Post Office lied for decades to keep us all quiet, says Mr Bates
THE Post Office spent decades ‘denying, lying and attempting to silence’ workers caught up in the Horizon false accounting scandal, campaigner Alan Bates said yesterday.
The former subpostmaster, who was played by Toby Jones in the hit ITV series Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, said the organisation did ‘everything and anything’ to keep failures ‘hidden’.
Mr Bates said they effectively sacked him from his job to make an example of him when he refused to back down.
He told the public inquiry into the scandal yesterday: ‘They were after me, one way or another.
‘They were determined to protect the brand at any cost. And they didn’t want anything coming out or being disclosed that might cause damage to the Post Office.’
The inquiry heard evidence Post Office bosses deemed Mr Bates to be ‘unmanageable’ before he was dismissed.
The scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015, because of software called Horizon which wrongly made it look as though money was missing from their branches.
Many were sent to jail and bankrupted, while at least four are believed to have taken their own lives over the scandal.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak subsequently described it as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history’.
Mr Bates ran the Craig-y-Don Post Office in Llandudno, north Wales, from the late 1990s until 2003, when he lost his job after three years of complaining that the software was causing errors.
In his witness statement to the inquiry, Mr Bates wrote: ‘Prior to and since my termination from the branch, I have spent the last 23 years campaigning to expose the truth, and justice, not just for myself, but for the entire group of wrongly treated/wrongly convicted SPMs (subpostmasters).
‘I have dedicated this period of my life to this cause which, sadly, has been necessary since Post Office Limited has spent this entire period denying, lying, defending, and attempting to discredit and silence me.’
A lawyer for the Post Office also privately accused him of having ‘a loose relationship with the truth’ in 2017, as his campaign for justice clicked into gear.
Mr Bates also recalled he ‘took offence’ when then-postal affairs minister Sir Ed Davey refused to meet with him in 2010 after he claimed the Government had only an ‘arm’s length’ involvement.
The campaigner wrote back: ‘You have allowed a once great institution to be asset- stripped by little more than thugs in suits, and you’ve enabled them to carry on with impunity, regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict.’ The inquiry heard Sir Ed – now leader of the Liberal Democrats – subsequently agreed to a meeting ‘for presentational reasons’ amid concerns about publicity.
Sir Ed, who is due to give evidence to the inquiry in July, has previously said he was lied to by civil servants about the extent of the problem.
Mr Bates concluded his evidence by describing the Post Office as an ‘atrocious organisation’ that needed to be ‘ sold to someone like Amazon’.
The long-running inquiry was catapulted into the limelight in January following the broadcast of ITV’s acclaimed drama series Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, starring Jones in the titular role.
‘An atrocious organisation’