UK to clear workers’ names in postal fiasco

LONDON — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Wednesday that he will introduce measures to overturn the convictions of more than 900 post office branch managers who were wrongly accused of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system.

Sunak said the scandal, which saw hundreds of postmasters falsely convicted of stealing money because Post Office computers wrongly showed that funds were missing from their shops, was “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history.”

Of the more than 900 postal branch managers who were convicted of theft or fraud between 1999 and 2015, just 95 have managed to overturn their convictions, Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake said.

Some were sent to prison and many were financially ruined after being forced to pay large sums to the state-owned Post Office. Several killed themselves. In total, over 2,000 people were affected by the scandal.

The real culprit was a defective accounting software package called Horizon, supplied by the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu, that was rolled out across Post Office branches starting in the late 1990s.

Sunak told lawmakers that a new law will be introduced to ensure that those wrongly convicted are “swiftly exonerated and compensated.”

For years, the state-owned Post Office maintained that data from Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty.

In 2016 a group of affected postal workers joined a group legal action against the Post Office that was key in uncovering the scandal. The High Court ruled three years later that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and that it was likely that those defects caused the shortfalls in the branch accounts.

Officials said Wednesday that the hundreds of postal workers who joined that legal action will be offered an upfront payment of $95,500 each.

Those whose convictions are overturned will be entitled to a $764,000 compensation payment.