Ex-post boss tells of 11-year ‘strain’ from wrongful conviction
OLIVIA WILLIAMS AND CHRIS SLATER
AFORMER sub-postmaster has told of the ‘stigma and ‘huge strain’ he lived with for over a decade after being wrongfully convicted in the Horizon scandal.
Scott Darlington, from Macclesfield, has spoken out after he finally cleared his name - 11 years after first being wrongly accused of false accounting due to issues with a Post Office computer system.
The 58 year-old was a sub-postmaster at the Alderley Edge Post Office between 2005 to 2010 before he was prosecuted and lost his job over an accounting discrepancy.
After being convicted, he says he struggled to find a job, had ‘ massive money worries’ and ended up battling with depression.
Mr Darlington was one of hundreds to be prosecuted for false accounting and theft which he had not committed, but was instead due to the flawed computer accounting system called Horizon.
The system recorded all transactions at a branch and calculated how much cash and stock there should be but had significant bugs causing it to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money.
Horizon-based evidence was used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736 people.
In 2008 there was a large discrepancy of £1,700 which Mr Darlington queried with the Post Office but was ordered to pay it back and ‘no investigation’ into the shortfall took place.
Mr Darlington said he knew something wasn’t right and in September 2008 even larger discrepancies occurred and out of fear of having to pay it all back, he didn’t tell anyone at first.
The dad-of-one spent nights exploring the system trying to figure out was happening.
He said: “I didn’t tell them straight away because I knew what they were going to do - they were going to take the money.
“The guy I worked with and I couldn’t figure it out and this eventually rose to £44,000.
“Eventually auditors came, doing the same thing I did - an office balance - and then I was pretty much charged with false accounting and taken to Crown Court.”
In 2010, Mr Darlington was convicted of false accounting when the system at his sub-post office suggested £45,000 was missing.
After this, Mr Darlington’s life flipped upside down.
He says he lost his business, was saddled with massive debt and was unable to get a new job for three-and-half years.
Mr Darlington added: “I went for interviews but got turned down after CRB checks and things like that.
“I had an eight-year-old daughter at the time and I wasn’t able to provide for her for all that time. The whole thing was just a massive strain.
“But I had to carry on, I wasn’t in the position to do anything else - put up with the situation and try your best.
“I suffered from depression because you feel like you can’t get out of the situation and it was going to be a long time before anything was looked at.”
Mr Darlington now works as an engineer at an aerospace company.
He said: “I knew I had never done anything wrong, but when people have seen you have been convicted at Crown Court we all assume that someone must have done something.
“So I had that stigma and carried that around with me for a long time. I knew I hadn’t done anything.”
But after more than a decade long fight, Mr Darlington and other sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses had their convictions overturned at the Court of Appeal on Friday, April 23.
The clearing of the names of 39 people follows the overturning of six other convictions in December and means more people have been affected than in any other miscarriage of justice in the UK.
Mr Darlington said: “The Post Office tried to deny it all along, just putting people under more and more pressure and here we are now proven that they are a bad guy.
“It was pretty euphoric outside (court) for a good half an hour. It’s been such a long battle.”
“Everyone is happy, but to be honest unless the people who perpetrated this get their comeuppance then it doesn’t feel very much like justice.
Speaking after the Court of Appeal judgement, Post Office chief executive officer Nick Read said: “I am in no doubt about the human cost of the Post Office past failures and the deep pain caused that has been caused to people affected.
“The quashing of historical convictions is a vital milestone in fully and properly addressing the past as I work to put right these wrongs as swiftly as possible and there must be compensation that reflects what has happened.”