PO scandal – is there no justice on Horizon?

IN a superb documentary a few days ago (well done BBC at last) Panorama exposed a truly hideous campaign of injustice as the Post Office persecuted hundreds of scrupulously honest postmasters for allegedly stealing money when it was all the fault of a flawed computer system it had installed.

In 1999 the system, Horizon, was introduced and almost at once began to go wrong. Engineers inside Fujitsu, the makers, knew it was their system, but were told to shut up. By 2014 – 15 years for heaven’s sake – a total of 736 postmasters and mistresses, all completely honest and hard-working, had been accused of stealing from their tills money that belonged to the GPO.

None of them had taken a penny – but the computers were held to be infallible and sacrosanct.

They were bankrupted, ruined, fired, charged and imprisoned. And still their pleas were rebuffed. This scandal is now officially deemed “the worse miscarriage of justice in British legal history”. And that really is saying something.

You don’t even have to be a statistician, scientist or computer engineer to see the flaw. Common sense alone, now completely rejected in a society become stupid at every official level, would have reasoned that the odds on more than seven hundred postmasters who didn’t even know each other, all going “bent” simultaneously, were astronomically small.

The most truly shameful aspect, as the documentary made clear, was the universal dedication in high places to cover it all up. Fujitsu tried to silence its own engineers; the Post Office denied and denied that anything had gone wrong with Horizon until the evidence was overwhelming.

Now at last monetary compensation is being offered – but public money, our money, of course.

But how do you repair shattered lives? Those responsible, and especially those at the very top who deliberately rebuffed every attempt to clarify what had really happened, simply must be pursued, traced, identified and prosecuted.

“Malfeasance in public office” is the charge, I think. Or will our government simply sing La-la-la and face the other way? I fear exactly that.

LAST week I tried to help a little old lady. She lives alone, elderly and frightened, in a small basement flat in West London. Both her phones had gone “on the blink”. She feared that if she had a fall she would be unable to call anyone for help.

The technical problem was simple. I got a technician round to mend both machines. More complicated was to find someone to check on her regularly as I live miles away. I tried Age Concern, which has now become Age UK. They put me on to Westminster Council Social Care. The phone rang for an hour until I had to put it down. So much for charity. So much for officialdom. At last a kindly upstairs couple agreed to check on her regularly.

That seems to be the answer nowadays. Back to the old ways. Kindly neighbours have been looking after the old and frail since Norman times. But what happens when they go away for a week or two? You can ring the authorities until the phone melts. It probably won’t answer.