UK post office scandal should be a salutary lesson to all corporations
AFTER Christmas, I watched the television drama series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. As the story unfolded, I became more and more incredulous. I cannot remember any other TV series in recent years that has had such a cathartic response.
The production depicts the circumstances surrounding multiple miscarriages of justice perpetrated against more than 700 British sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015.
They were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office for theft, false accounting and fraud after discrepancies were discovered in their branches. Many had their lives ruined. Bankruptcy, public embarrassment, depression, and other health problems followed. Some, tragically, took their own lives because of the stress.
Before I watched it, I had a vague recollection of a case I read about a few years ago in the North connected to this scandal. But it wasn’t until I watched the drama that I realised the extent and enormity of the situation.
The kernel of the problem was that, in 1999, the British Post Office introduced a new software accounting system called Horizon to its sub-post offices.
The new system, which was developed by Fujitsu, was designed to replace paper benefit books with swipe cards.
Very quickly problems arose but they were dismissed by bosses at the Post Office.
Plight
The Post Office officials rejected all suggestions that there was a problem with the new system, and put all the blame on individual sub-postmasters.
The plight of the postmasters was exemplified by the case of Deirdre Connolly from Tyrone. When two fraud investigators arrived at her border post office, despite her protestations of innocence, they demanded to know if she had taken the money for paramilitaries.
Another postmaster in the North, Lee Williamson, told RTÉ radio last week about the souldestroying toll the false accusations took on his family. He said the Post Office adopted the attitude that he was ‘guilty, until he proved otherwise’. Rather than the other way around.
He said fear of prison made him plead guilty, even though he maintained his innocence.
Numerous people in the UK tried to fight the Post Office but were roundly slapped down by what can only be described as bully boy tactics.
It was not until Welsh sub-postmaster Alan Bates took up the cudgels that a co-ordinated effort to tackle the Post Office began.
Bates and some of his colleagues formed a lobby group of sub-postmasters.
As a result of their efforts an inquiry was commissioned by the Post Office in 2013.
While it concluded that ‘it had not found evidence of system-wide problems’ in the Horizon software, it recommended that the Post Office ‘consider its procedures and operational support for subpostmasters’. Despite this, and many other subsequent warnings, the Post Office bosses dug in, and rebuffed any suggestion of widespread problems. More and more sub-postmasters were wrongly implicated.
Even as recently as 2019, the now disgraced former chief of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, maintained that the Horizon software was ‘fundamentally sound’.
Efforts at mediation failed, and the Post Office adopted an aggressive legal strategy in the courts.
Eventually, when the Post Office settled a major legal challenge without an admission of liability, the legal costs involved more or less eclipsed the amount paid by the Post Office, with little or no compensation to sub-postmasters.
In February 2020, such was the furore over the injustice against the sub-postmasters that the then British prime minister, Boris Johnson, agreed to hold an independent inquiry.
But even this was limited in its scope to such an extent that the lobby group on behalf of the subpostmasters refused to participate in it. Eventually, under further pressure, Johnson agreed to a full statutory inquiry. Compensation was paid to those wrongly convicted.
But it was not until the recent broadcasting of the drama series that the current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, finally announced that his government would bring forward a new law to fully exonerate all those wrongly convicted.
While a few voices have raised concerns about the legal soundness of this move, hopefully it will draw a line finally under this sordid situation.
It took a TV series to finally get the British government to decisively put right the wrongs meted out to the sub-postmasters. If ever there was an example of proper public service broadcasting, it was this excellent series.
What is amazing about this affair is that it appears that none of the ‘missing money’ actually enriched any of the officials at the Post Office head office. It was merely added to the Post Office accounts, falsely boosting its bottom line.
No one in Post Office management has been held responsible for the debacle – although some might be, eventually, when the independent inquiry finishes its hearings.
What was also surprising about the story was how ordinary lawabiding people were pressurised into accepting that they had done something wrong, when they patently had not.
And that they all, in the early years, believed and were led to believe that they were totally on their own, when in fact hundreds of other sub-postmasters were in a similar situation not of their own making.
While I watched this superb series, it kept occurring to me to ask, ‘Could this happen here?’ I’m pretty sure that it would not.
First of all, I don’t think our citizens would be as supine in the defence of their individual rights. They would not take such allegations lying down.
They have a very active body lobbying on their behalf, the Irish Postmasters Union. And they would probably engage solicitors, contact their local TDs, and even ‘talk to Joe (Duffy)’, to kick up a stink.
An element in our favour here in Ireland is that we are a relatively small, open society, especially when it comes to the ability of our citizens to make their voices heard. For instance, every citizen has relatively easy access to our TDs and ministers. The same cannot be said of the UK.
Responsive
Recent governments here have had to be extremely agile and responsive as issues of the day arise. The fact is that they would not last too long if they were otherwise. I cannot imagine any Irish government being so detached from the plight of postmasters’ as the various British governments were over the period of the scandal there.
If anyone in the general public here wants to lead the charge against any perceived injustice, they have ample opportunities to get their voices heard through an open and independent media.
Having said that, we should never be complacent.
I get the impression nowadays that large companies such as banks and utilities companies have changed their overall ethos.
It used to be that they were there to serve their customers. Now it seems they treat customers as something of a nuisance, with poor service and support.
What happened in the British Post Office should be a salutary lesson to everyone who is in charge of large corporate bodies, both private and public.
Our own post office organisation has had its challenges over the past few decades. New technology and changes in people’s habits put the future viability its network in doubt.
Yet An Post has risen to the challenge to such an extent that it is now a relatively efficient organisation doing many other tasks, not just posting letters.
While we might grumble about recent rises in the price of a stamp, we should be thankful that those at the helm in An Post have steered it very well through stormy waters – without any of the kind of scandals we have witnessed in the case of Mr Bates versus the British Post Office.