The Great Post Office Scandal Original Article published in broadband February 2022 scte long read
Alliance and his band of Subpostmaster campaigners, aided by some extraordinary politicians/experts/lawyers who got them to where they are today.” Thanks to his efforts and those of a few dedicated experts, this an overdue triumph of David and Goliath proportions, the scale of which is only just fully emerging. The inquiry into the scandal has not yet begun, but the trial has gone some way to providing overdue vindication for the victims and their families, some of whom are sadly no longer even with us. One might think bringing the Post Office into the 21st Century is a tricky brief, but hardly impossible surely? There are multiple moving parts of course, but was that all? “It’s worth pointing out the colossal scale of the Post Office in the UK,” Nick explained. “There are only just fewer post offices than banks and supermarkets altogether. It is a vast and sprawling network. The Post Office is the biggest retail network in the country by far. There are outposts in the tiniest of highlands and islands, so you might imagine correctly that connectivity issues are huge. Data dropouts are common, and they can cause different numbers to appear on your balance sheet.” What went wrong The book goes into forensic detail. “Conceptually, Horizon was relatively straightforward. The front-end terminals would be custom-specced PCs running Microsoft Windows NT operating system. These would sit in a box under each Post Office counter window. Each PC would be connected to a custom keyboard, a barcode scanner, a 3.5 inch receipts printer and a touchscreen, which would sit on top of the counter. Running bespoke Horizon software, each counter PC would write both manually- and barcode-inputted transactions into the branch accounts. Every night all the information collected from the brand would be uploaded to the ISDN (or in some cases) satellite to a centrally located Post Office mainframe.”
As revolutions go, the Digital one rolls off the tongue a little less easily than perhaps the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. Arguably we are still working our way through it; the vantage point of history isn’t quite in view yet. It still feels too soon to comfortably give any of this unregulated chaos a name. A curious and expensive phenomenon has occurred repeatedly over the last 20 years during this Digital Revolution and is not limited to any one nation, or any one industry. In the name of progress, billions have been wasted, lives ruined, reputations shattered and criminal investigations launched as governments, slow moving machines at best, have been variously forced, inspired or politically motivated to move with the times. Wholesale upgrades of antiquated manual systems have been replaced by automated ones, connecting a network of remote sites to a central operating system, introducing shiny new back-up systems in the cloud, making data widely accessible and so on. The list of system failures across the board over the last 20 years is extraordinary and ongoing, and it is clear lessons are not being learned; the same mistakes occur time and time again. This article examines the causes of some of these debacles with a look in particular at the Great Post Office Scandal and asks why those lessons aren’t being learned. “The Great Post Office Scandal” covers the story in sympathetic yet forensic detail, further to a High Court trial last year compensating the 2000 victims. More than 700 people were convicted between 2000 and 2015. 72 of these have been cleared so far by the Court of Appeal in England. There are 2,000+ compensation claims in the pipeline. £1bn has been earmarked by the government, but hardly anyone has received what they are actually owed to date. Journalist Nick Wallis has spent the last decade covering every possible element of this injustice in exhaustive, granular detail, and his book is a compelling read. With typical modesty, Nick shuns the credit. “No - that’s reserved for Alan Bates from the Justice for Subpostmasters
Nick Wallis
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Volume 46 No.1 March 2024
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