrainian president presses allies in the West to provide the country with more support to fight back against Russian forces, amid fears that interest in the war is flagging among allies as the war drags on.
Sunak said:
For two years, Ukraine has fought with great courage to repel a brutal Russian invasion. They are still fighting, unfaltering in their determination to defend their country and defend the principles of freedom and democracy.
I am here today with one message: the UK will also not falter. We will stand with Ukraine, in their darkest hours and in the better times to come.
The prime minister made his first visit to Ukraine in November 2022, weeks after entering Number 10.
For more on what’s happening in Ukraine, you can follow our liveblog here:
Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Panorama programme exposing scandal, the broadcaster says
Nicola Slawson
The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in 2015 ahead of a Panorama programme with a Horizon whistleblower which exposed the scandal, the public broadcaster said.
The BBC said experts who were interviewed for the programme were sent intimidating letters by Post Office lawyers who also sent letters to the broadcaster, threatening to sue Panorama.
According to the BBC, senior Post Office managers also told the broadcaster at the time that no staff or the company who developed Horizon, Fujitsu, could access post office operators accounts, despite being warned four years earlier this was possible.
The BBC says the claims did not stop the programme, titled Trouble at the Post Office, but it did delay the broadcast of the show.
The Post Office has been contacted for comment. It told the BBC it will not comment while the public inquiry continues.
The Post Office scandal has been described without exaggeration by the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history: the hounding and prosecution of thousands of people who owned and ran smaller post offices for alleged fraud between 1999 and 2015, the overwhelming majority of whom were falsely accused.
More than 700 post office operators were handed criminal convictions after faulty Fujitsu accounting software made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Victims have described being shunned by their communities, financially ruined and having their families destroyed.
The Post Office public inquiry into the scandal continues in London today.
I will be looking after the politics blog today. If you have any tips or suggestions, please get in touch: [email protected].
