Post Office Scandal

Inquiry re-start preview

Nick Wallis

Tue 21 February 2023

0 comments
5 min read

Davinder and Seema Misra with Richard Roll

Part 2 of Phase 3 of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry gets underway today. There will be three more weeks of evidence before another break until May, punctuated by another compensation hearing on 27 April.

There are going to be some intriguing witnesses over the next three weeks. I have picked out a few.

Richard Roll – Thu 9 March

Richard Roll is something of a hero of this story and gets chapter to himself in my book. He is the Fujitsu whistleblower who appeared on our first Panorama programme and subsequently became a star witness in the Horizon Issues trial during Bates v Post Office. During the trial, Roll was subjected to a lengthy cross-examination by the Post Office. Everything from his experience, level of seniority and quality of recollection was rigorously challenged. In his judgment, Mr Justice Fraser, said:

“Mr Roll’s evidence was supportive of the claimants’ case and it was necessary for the Post Office to render his evidence unreliable, insofar as they could, in order to damage the claimants’ case and bolster their own. In my judgment, this the Post Office failed to do.”
par 184, Judgment (No.6) “Horizon Issues”, Bates and others v Post Office

The judge described Roll as a “reliable and helpful witness” whose evidence was “very important”, particularly when it came to laying bare the scale of remote access Fujitsu had when it came to delving into Subpostmaster accounts. Although I have interviewed Richard a number of times and was in court to watch him on the stand in the Horizon trial, it’s going to be very interesting to hear what evidence the inquiry will seek now it has the opportunity.

Andrew Winn – Fri 3 March

Andrew Winn also appears in the Horizon Issues judgment and my book. He was a senior Post Office exec who was tangentially involved in Pam Stubbs’ case and was also present at the infamous joint Fujitsu/Post Office meeting to discuss a serious bug in Horizon a month before Seema Misra’s trial (see Paul Marshall’s submission to the inquiry on that matter here). Winn was criticised by Mr Justice Fraser for his lack of interest in Subpostmaster concerns, closing an internal query over one problem with the dismissive:

“My instinct is that we have enough on with people asking us to look at things.”
par 218, Judgment (No.6) “Horizon Issues”, Bates and others v Post Office

Winn was in post when the Post Office knew it had problems with Horizon, a campaign group had been set up to raise awareness of problems and whilst the Post Office prosecuting frenzy was at its height. His evidence could be newsworthy.

Andy Dunks – Wed 8 March

Andy Dunks used to be an Information Technology Security Analyst at Fujitsu. He was a witness in the Horizon Issues trial and provided a witness statement in the prosecution of former Subpostmaster Sarah Burgess-Boyde in 2010. Mr Justice Fraser found that Dunks “expressly sought to mislead” him in court, which is serious.

The context was specifically to do with the boilerplate witness statements produced by Fujitsu to aid Post Office prosecutions. Fraser said:

Mr Dunks expressly sought to mislead me by stating that there was no “Fujitsu party line” when it came to the contents of drafting witness statements about audit records for legal proceedings. There plainly is; it was used in the Fujitsu statements in 2010 and it was used by him in his statement for the Horizon Issues trial.
par 294, Judgment (No.6) “Horizon Issues”, Bates and others v Post Office

I wonder what he’ll come up with when it comes to giving evidence, again under oath, to the Inquiry.

Brian Trotter – Thu 2 March

Brian Trotter was a Post Office witness in the first Bates v Post Office trial – held at the latter end of 2018. Under cross-examination Trotter accepted a key part of his witness statement was wrong and that he knew it was wrong. When asked if he wanted to correct the wrong impression it gave, he replied “No”. The Post Office’s written closing at the end of the trial did not mention him once, which is telling. As a former contracts manager, Trotter was responsible for suspending and ultimately ruining at least one Subpostmaster. In his Common Issues trial judgment, Mr Justice Fraser wrote that Trotter:

“was accused of being evasive in some of his answers. I do not accept that he was being evasive, but he certainly seemed extremely nervous about giving evidence before me that he thought might be unhelpful to the Post Office.”
par 534, Judgment (No.3) “Common Issues”, Bates and others v Post Office

I hope that by 2 March, that nervousness has gone.

You can read the full list of confirmed witnesses on the Inquiry website here.

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

Civil litigation, Inquiry

Bates v Post Office, Inquiry, Post Office
Isabella Wall

Nick Wallis

Wed 8 February 2023

0 comments
2 min read

Isabella Wall

I was contacted by Gavin Wall in September last year in my role as a trustee of the Horizon Scandal Fund. Gavin’s mum Isabella had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Isabella was one of the 555 litigants who took the Post Office to court and won in 2019. The fund provided some financial help to Isabella, but shortly before Christmas Gavin wrote to let us know his mum had sadly died. I asked Gavin if he would consider posting a tribute on this website. It follows below:

Isabella Wall passed away peacefully on 19 December 2022 after a short but brave battle with Motor Neurone Disease.

Isabella was the former Subpostmistress of Bowness Road Post Office, Barrow-in-Furness from 1995 to 2012. It was a role she loved dearly for 22 years, acting as the focal point for her local community, despite things ending not the way she wanted.

Isabella was dismissed from her position after several interrogations without legal representation, losing her role and livelihood as a result.

No charges were brought, but as the Post Office’s Horizon IT system showed inaccuracies in her accounts she was deemed unfit to run the branch. Her career destroyed, Isabella was plunged into debt, permanently damaging her mental health. Unfortunately Isabella did not live to receive an official apology from the UK Government nor receive long overdue compensation from the Post Office.

Her family would like to thank Computer Weekly, Alan Bates, Kay and all at the JFSA campaign, Imogen at Freeths solicitors for going above and beyond to support, Dominic Curran at Howe and Co, Simon Fell MP, the Horizon Scandal Fund charity and all subpostmasters and their families affected by this travesty of justice.

Donations to the Motor Neurone Disease Association (https://isabellawall.muchloved.com/) to fund much needed research into this underfunded and devasting disease would be greatly appreciated by the family.

Civil litigation, Compensation

Bates v Post Office, Horizon, Isabella Wall
Altman General Review finally published

Nick Wallis

Tue 17 January 2023

0 comments
11 min read
Brian Altman KC

On Friday, a key document in understanding the Post Office scandal was brought to the surface. It is the 15 October 2013 General Review into the Post Office’s past prosecutions and future prosecution policy, written by Brian Altman KC.

The Review came up almost in passing during former Post Office auditor Chris Gilding’s evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry*.

As soon as it had been mentioned, I asked the inquiry to publish the Review, which they kindly did. I have published a searchable version of the Review below this blog post.

What’s the Review about?

Brian Altman KC represented the Post Office in Hamilton v Post Office at the Court of Appeal in 2020/2021, after which 39 Postmasters had their convictions quashed. He also advised the Post Office on multiple occasions during 2013 about their prosecutions of Subpostmasters.

This Review and his other Advices are crucial to this story, given Altman’s expertise and seniority. He was First Senior Treasury Counsel – the country’s top prosecutor – from 2010 to May 2013. The Post Office has repeatedly refused to give me the Altman advices on the grounds of privilege. This is the first time this document has been put in the public domain, though it has been quoted from in published submissions to the Inquiry by Subpostmasters representatives.

In his General Review, Altman writes: ‘The Post Office Ltd (“POL”) has commissioned me to review past practice and make recommendations as to the future approach to the conduct of prosecutions.’

Altman’s terms of reference came from Bond Dickinson LLP, later Womble Bond Dickinson, the firm of solicitors who represented the Post Office so disastrously during the Bates v Post Office civil litigation. Part of those instructions to Altman include ‘Meeting/Reporting to the Post Office Audit Committee/Board.’

Context: the Second Sight interim report and the first Clarke Advice

The reason for the Review can be traced back to Second Sight’s Interim Report dated 8 July 2013. Second Sight are a company run by Ron Warmington and Ian Henderson. They were invited to investigate the complaints of former Subpostmasters about the Post Office Horizon IT system. Their investigation was paid for by the Post Office, but instigated by senior MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The interim report was signed off by both the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and the Post Office and published on the Post Office website. Here is what I had to say about it at the time. I have published the Interim Report below this blog post as I can no longer find it on the Post Office website.

The most important thing in the Second Sight report was the revelation that two IT bugs in the Horizon system had caused problems with account balances. Although the report didn’t say it, this information had come from Gareth Jenkins, the Horizon system architect who worked at Fujitsu, which designed, maintained and operated the Horizon system as part of an outsourcing deal with the Post Office.

On reading Second Sight’s interim report, the barrister Simon Clarke, who was prosecuting Subpostmasters for the Post Office at his firm Cartwright King, raised the alarm. He halted several prosecutions and instigated an immediate review. He discovered Jenkins was the source for Second Sight’s information. The Post Office had been prosecuting Subpostmasters for theft, false accounting and fraud on the basis of Horizon data. Now a formal report had been produced which suggested the data might not be sound. Clarke was concerned there was the slightest possibility that Postmasters might have been given criminal records on the basis of potentially flawed data.

Clarke was asked by the Post Office for advice. On 15 July, after a brief investigation, he delivered his advice. All prosecutions by the Post Office needed to be reviewed, and Gareth Jenkins, who had been used as an expert witness by the Post Office, should never be allowed near a witness box again.

The Post Office asked Cartwright King to start reviewing prosecutions dating back to 1 Jan 2010 (the date at which a new version of Horizon (Horizon Online or HOL or HNG-X) began rollout. This became known as the Cartwright King Sift Review. The parameters for the review have not yet been made public (though they are discussed in the Altman Review). They were essentially to decide if any of the people whose cases had been reviewed should be alerted to problems with Horizon. This would be done by giving them Second Sight’s Interim Report and a document called the Helen Rose report, both of which describe accounting error bugs within Horizon, which may not be obvious to the user. The Helen Rose report eventually surfaced during Bates v Post Office. I published it here.

What’s in Altman’s Review?

Brian Altman was brought in by the Post Office to oversee the Sift Review and basically check Cartwright King was doing the right thing in the right way. Shortly after being instructed, Altman handed the Post Office an Interim Review on 2 August 2013. This has not yet been made public.

The General Review of October 2013 essentially reviews the Cartwright King Sift Review. Altman notes he has met with the Post Office’s in-house legal team, led by Susan Crichton with Rodric Williams and Jarnail Singh in tow (again, all familiar names to those following this disaster). Altman also met with Simon Clarke, Harry Bowyer and their team at Cartwright King. He also saw Andy Parsons at Bond Dickinson (Parsons is a familiar name to those who followed Bates v Post Office – he submitted more than a dozen witness statements to the litigation).

Altman’s initial conclusion was that reviewing prosecutions from 1 Jan 2010 was ‘logical, proportionate and practicable’. That in itself is a contentious point. Altman’s Review notes the date was settled on by Simon Clarke (despite his initial advice demanding all Post Office prosecutions be reviewed) for reasons of ‘proportionality, resourcing, transparency and POL’s reputation’. Hmm. Not sure any thought should be given to reputation if you’re considering whether or not you might have sent innocent people to prison. As it turns out, pre-2010 cases very much should have been reviewed.

Conflicts of Interest

Altman also wonders about the wisdom of Cartwright King reviewing their own prosecutions. He spends several paragraphs setting out his recommendations to ensure that no CK lawyer involved in deciding a case for prosecution should be involved in reviewing it for post-prosecution disclosure. Altman also addresses the potential for Cartwright King’s commercial conflict of interest ‘given CK’s professional relationship with POL and the fact that the very counsel and solicitors making decisions about POL cases are those who rely on CK and POL for this work.’

Altman decides there is no case to answer having ‘seen no evidence other than a professional and independent approach to this review.’

Given how alive Altman was to potential conflicts of interest in 2013 it would be interesting to know what consideration he gave to his own potential conflicts of interest in representing the Post Office at the Court of Appeal in Hamilton, where he was essentially defending actions made on his advice in 2013 (and again, as it transpired, in 2016).

Richard Moorhead, Professor of Legal Ethics at Exeter University has addressed this point before. In his post ‘Independence, a particular professional blindspot‘, Moorhead wonders whether Altman ‘was sufficiently independent to advise and represent in the Hamilton appeals. It adds weight to concerns about the extent to which Altman’s prior involvement in the Post Office case was understood and candidly disclosed before the Court of Appeal in the Hamilton case.’

I have asked Mr Altman if he considered a potential conflict of interest and whether he took advice on the matter. He hasn’t responded.

The case reviews themselves

Altman tots up the reviews already completed and notes a) the numbers don’t add up and b) disclosure has been advised in nine cases already. The former is obviously a concern to Altman, who says ‘the statistical picture is confusing and I have been unable to reconcile the number of cases reviewed by CK with those seen by me. This needs rectification, if CK’s audit trail is to be robust.’

The latter – a minimum of nine post-2010 cases passing the disclosure test – should be a red flag, but it passes without comment.

Altman has plenty more to say about about the forthcoming (and ultimately doomed) Subpostmaster Complaint and Mediation scheme, not least the ‘real dangers’ of letting those with convictions onto the scheme. He notes that Sir Anthony Hooper, the retired Court of Appeal judge hired to oversee the scheme’s working group had ‘suggested (quite firmly) that it might be more appropriate for cases that have been through the courts to be referred to the CCRC [Criminal Cases Review Commission] rather than go through the mediation scheme.’

It turns out that, despite advice, the Post Office had made a policy decision to allow convicted Subpostmasters onto the scheme in order to try to stay in control of the process. If the CCRC took over, the Post Office would have no say in the outcome of any CCRC’s decisions. They would be unable to keep the lid on a brewing scandal. As Altman says ‘If a policy decision has been taken to permit those convicted of crime against POL to participate in the mediation process, then there is no case to refer convicted cases wishing to engage in mediation to the CCRC.’

I wonder whose fingerprints at the Post Office were on that?

Simon Clarke

The Shredding Advice

On 2 August 2013, less than a month after Simon Clarke issued his initial advice, he was forced to issue another, now known as the Shredding Advice.

Clarke described a weekly conference call which had been set up (in the light of his first advice) between Fujitsu, the Post Office and lawyers involved in prosecuting Subpostmasters to discuss issues with Horizon and how they might impact on future prosecutions.

Clarke reported: ‘The minutes of a previous conference call had been typed and emailed to a number of persons. An instruction was then given that those emails and minutes should be, and have been, destroyed: the word “shredded” was conveyed to me.’ (You can read the full Shredding Advice here).

Altman addresses this in his Review, though is never so vulgar as to use the word shredded. Instead he chooses to say:

‘early teething and “cultural” problems arose as highlighted in Simon Clarke’s 2 August 2013 Advice, and indeed to me in Harry Bowyer’s response to my interim review’

If the shredding of documents was recognised a ‘cultural’ problem within the Post Office (or those dealing with it) in 2013, it suggests the Post Office was already a rogue outfit with some genuine rot at its core. Should it be investigated?

Funny you should ask. This month marks the third anniversary of the criminal inquiry by the Met Police into Post Office and Fujitsu staff (hi Operation Olympos!) As yet no arrests have been made.

How many more bugs?

In his Review, Altman doesn’t seem to express any curiosity about any other potential bugs in Horizon beyond those brought to light by the Second Sight and Rose reports. The obvious questions for any Post Office board/Audit and Risk Committee member reading the Review is how many bugs are there or have there been within the system since its inception and what implications do they have for all Post Office prosecutions? It is a question it seems both Altman and the Post Office deliberately chose not to ask.

It is my understanding that Brian Altman is one of the barristers who has been referred to the Bar Standards Board for investigation over the Post Office Horizon scandal. The BSB was recently found to have improperly paused its investigation into Altman et al by the Legal Services Board.
- To hear more about Chris Gilding’s evidence and what else happened in the first week of Phase 3 of the Inquiry, do listen to Episode 26 of Investigating the Post Office Scandal.
Brian Altman KC General Review 15 October 2013 Download

Second Sight Interim Report 8 July 2013 Download

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.
Appeals, Civil litigation, Inquiry

Bar Standards Board, Bates v Post Office, Brian Altman KC, Inquiry, Legal Services Board, Post Office, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry
A Christmas message to the Post Office CEO

Nick Wallis

Fri 16 December 2022

0 comments
6 min read
Susan Craddock outside her Post Office in Largs, Ayreshire

Susan Craddock (above) has multiple sclerosis. She runs Largs Post Office in Ayrshire on Scotland’s West Coast. She cc’d me in the letter below.

When I asked her if I could publish it she agreed, describing herself and many other Postmasters as “desperate”. There is something Dickensian in the tone of Susan’s letter. I couldn’t help thinking of Bob Cratchit and Ebeneezer Scrooge when I read it. Maybe it’s the time of year.

I asked the Post Office for a response to Susan’s letter, ideally from the Post Office CEO, Nick Read, himself. They have provided me with a statement which I have also pasted below.

I have been hearing stories like Susan’s for a while now. Here goes….

Dear Mr Read,

I know you have said that you are trying your best but there’s a few things I feel you should know.
I paid you in excess of £20,000 for the privilege of running a Post Office.
During Network Transformation I was hounded until I signed the new contract. Your financial experts approved my business plan when I had the post office income and a few cards and souvenirs.
Now, ten years later, I have a much bigger retail area, a cafe and market stall. My husband runs this.
We are working ourselves into the ground. We can do no more.
Why, oh why then am I earning far less than I did before NT?
No pay rises for all those years, that’s why! In fact decreases for some products!
Our income is constantly eroded and I believe the Post Office are taking a massive proportion of the money that we generate, although we cannot find this out of course.
I would like to retire, but one look at my books would put anyone off for good!
We have recently discovered that Postmasters are paying for the Horizon scandal. This is a scandal in itself!
The minimum wage has gone up along with many other regular expenses. This is unsustainable
I am not alone. You will find this in almost every postmaster you ask.
Is it really okay that highly experienced post office workers are only worth minimum wage and Subpostmasters not even worth that!
The government says it wants 11,500 post offices but who pays for this?
More and more it’s the poor Postmaster!
We know the the Post Office has made millions this year and we will get none of it!
Please give us some respect and be open and truthful and please give us the money we have earned!

Kind regards,

Susan Craddock
Largs Post Office

The Post Office Response

“This is the most challenging economic climate retailers have faced in decades and we fully recognise the pressures Postmasters face to keep their branch open and serve their local community.

“Post Office increased remuneration rates in August to support Postmasters, including a one-off lump sum to help with the difficult winter ahead. We have also secured partnerships with Amazon, DPD and DHL Express to help increase footfall for our postmasters and have just announced a new trial partnership with Evri.

“However, we made clear to postmasters in August that further help, particularly with energy costs, would be required from the UK Government who is the sole shareholder of the Post Office. The Energy Bill Relief Scheme announced in September that provides a saving until the end of March 2023 is not only welcome but vital.

“The immediate priority is for post offices to be considered ‘particularly vulnerable’ for further support by the UK Government when it announces the conclusion of its review of energy support by the end of December.

“Postmasters demonstrated through the Covid-19 pandemic that they are there in person to help every community in the country. They continue to provide essential services, including some 400,000 banking deposits each month in Scotland; and over eight million £400 payments across the UK as part of the consumer Energy Bill Support Scheme. If postmasters lose the support for their business energy costs, this could significantly affect their ability to stay open and help millions of people access the help they need.”

With regards to the point about remuneration rates not going up, please see below the full package of remuneration improvements announced in August 2022.

The improvements, taken from a speech delivered by CEO Nick Read, are detailed below:

In Cash & Banking:
- We will double the per transaction payment for banking deposits
- We will pay you a fee for each £100 of any cash withdrawal of £500 or more
- And we will pay you for balance enquiries and failed transactions
- All of these improvements will be effective from the start of September trading.
In Mails:
- We will Introduce an acceptance payment for Click & Drop letters, passing on the full amount of the payment we receive from Royal Mail directly to you.
- Again this will be effective from September trading.
And for Payout:
- We will double the payment you receive for all Payout transactions for the rest of this financial year.
- This will be back-dated to 1 April 2022, so you receive a full year’s worth of this 100% uplift
To provide you with immediate support in the midst of this cost of living crisis, we will also;
- Pay you a one-off lump sum worth 7% of your Mails and Travel Money remuneration based on the five months of trading already this financial year.
- You will receive this lump sum in your September remuneration.
With regards to the Postmasters of today paying for the failings of the past, this was acknowledged by Nick Read in a speech in April 2022 and covered by the media too.

From Better Retailing’s “Post Office CEO Unveils Key Priorities for the Year Ahead“:

https://www.betterretailing.com/symbol-group-news/post-office-news/exclusive-post-office-ceo-unveils-key-priorities-for-the-year-ahead/

Lastly, Read recognised the remaining priority needs to focus on rebuilding trust, in light of the Horizon IT scandal, noting “until we fully address the past, we cannot fulfil our future”.

He said this means giving “every possible assistance to the Horizon IT inquiry”, “delivering compensation to those impacted” and “continuing to deliver operational and cultural changes across the business”.

“To do this, over the anticipated end-to-end timeframe of providing redress for historical matters – from 2018 through to 2025 – the government has chosen to have us set aside over £300m in our accounts,” said Read.

“This is for the administration, management, and legal fees to delivery compensation to all those impacted – including some contributions to those settlements. It is a huge sum. But is a sum driven by the process we must follow and to ensure that full, fair, and final compensation is rightly paid.

“It pains me to say that it is therefore some £300m that is not available for investment in you and our network.”

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.
Blog

Nick Read, Post Office
Government ‘unveils’ compensation scheme for Subpostmasters in Bates v Post Office litigation

Nick Wallis

Wed 7 December 2022

1 comment
4 min read

The government has announced some details of its compensation scheme for the civil claimants in the Bates v Post Office litigation. You can read the ‘process document’ here.

The scheme will be run by BEIS, the government’s business department, and overseen by an ‘independent advisory board’ to ‘ensure the scheme works effectively’.

Although there is no mention of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance in the press release, the independent advisory board includes Lord Arbuthnot and Kevan Jones MP, both of whom have campaigned for more than a decade for Subpostmasters.

The new business minister, Grant Shapps says:

“I am acutely aware of the pain and suffering that these postmasters and their families have been through as part of the Horizon IT scandal. As Business Secretary I will always stand by them.

Today’s compensation scheme will ensure these trailblazing postmasters who did so much to uncover this injustice receive the compensation they deserve.”

(“Always stand by them”, eh?)

Meester Jones

I spoke just now to Kevan Jones, who told me he is not fully across the detail of how the scheme is supposed to work and, crucially, he does not know which firm of lawyers will be running it (though he did say Freeths had advised on the matter), but he did tell me the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance were involved in setting it up and that, importantly, the Post Office are ‘nowhere near it’.

Jones thinks the scheme is ‘a major step forward’ and an opportunity to get ‘the money out of the door quite quickly’ so the claimants ‘don’t get bogged down in litigation’.

He says it will run on a ‘tariff’ basis for various categories of loss including financial and mental health, reputation etc. The independent advisory board will sit across the operation of the scheme but won’t be ‘sitting in judgment on individual cases’. Essentially, he says, ‘if there are complaints from the participants then we can raise them with the minister.

I put to him the JFSA’s case that no scheme is fair until it has put claimants back in the position they would have been had they never come into contact with the Horizon IT system. Jones replied: ‘that’s exactly where we’ve got to get to.’

Lord Arbuthnot

Lord Arbuthnot told me:

‘I have to do what I can to make this scheme as good as possible – I must not just sit on the sidelines and criticise. My understanding is that the oversight board is something that Alan Bates has been calling for for a long time, so I hope he will be pleased now that it’s happening.’

In terms of how quickly things will get going, Lord A said: ‘I gather the first meeting should be this month, which is good. We must ensure that speed goes hand in hand with fairness to give the subpostmasters the compensation they deserve and need.’

With regard to his and Lord Arbuthnot’s involvement in the scheme Kevan Jones told me they have both been campaigning so long ‘we’re not going to suddenly sell out at the last minute’ and ‘if we’re not happy with it we’ll say we’re not happy with it.’

Start prepping now

Subpostmasters are being told to start preparing their claims ‘today’ in advance of the scheme opening for applications in the new year. The government says it will pay £900 per claimant as part of reasonable legal fees to prepare their claim.

Qualification for this scheme is limited to the Bates v Post Office claimants were excluded from the Post Office’s Historical Shortfall Scheme on the grounds that the High Court settlement, announced in December 2019, was full, final and binding. Despite blowing the doors off the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, the claimants were locked into a deal which saw them sharing (after deductions) approximately £12m between the 555.

In March this year, the then Postal Affairs minister, Paul Scully, announced the government had reversed its position and was going to give proper compensation to Subpostmasters. Today’s scheme is a development of that announcement.

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

Blog, Compensation

Bates v Post Office, BEIS, Kevan Jones MP, Lord Arbuthot
From the archives…

Nick Wallis

Mon 5 December 2022

0 comments
9 min read

The gentleman behind this website – Andrew Neale, Master of the Dark Arts – is currently engaged in a mammoth project which involves taking every single secret email newsletter I have written and converting it into an archive.

Each newsletter will then get posted up on this site once it is six months old.

A lot of interesting reportage and information has been exclusive to newsletter subscribers (as it should be), but I think there is some sense in ensuring the older posts can be made available once they have lost their immediate news value.

For example, nearly four years ago today, in the middle of an epic High Court battle, I wrote the newsletter below. It’s quite a trip down memory lane for those of us around at the time, and potentially of use to those who might be interested in seeing how this scandal has developed.

Mr Neale is himself a secret email subscriber who very kindly volunteered to get involved in helping me set up this website. I am giving him a percentage of the money which has been raised via crowdfunding, but it doesn’t come close to the huge amount of work he has done for free, in his own time, simply because he believes the Post Office scandal is important and needs properly documenting. I am deeply grateful to him.

If you feel able to make a contribution to the crowdfunding campaign to keep this website afloat and power my and Rebecca’s Investigating the Post Office Scandal podcast, we would be deeply grateful. You will get the newsletters as they are published rather than six months down the line, and you will be making a significant contribution to public interest journalism. And have our undying gratitude.

Okay here goes with a post published on 8 Dec 2018:

Not even the end of the beginning

Part of my route to work for the last five weeks, Inner Temple, Lawyerland.

Fifteen days doesn’t sound like much, but I feel like I’ve been through the wringer. Trying to synthesise and process the volumes of information which have come out of this trial is going to take weeks. I will give you a quick summary of what happened today and then take you to the next stage, which in many ways is more interesting.

Today was, like yesterday, the slow, methodical demolishing of the edifice which the JFSA, Freeths and Patrick Green QC have built up over the past month or so. Mr Cavender QC cut a knowledgeable, urbane and extremely assured presence. I sensed he was in his comfort zone – delighted to take the court step by step through the apparent flaws in the JFSA’s claim, but equally happy to think on his feet and spar with the judge as the situation required. He was convincing as he pursued the same argument as yesterday. Which is:

The Post Office has the right to do as its contract suggests. There is nothing in the contract which is obscure, hidden or designed to spring traps on Subpostmasters. It is all there in black and white and if you didn’t get that contract or didn’t ask for it or didn’t read it before lumping your life savings/nest egg/pension fund into that deal, well…

The inference was clear – who goes into business, who risks almost everything without asking for their contract or taking legal advice on it or both?

You can complain after the event to the high heavens, but in business-to-business agent/principal situations you do the hard yards. No one was being taken advantage of here. The law assumes you are going to do some due diligence and the law assumes due diligence involves reading the contract.

Run that alongside the position stated position yesterday – that the Post Office is entitled to believe that Horizon’s figures are correct because it is generally reliable, and you have a recipe for disaster.

A possible unexpected side effect of this hardball position is the warning signals it sends out to existing Subpostmasters. If, contractually, you and your business and your entire family’s livelihood are at the whim of a computer system you have no control over, you’re f***ed. Having seen the performances of the procession of employees called to the witness box on behalf of the Post Office there is no way I would let them near my business in a million years. Yet they are authorised to take life-changing decisions with no implications for them, even if they get those decisions catastrophically wrong.

I said in a previous piece: if you are a Subpostmaster and you read the factual information that now exists on the record about the NFSP and you still believe they are looking out for your interests, you are fool (they unfortunately refused to advance a counter argument to that, but I am all ears if there is one).

To the above I would add: if you consider taking on a branch Post Office, and read the factual information that now exists in the public domain about the risks of doing so – you are taking one hell of a gamble, with very little obvious upside. Apart from footfall, of course.

Respect my Authorities

So how do we get to a judgement? From what I have been able to ascertain, each QC delivers a binder of case law to the judge, thoroughly marked up, directing his Lordship to the specific judgments which each party thinks has a bearing on the law with regard to this case. Contract law appears to be a well-developed area and there are lots of landmark judgments made at the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court which are binding on the High Court.

The judge then asks which judgments the QCs want him to favour at and how they want him to consider them. The judge may also have his own view on what he thinks important, and he will occasionally mention this – or more likely challenge the QC on their interpretation of the case law he is presented with. In this way, the judge is not only given the measure of the case, but what both parties say are the parameters in which he should make his judgment.

This trial has generated vast tranches of data. Off the top of my head:

Claim and particulars of claim

Generic Defence

Common Issues and pleadings

Opening statements x 2

Witness statements x 20

Documentation put to witnesses (thousands of pages)

Daily transcripts (ie oral evidence and cross-examination) x15

Closing submissions x 2

Claimant statements 500+

The Authorities

The closing submissions alone are 200+ pages each. The Authorities can be between 20 and 200 pages, the claimant witness statements are vast. Some of the documentation are Post Office manuals which are more than 100 pages long.

The judge doesn’t necessarily have to go through every word on every document, but he certainly has to take note of the important ones, and I would say that’s probably at least 2000 pages of relevant technical data, personal experience and nuanced legal argument, much of which he will have to read more than once.

His job is to funnel all that information into his decisions on the 23 Common Issues. It is a big task. I have already uploaded a version of the Common Issues which has a lot of pleading references attached. The judge asked for a clean version. He got that last week. I was issued with it on Monday. Have a read. This afternoon he rather sensibly asked the QCs to give him two more versions of the Common Issues in which each QC states the judgment they wish him to make after each issue.

What next?

At the end of the trial there was quite a bit of what Mr Cavender called “housekeeping”. Various documents and bits and bobs were requested and/or ordered. The Post Office found its own encryption of Liz Stockdale’s interview impossible to crack, which is great for them as it might have corroborated her witness statement in the same way Louise Dar’s lately-discovered interview transcript corroborated hers. The judge has ordered a witness statement from the Post Office on why it has not proved possible to crack their own encryption keys. The judge also asked for a proper flow chart on the process of dealing with a) a Transaction Correction and b) a shortfall when submitting branch accounts.

All this takes us up to Christmas. The judge has ordered a Case Management Conference [CMC] on 31 January 2019 and put the parties on notice they can expect a draft judgment under embargo from 14 January 2019 onwards, which gives us a two week window during which the public judgment will be handed down.

The CMC is to decide the date, terms of reference, agreed quantam expert (likely a forensic accountant) and number of claimants to be tried in what will most likely become known as round three: the breach trial.

The judge has a duty to expedite proceedings, but the lawyers obviously want things to last as long as possible as it means more money for them. At one point the judge lost his patience and said he didn’t wish to be abrupt or look like he was trying to steamroller the parties, but if it was not possible to try the cases of all six of the Lead Claimants in October 2019 he would schedule a trial for every judicial period thereafter in order to get to a resolution in the case starting in Spring 2020.

At this point I (temporarily, m’lud) lost patience with the judicial process. If the only way to steamroller the parties into doing something positive is promise them five weeks in court three times a year until one of them folds then you have a problem.

So we’ll get our first judgment in this epic saga in six or seven weeks, then we’ll get a confirmed date and structure of the third trial, then on 11 March 2019 the second Horizon trial starts.

I personally think someone needs to take this process by the scruff of the neck and boot it into the world of politics, media and public affairs or the legal action will continue ad infinitum until one party runs out of money, and I suspect that party will be the JFSA.

Blog, Civil litigation, Podcast

Bates v Post Office
EXCLUSIVE: How not to commission a complex IT project

Nick Wallis

Sun 27 November 2022

0 comments
7 min read

Going around the country trying to spread the word about the Post Office Scandal (whilst also hoping to sell copies of my book) has brought me into contact with a class of bright, often retired, professional people who are appalled at what happened.

Some even have direct experience of the story, usually from an interesting angle.

Every now and then we strike up a correspondence. The following piece is the result of a chat which started with John’s partner Pam getting in touch after she came to see one of the presentations I gave earlier this year.

John Murray (pictured) is a now-retired project manager whose most recent job was working for the Cabinet Office as part of its Corporate Services Improvement Programme. Before that he worked for Barclays Bank and before that… the Post Office. For fifteen years.

John has very kindly written what I think is an important piece about the disastrous origins of the Horizon IT system. I have already suggested (in the light of Dave McConnell’s evidence) that Terry Austin might be recalled to the statutory inquiry. I hope that in the light of what John Murray says below, Basil Shall is asked to give evidence. Here is what Mr Murray has to say:

Your first mistake is always your second mistake

Writing about Horizon, the temptation is to start with Alice in Wonderland… but which quote to use?

– “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”

– “It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not’.”

– “No, no” said the Queen. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards”

All of these work perfectly, I think.

I was first involved with the precursor to Horizon – the BA/POCL [Benefits Agency/Post Office Counters Ltd] Programme – working in the Post Office as a link between Account Managers in our Business Centres and their clients on opportunities to automate their products in a future where all Post Office outlets had the appropriate technology.

I also became involved in the requirements stage for the forthcoming Invitation to Tender (ITT). This was where the trip into Wonderland maybe started. The Programme Team ran the requirements sessions, which were in non-Application areas such as Security, on the basis that as this was going to be a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) procurement then you could ask for whatever you wanted as the supplier would have to provide it!

Fruitless

Challenging this approach in these sessions was pretty fruitless as the Programme didn’t want to listen or engage. The problem, of course, was the obvious disconnect with the business case with the Benefits Agency which was based on rollout happening to eye-wateringly tight timescales.

It was clear even at this stage that having, say, security requirements that the Pentagon would blanch at would impinge on this.

It was around this time I was asked to produce the requirements to go in the ITT for the Post Office EPOS [Electronic Point of Sale – ie front end till position] Application, largely because of my work on previous automation programmes.

Now, as the evidence to the Inquiry so far has shown, EPOS was a key factor in all of the future problems.

Bob n’ Baz

The issue with trying to write meaningful requirements was twofold: POCL had brought in a new Director of IT Strategy (I think that was his title), Basil Shall, who had convinced Bob People and Paul Rich, the key programme sponsors in the business, and through them the Board, that EPOS could be provided by a standard off-the-shelf solution such as you would find in any supermarket, rather than anything more bespoke.

As Basil knew about as much about how Post Offices worked in practice as I do about the Hadron Collider it is difficult to overestimate how much this flawed ‘assumption’ led to the future problems.

The second problem was that I was told that PFI meant the requirements had to be based on Outputs rather than any kind of technical specification, which meant that the chosen supplier would need great technical expertise to design from scratch something which could actually support how Post Offices worked, or POCL would need to radically redesign and standardise their processes in agreement with Clients to enable a more simple EPOS system to be implemented.

Again, the disconnect with the business case was stark but any attempt to challenge the EPOS assumptions were ignored… to suggest the Emperor lacked a certain something in the sartorial department was seen as career-limiting.

Flights from Reality

It’s also worth noting that Basil Shall sold the idea that the Benefits Encashment Service element could be provided by an off-the-shelf banking package, another flight from reality, as it failed to consider the business rules and exceptions that would need to be included in any specification.

I continued to work on how to automate client transactions etc while the procurement continued as we weren’t allowed to speak or interact with the prospective suppliers but when we were finally allowed to meet them I went to a series of meetings with each of the final three shortlisted – Cardlink, IBM and ICL Pathway.

I also attended meetings with all three specifically on EPOS together with John Meagher, from the Programme, and Basil Shall and his deputy. At this meeting Cardlink and IBM explained that there was no conceivable way that an off-the-shelf solution could be provided and they would need a considerable amount of input from POCL to design a bespoke solution. It is fair to say that by the end of these meetings, Basil Shall had very little to say.

ICL Pathway, by contrast, were confident they would provide EPOS as per the limited requirements. This confirmed my impression from the sessions with the three that Cardlink and IBM had a chance of delivering a workable system, although not remotely to the programme timescales (as this was always a fantasy), but that ICL Pathway, where I’d had my first meeting with Terry Austin, who struck me as a DelBoy Trotter-type character, had no chance at all.

Cardlink and IBM produced very professional presentations, and had a clear understanding of the difficulties and complexities involved. This contrasted sharply with ICL Pathway’s presentation, which what was, to my eyes, amateur hour.

When ICL Pathway were then chosen (which didn’t surprise me as I’d always suspected price would be the ultimate determinant and I was convinced the POCL Board hadn’t a clue about the complexity of what was going to be required), I went to join the Programme, working for John Meagher, to look after the POCL Business Products, as they were called, but that’s another story.

I wasn’t surprised how things turned out on a technical level but I couldn’t have envisaged the level of wickedness that would happen. Having worked closely with Subpostmasters on designing and project managing the Capture package, which was sold as an aid to back-office accounting, I knew what decent people they were. Having worked at head office, I suppose the Three Wise Monkeys approach of Post Office senior management was to be expected.

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

Inquiry, IT

Horizon, Inquiry
How to destroy a business and a human being: Part 753.

Nick Wallis

Sun 27 November 2022

0 comments
17 min read

In December last year, shortly after I’d published the hardback version of my book, I got an email from Lisa Kear. Lisa ran a Post Office counter within her “Pet Stop” shop in Belmont Sutton in South West London from April 2018 until November 2019.

Lisa got in touch because she had read the book. She seemed utterly traumatised. I asked her to put her story in writing with a view to publishing it on my blog. Lisa wrote me her note below on 24 Dec 2021. Sadly – things got lost over the Christmas period, I got caught up with other work and the piece never got published.

I found Lisa’s note whilst searching through my emails yesterday for something else. I thought I’d publish this now as a reminder of the way the Post Office works and treats its Subpostmasters. I’ve edited what Lisa wrote for clarity, whilst also trying to keep her voice. Her experience sounds grindingly awful.

My short time with a Post Office

So today is Xmas eve and I’m sitting here feeling like the worst person/mum/wife/nan ever.

I opened up my first business five years ago. A shop – Pet Stores. I was doing ok. I could see I would never be rich but I was happy and paying the bills. Three years into running my business my local community said there was a need for a Post Office. I love working with the public and love to help so I offered to apply for a counter within my shop. I had a meeting, then a phone meeting and then went for two days training.

Private Eye

When I was at training an old man walked into my shop and said to my husband “Are you the one opening a Post Office?”

He said: “My wife is, yes.”

The old man said: “Tell her she is mad,“ and handed him a photocopy of an article in Private Eye about the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.

I asked the Post Office about this article and was told, “it’s a handful of people led by a man who’s got it in for the Post Office” [presumably this was Alan Bates].

I asked if this could happen to me and she said she couldn’t talk about it as it’s still ongoing.

“But,” she added, “let me say all the people involved had nice new cars and had lovely holidays,” and winked.

We both laughed and I didn’t think any more of it.

Fitting the Post Office counter

We had nothing but problems from day one! No one kept to appointment times and we had to help design the layout.

The day before we opened, the Horizon system didn’t work and it took many, many people from the Post Office, phone calls and workers coming to see what the problem was. Nobody could work it out until a man from BT walked in and said our switch was off in the main box.

I had missed my six days on-site training due to this and had to ask for more for when we eventually opened. I got four different trainers split over a week or so.

During our first month, when I was locking up to go home (the Thursday before Good Friday), my alarm wouldn’t set. I phoned for help and was passed from pillar to post for the next two hours. I explained that I had a disabled son at home and really needed to leave. At last, someone told me the alarm needed a workman to come and look at it but the earliest they could get there was Saturday. But more than likely Tuesday after the Bank Holiday.

I asked if I had clearance to go home as the alarm wasn’t set. I was told “I cannot give you the clearance, sorry.”

I said “So – I’m meant to sleep in my shop over the Bank Holiday? What about my son?”

I was told I had to stay in the shop by more then one person that night.

In the end I emailed Paula Vennells, locked up and went home.

The next day I had an email from Paula, phone calls from all departments apologising and everyone running around, getting me help.

Summer 2018

One day I cash up and the Horizon end of day balance check says I’m £1600 out. How? Why? What had I done ?

I counted and counted but couldn’t get it right. I needed help. I phoned the helpline in bits. The man on the phone told me to press a few buttons. He didn’t know why my balance was out but not to worry – just put the £1600 back in!

I now am crying and can’t believe it. I phone one of my trainers. He tells me to print off some reports and see if I could find it and if not, then yes, I have to pay the £1600 back!

I printed off the reports but to be honest I didn’t even understand the report let alone find a mistake in it!

I did try another trainer but couldn’t get hold of her so I had to admit defeat and start paying it back, bit by bit, out of my shop till every night. By now I’m spending so much of my time at the Post Office side I had lost a few of my shop customers. Yes I gained lots of Post Office customers but they didn’t really spend in my shop.

Paying back the Post Office was killing my business. As were the letters saying I had sent back money short by the odd £10 or £20 or a fake £50. That ALL needed paying.

I got my ‘debt’ down to £700 and guess what? One night it jumped up to over £1600 again.

As a last resort I phoned the lady I had my first ever meeting with about opening a Post Office. I believe she worked for Network Transformation [part of the Post Office’s shift from salaried posts to commission-based branches].

She couldn’t believe what I was telling her. On 18th October 2018 that lady walked in my shop to see how I was doing. I burst into tears. I was telling her it seems to be every time a specific local business deposited a large sum of cash, it went wrong.

She asked me to balance and I did. By chance, the owner of the business in question then came into make a deposit. She watched me count £2000 twice and enter it on Horizon.

She said I had done it exactly right. She asked me to balance again. It should have been exactly £2000 more than the last time, but it was under again.

She then asked me to sell a 1p stamp, and balance again. My balance should have been a penny different. The difference leapt to £500. The woman told me not to pay another penny and took pictures of the screen.

She emailed the pictures to someone. From then on I was between £100 out £300 a night out. A lady from the Post Office called me to say she would look into it – but maybe I had handed out £50’s instead of £20’s by mistake. I told her I wasn’t that thick. Anyway – I didn’t hold enough £50’s!

A gentleman came from post office to see if he could help me. He said I was doing everything right. I explained to him about the problems with Horizon and things seeming to misbalance after a local business pays in money. He said with a smile “You’re not one of them people are you? That blames it on the system?”

My First (and only) Christmas as a Subpostmaster

I’ve now got lots of stamps to book in and I’m not sure if I’ve done them right. It turns out I hadn’t and I phoned the Horizon helpline once again. I was asked to press a few buttons (don’t ask me what as I don’t have a clue, nothing was explained). After a few minutes the lady on the phone said “Oh no I’ve not done that right. I’ve made it worse.“

This happened a few times until she was happy it was right.

I work alone and was sold the idea of the Post Office counter as a hop-on hop-off thing. Not true. I didn’t have time to hop to the toilet let alone on my shop till. No help was offered. I then received a training phone call on mails and how best to sell them, because I failed my mystery shopper. This was to take place on a working day in December. I asked “Can I close my Post Office for the hour or so for the call?”

I was told no, you have to serve also.

It was impossible to concentrate on both and get the job right. I had to hang up the phone!

After Christmas…

After many letters about fake banknotes, I phoned helpline. I told them this is so unfair, I’ve had no training on what a real or fake note looks like and it’s killing my business as every penny counts at the moment.

They said they would send a leaflet showing me what to look for. They NEVER did!

Special visit… 2019

I had a phone call from the lady who trained me at training school for two days.

She was coming as the Post Office had found a problem with the accounts.

I was so excited to finally have an answer to the money that was disappearing.

I was wrong. This lady – Jane – knew nothing about this money and had apparently turned up to tell me that nearly a year ago I had entered stamps in wrong (last Xmas?)

She came with a bit of paper that told her what to enter on Horizon. I logged on with my name and she entered the stamps and at the end it said I owed around £1200. Jane told me I had to pay by the end of the trading period.

I couldn’t understand. If the stamps were not there I must have sold them. If I sold them but didn’t enter them, would my stamps not be minus and my money up?

Jane said she thought what was happening to me was very wrong (as I also had to pay 2019 prices not the 2018 price when this happened). She spoke about a group that can help Postmasters and said she will email them and they would be in contact. Nobody ever did!

I also explained to her about the local business and the problems that happened every time they paid any cash as a banking deposit. She said from now on they can only pay in sealed envelopes. Don’t count it or open it. Just stamp it.

I started doing this then got a call from the Post Office saying the information was wrong and I would be liable if there was a mistake in the sealed envelopes.

CWU

It was a Royal Mail worker that told me about the union and a Facebook group I had found. I joined and it was the best thing ever. I couldn’t take any more sleepless nights or stress. My family couldn’t take any more and my health very getting very bad. A woman came down from CWU to look at my paperwork (something the Post Office didn’t do). The lady from CWU found the papers to prove I had entered the stamps in wrong then corrected it 3 days later with the help from helpline.

More letters for money

More fakes. Why me? Only one business pays them in, funny it’s the same one as before when the balance goes wrong. I ask can I stop them paying £50’s in? I’m told no. I saw on the CWU site I could ask for a u/v light so I did. I used it every time I got a £50 note, under my cctv.

I get another letter telling me I’ve been accepting fakes, so I phone to ask how can this be when I’ve used the equipment you provided? The answer I got was, oh don’t trust that 100%.

My business and health hanging on… just.

I remember the woman from the CWU telling me I could dispute any Transaction Corrections sent down by the Post Office (something I’ve never been told I can do).

Times goes on but my head will not take anymore, I’m crying daily, my memory isn’t working and my body is in pain.

The hospital thinks I may have MS

Another £600 Transaction Correction and then a £500 one. I’m now to scared to dispute them, I’ve been reading horror stories of what happens and people going to prison.

I’m petrified and I think I’m having panic attacks… so I pay up!

I decided enough is enough, I can’t do it anymore. I have bills coming out of my ears, I’m scared to touch the Horizon screen in case I end up owing it more money and I’m now really not well, I can’t afford staff so feel my only choice is to close my Post Office and shop.

Walk away with nothing

I phone the Post Office and explain I cannot carry on. My health, money, my mind isn’t working and my tenancy is coming to an end. I didn’t have to renew if I didn’t want to.

I tell them I have to be out by the end of November. They ask me to stay on and work December (bearing in mind I’ve already told them my memory isn’t working very well and I’m likely to make mistakes). I was thinking about it and she then said “I have to warn you you will not be paid for it as you do not get the last month’s payment”.

I said, “so you want me to work the busiest month for no pay?”

I was still thinking of doing it for my customers. Then I said “Hold on, I’ll have no stock left, so what about my rent that month if I work for you for free?” She said “You would have to pay that.”

I declined and closed mid-November 2019.

Closing Audit

I had counted the money, my husband had counted the money and two members of Post Office staff had counted it. I knew it was over, and told them when they came it would be. I was so scared I had put money into it that morning to make sure it wasn’t under.

The Auditors gave me the money back that was over and everything else was spot on.

Four days later I got a letter to say I was £10 short. It’s never-ending.

I did contact my local MP. The one and only Paul Scully. He never replied.

Now I’m jobless, in pain and with no money. I’m having to claim universal credit. I started my claim back in October 2021 and only got my 1st payment today – 24 December.

I get £350 a month. I don’t want to leave my house but have to. I had to use a food bank. Do you know how embarrassing and downgrading this makes me feel! I am sitting here on Christmas Eve feeling like a let-down, a disappointment, rubbish.

My membership to CWU will stop as I can’t even afford to pay the only people who helped me!

A job I loved, with customers I loved, gone

I’m heartbroken and can’t see where my life will go from here, but I will climb back up somehow.

I have now been diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder. Every doctor I speak to believes it’s due to the stress of trying to run that Post Office and losing money.

I joined the historic claims scheme but was told my computer was not one of them in the timeline affected.

The Post Office did phone me to apologise nearly a year later, offering me around £1500. I said I hadn’t been treated fairly. As I was bankrupt I wouldn’t have seen a penny.

My case is now with the solicitors but I don’t hold out much hope.

I will never be the same person I was. It has changed me massively!

I know it was only a short time and my story is nothing compared to others but to me it was everything. They destroyed me.

*******************

I haven’t asked the Post Office for a comment on Lisa’s case. The Post Office have told me many times they don’t comment on individual cases. Assuming Lisa is correct about what she remembers, it’s hard to say exactly what was going wrong – but this article points to a pot pourri of disastrous business practices and harmful behaviours which inevitably lead to appalling outcomes. Every time I think I can’t be surprised by what the Post Office has done to people (and I fully accept I haven’t heard the other side of the story in this case), something new comes along.

UPDATE: I have been in touch with Lisa to let her know I have finally published her memoir. She sent me this update on 27 November 2022 and very kindly allowed me to publish it as well:

“It feels great warning other people but my god that was hard reading it again!

I see another Post Office has opened last month a few doors down from where mine was. A new family shop that only opened itself the year before. I wish them all the luck but can’t bring myself to go in there.

My case is still with the solicitors and I think my bankruptcy is the big problem (ironic as I wouldn’t have been bankrupt if it wasn’t for the Post Office). They said hopefully they will know more after the 8th December.

My health still isn’t great but I now receive help and the housing have made adaptions to my home that help with daily life.

After lots of therapy my mental health is improving somewhat.

I will never get over what happened and will never be the same person as I was but knowing it wasn’t JUST me helps.

Thank you for taking the time not only to read and listen to me, but getting it out for all to see.”

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

Compensation

Horizon
Inquiry Phase 2: Star Witness – Dave gives it both barrels

Nick Wallis

Thu 17 November 2022

11 comments
6 min read

David McDonnell, a former Deputy Development Manager on the Horizon IT project with Fujitsu/ICL gave evidence during the Horizon IT inquiry on the morning of Wed 16 November.

What he had to say was devastating. In October 1998 McDonnell co-wrote a report on the Horizon EPOS system with Jan Holmes, a Fujitsu/ICL internal auditor (and a very interesting witness in the afternoon of 16 November). The Task Force report was put together to try to address the serious number errors in the Horizon project at the time. You can read it here.

The Task Force report has surfaced already during the inquiry. It was damning, and included this choice phrase:

‘Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.’

Over three hours McDonnell gave some extraordinary evidence. You can listen to the highlights on Episode 22 of Investigating the Post Office Scandal (which includes clips from the last four witnesses), or you can watch the entire evidence session on video and read along with the full transcript, by clicking on the inquiry website here.

McDonnell describes the EPOS programming team as like ‘the Wild West’.

When asked what he meant, he replied: ‘There were no standards in place, there were no design documents. The culture of the development team was – I wouldn’t say it was a holiday camp, but it was free format. There was no structure, no discipline; it was crazy, never seen anything like it.’

Of the code itself, he said:

‘it was so bad. It was beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Even in the 25/30 years since that project, I’ve never seen anything like that before. Some of the stuff that we found buried in the code was unbelievable. There was unreachable code… It was a mess.’

Among techies at Fujitsu/ICL, McDonnell quickly discovered the EPOS team were the ‘joke of the building’, telling the inquiry ‘everybody knew, specifically the test team who, when I spoke to those guys, they would make it very clear that the quality of code that was being delivered was to such a bad, poor level that they’re wasting their time testing it.’

The solution

McDonnell’s rather obvious solution was to get some better coders in and re-write the cash account from scratch. He was overruled by the Horizon Programme Manager, Terry Austin. McDonnell found the resistance to his solution odd, and believes the way it has been portrayed by other witnesses at the inquiry as too big a problem to realistically deal with, ‘betrayed a basic misunderstanding of how the EPOS system was built or even potentially suggests an attempt to obfuscate the issue.’

He described it using a Lego analogy:

‘if you understood that it was built out of Lego bricks, you could replace the Lego bricks one at a time starting
with the most critical, the most important, which I would argue was the cash account. Here, you could even — because it was a batch process that wasn’t part of the counter client/customer interaction, you could rewrite that as a separate module and have it running as a shadow process on the counter. You could run the cash account twice at the end of the day or whenever, as a secondary confirmation, and use the replacement module to check the validity of the first one. Once you’d proved that it worked, you could take the old one out and just continue with the new one. This was not a large task. It was not something that – I couldn’t understand why they didn’t do it, because it was such a – it’s not a small piece of work but relatively small, and you could have done it without introducing any danger to anything else on the counter.’

The CSR+ solution

McDonnell says matters reached a head when he was called into Terry Austin’s office and offered a promotion. He accepted on the condition the EPOS cash account was re-written. McDonnell says Austin became ‘frustrated’ by his insistence:

‘He wasn’t very happy with me putting a condition on that acceptance. It was clear that the cash account wasn’t going to get written. That conversation was very quickly brought to a halt, and I was ushered out of the office, and I never really spoke to Terry after that again.’

Fujitsu, in its wisdom, chose to try to fix the code, which took a year, and by November 1999, after the system had been accepted, they were getting a similar number of errors and bugs. Fujitsu got acceptance from the Post Office by agreeing to write a new bit of code, known as the CSR+ release which would monitor the cash accounting discrepancies within the system. McDonnell had been moved off the project by that state, but described the CSR+ release as a ‘big bone of contention at the time.’ The way he saw it:

‘At the end of the Task Force they were given the report that we co-authored detailing what the senior engineers, senior auditing guy, and all of the experienced people around the project were saying, detailing the problems. It’s like the captain of the ship’s been told that there’s a hole in the boat and it’s filling with water by the engineers. Instead of fixing the hole, what they did was they went away and constructed this CSR+ release, which is akin to painting a plimsoll line on the outside of the boat so that they could measure how fast it was sinking.

‘The whole context of this CSR+ release was about being able to detect discrepancies between the counter and the middle and back office, the APS systems and such, and highlight where there was a difference between the number of transactions or the balance between the two being different. That’s just building a dipstick instead of actually fixing the hole in the boat. They spent a year, an inordinate amount of time and resource, on this release instead of fixing the problem.’

The only question left unanswered at the end of McDonnell’s three hour session was why he didn’t come forward sooner. Mr McDonnell declined an interview after giving evidence.

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

Inquiry, IT

Fujitsu, Horizon, ICL, Inquiry
False Accounts – London run review by Eleanor Shaikh

Nick Wallis

Sat 5 November 2022

0 comments
4 min read

If she didn’t have her hands full fisking the inquiry evidence of a former Post Office executive or writing a mammoth document on the disastrous origins of the Horizon IT system, Eleanor Shaikh would make a fine theatre reviewer. Here’s her take on the London production of False Accounts:

“Only a hardened dramatist would consider going anywhere near the Horizon scandal and it would take almost madness to tackle it with black comedy. It would also take an unusually brave bunch of actors to recreate the carnage left in Horizon’s wake, in the knowledge that some of those most deeply affected are sitting just metres away.

But Lance Nielsen, Dickon Tolson and the Outcasts Creative have embraced these risks with consummate skill, delivering a fast-moving, multi-layered critique of Post Office’s Empire, whilst simultaneously paying homage to those sucked into the upside-down world of its infamous IT scandal.

Elite Sparrow sub-committee

There’s perhaps no better way of exorcising the demons of Post Office’s regime than through satire, it’s deployed like ammunition by the Outcasts in relentless waves. They train their sights on Fujitsu and the NFSP; they spare neither lawyers nor auditors, trainers nor the elite Sparrow Sub-Committee in their attack. They juggle outrageous costumes with mercurial skill; seize puppets and masks as shields and decoys to defend against any accusations of defamation which real world lawyers might seek to launch in retaliation.

But these moments of hilarity punctuate tortuous scenes in which the survivors’ lives and sanity are systematically stripped away. This piece wasn’t conceived to be a comfortable watch and the writer doesn’t recoil from showing us an endless stream of ‘Smiths’ being beaten into submission by their corporate taskmasters. Nielsen knows that, to do justice to the real Sub-Postmasters (to whom he dedicates the show), he must take the audience to their toughest, darkest places. The inevitable consequence is a solitary speech, under a single light, which takes us to the brink of one man’s devastating despair.

Alan BSmith

The Outcasts Creative makes high demands on its actors as they race through multiple roles, reeling between fact and fiction, ruin and hope. Along their way, they leave behind some priceless cameos; the finely drawn portrait of ‘Alan BSmith’ whose relentless sense of justice is the unifying force for rebellion; a tender nod to Julian Wilson; an Aujard, paralysed by news of the failed recusal attempt and an alarmed Vennells summoned by her boss…

But for all these brilliantly observed, interconnected threads, ‘False Accounts’ offers no honeyed resolution; it ends with actors addressing the audience directly to remind us that the fight is very far from over, the balance of power has yet to be restored. There is a final, moving moment as the company bows to those in the audience whose accounts they have so truthfully told, before leaving us with the lingering question of where on earth do we go from here…

One day, the story of the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history may be honoured with the budget and the weight of a full-length feature film; the heroic struggle of its survivors deserves no less. But in the meantime there is perhaps no sharper medium to take on the staggering sweep of this story, and the human suffering at it’s heart, than that of of raw theatre in the hands of a genius writer/director and his impassioned band of Outcasts.”

I am grateful to Eleanor for allowing me to publish her review here. You can read first tranche of notices from the Birmingham production here (with thanks to Wendy Buffrey, Tracy Felstead and Janet Skinner). And the second tranche – again from Birmingham (this time with thanks to Nicki Arch, John O’Sullivan and Ian Henderson) here.

My work on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is crowdfunded. If you’d like to contribute, please click on the widget you should be seeing to the right of this text (or below if you’re reading it on a mobile). To find out more before donating, please go to my tip jar web page. All contributors will be added to the ‘secret’ email newsletter, which offers irregular, and at times, irreverent insight into the machinations of the inquiry and the wider scandal.

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Eleanor Shaikh, False Accounts, Outcasts Creative