Village postmasters ‘ hounded for stealing because of IT system riddled with 29 bugs’

HUNDREDS of village postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing because Post Office computers were riddled with 29 separate bugs, the High Court heard yesterday.

When millions went missing, sub-postmasters were jailed, made bankrupt and had their lives ruined – but glitches in the system were to blame, it was claimed.

As 557 former sub-postmasters began fresh court action, a judge was told that postal chiefs tried to hush up reports that the software was plagued by problems.

One sub-postmistress – Seema Misra, 43 – was jailed for theft when she was four months’ pregnant with her second son.

Overcome with shame, she considered suicide and her conviction means she is still struggling to find work more than eight years later. At her 2010 trial, the Post Office claimed that although one IT bug was known about, it only affected ‘one branch’ 600 miles away in Scotland.

But yesterday, the High Court heard that the problem in the Horizon computer system had actually affected 30 branches.

Patrick Green QC, for the sub-postmasters, said: ‘It has taken the process of this group litigation to establish that the Post Office has not been truthful.’ Bosses have always denied the computer system could be faulty, even though pillars of their communities like Mrs Misra, of West Byfleet, Surrey, were mystified by their terminals declaring shortfalls of tens of thousands of pounds.

Now the Post Office could be forced to pay millions of pounds in compensation if it loses at the High Court.

Yesterday was the opening day of the second of four linked cases into whether it cheated its own sub-postmasters. The hearings will last until next year.

Mr Green told the court that a computer expert commissioned by the claimants identified 29 separate bugs in Horizon, which records all over-the-counter transactions.

One, called the Dalmellington Bug, gave an innocent sub-postmistress a £24,000 hole in her accounts, the court heard.

Named after her village branch in Ayrshire, Scotland, it struck in October 2015 when she took delivery of a pouch from head office containing £8,000 in bank notes.

When she recorded receipt of the £ 8,000 in Horizon, the screen ‘froze’ when she pressed Enter so she pressed it again and again. Eventually the system wrongly recorded that she had accepted £32,000 cash. In 2016, the £24,000 discrepancy caused by the Dalmellington Bug was discussed internally by Post Office bosses, including Paula Vennells, chief executive at the time, the court was told.

But an ‘urgent review’ was mysteriously shelved and the bug was not disclosed when the Post Office responded just four weeks later to the claimants’ group legal action. ‘The Post Office had front and centre in its mind the existence of this bug,’ said Mr Green.

‘But that bug was not disclosed in the letter of response.’

He added there was evidence of the Dalmellington Bug striking 112 times in five years but it was not noticed and fixed until 2016. Mr Green also accused the Post Office of telling ‘the public, the court and claimants’ that bosses could not remotely access and alter a branch’s accounts when this was ‘clearly untrue’.

Anthony de Garr Robinson QC, for the Post Office, said Horizon was ‘reliable’. He claimed the subpostmasters had failed to show any clear- cut examples of bugs causing false shortfalls, ‘let alone bugs causing the shortfalls of £18.7million that they claim not to be responsible for’.

He added: ‘[Their] suspicion of Horizon is driven by the natural human scepticism to technology.

‘It is easy to blame the computer when something has gone wrong in a branch.’ The case continues.