Hello there

It really is a stunning, frosty morning down here in the South East. Today I’m up to the Rolls Building for the second time this week.

Tuesday’s case management conference (CMC) barely touched on the upcoming Horizon trial (starting 11 March). Today’s Pre-trial Conference (PTC) is all about it.

I am hoping we will start to find out who will be in the witness box during the trial, the names of the various experts, what role Fujitsu are going to take and exactly how the court expects to try a computer system.

I’d really like to know if Richard Roll is going to play any part in the trial – the former third tier Horizon support employee who worked on Horizon at Fujitsu’s UK HQ in Bracknell in the early 2000s. When we interviewed Mr Roll in 2015 for Panorama, his recollections were imprecise, but he talked generally about the host of problems his team were dealing with.

According to Mr Roll it was standard practise to dive into individual Subpostmasters terminals to try to fix them. Often with their knowledge, sometimes without. Patches containing major fixes were rolled out regularly. Some of these patches would throw up errors of their own. Minor system errors were not being reported to the Post Office but fixed on the hoof so they didn’t incur fines or charges. Major system errors were notified to the Post Office, but Subpostmasters were largely kept in the dark. Mr Roll was certain that software and hardware errors within Horizon would have led to discrepancies on Subpostmaster accounts, which the Post Office would then hold Subpostmasters liable for, either because they didn’t know, didn’t understand how or didn’t care that Horizon might be responsible. Explosive stuff – and believe me, Panorama checked Mr Roll out very, very thoroughly. He told us he eventually left Fujitsu partly because he wasn’t very happy about what was happening up on the 6th floor in Bracknell. It didn’t sit well with him.

If Mr Roll isn’t involved in the forthcoming trial, I hope someone with a similar level of experience and expertise has an opportunity to explain what it was like dealing with Horizon through its various iterations over the last 20 years. On oath.

After Tuesday’s case management conference I had a chat with someone who is very familiar with the inside of a courtroom. They kindly explained what I had just heard and the way the law works when dealing with a case like this. The peculiar way this group litigation is being played out – trying first the Subpostmasters’ contract, then the Horizon system, then just two of the claimants’ cases but specifically within the issues of limitation, concealment and breach – makes some sense to me, but not much.

I suspect today will be hard going, but I’ll be there waiting for the odd cast pearl and any more detail on the first trial judgment, which will be an early indication as to whether or not this whole experience has been a colossal waste of time and money.

Incidentally, I was told that the government is providing 80% of the funding for this legal action, which is a story, if it’s true. Time for an FOI request, I guess.

If you want to read what I’m hearing as the pre-trial conference is happening, please have a look at my twitter feed @nickwallis. For those wary of social media, twitter is basically a website. If you click on that link, it will take you to directly to my tweets. That’s it. You don’t have to do anything other than read them. Simples.

Full write up when the day is done. Until then….