Sue Edgar is Chair of the National Federation of Subpostmasters and a serving Subpostmaster. Her story is fascinating. The evidence she gave to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry on the afternoon of Fri 4 March will undoubtedly be seen as significant for a number of reasons, but I would like to focus on what she said about remote access to Subpostmaster branch accounts. By 2016, the Subpostmasters’ campaign for justice was well known to the Post Office and the National Federation of Subpostmasters. Remote access to the Horizon IT system was a live issue. In order to maintain confidence…

For obvious reasons I have spent many hours dealing with sacked and convicted Subpostmasters, rather than those still working. The evidence given to the Post Office Inquiry has come from both serving and former Postmasters. I am currently watching the focus group session on the afternoon of Fri 4 March – particularly because of some social media interest in what the Chair of the National Federation of Subpostmasters, Sue Edgar, told the inquiry about remote access to Horizon, the Post Office’s disastrous IT system. I haven’t got to the relevant bit yet, but before I do, I thought it was…

Malcolm Simpson was a Subpostmaster at Boxgrove Post Office near Chichester, West Sussex. Malcolm came to the inquiry on 24 Feb with his wife Lesley (pictured above). Malcolm and Lesley bought Boxgrove village shop in 2003. It had a Post Office counter which was run completely separately by the incumbent Subpostmaster. The Subpostmaster left in 2007 and although he was reluctant to do so, Malcolm said it was the “logical step” for him to take over. After inadequate off-site group training (during which Malcolm said none of the trainees could balance correctly) he was let loose on Horizon in his…

The number of people affected by the Horizon scandal is a question news editors used to ask me and journalists used to ask themselves when trying to get some kind of handle on scale of this story. This was in the bad old days when the Post Office refused to give out information and no one else had a record of it. Alan Bates from the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance always had a perceptive view of the likely scale. In our very first conversation in 2010 he told me the number of people affected could be “the high hundreds, possibly…