It shouldn’t have taken a change in the law – or a TV drama – to deliver justice to the Post Office victims

Editorial: Many of those wrongfully accused of stealing money have been protesting their innocence for more than 20 years. So why did it take the government so long to act? And who will pay the price?

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 of its workers (AFP/Getty)

The Post Office scandal has dragged on for so long, been so traumatising for its survivors, and has – albeit latterly – provoked such public outrage that the pressure to cut the Gordian knot has grown irresistible. Hence the arrival of a new law that will, almost immediately, exonerate victims and speed up redress and compensation.

After so long (the scandal dates back at least 20 years), any sort of justice is to be warmly welcomed.

The recent ITV series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, provoked a visceral reaction to the plight of hundreds of innocent people who were prosecuted and persecuted. In a few particularly tragic instances, it led to suicide; in many, it also meant reputational damage, social ostracism, ill-health and family breakdowns. Some innocent victims went to jail; others suffered bankruptcy. The mental torture stretched out over decades. Britain has been deeply moved – and politicians, at long last, have been forced to pay attention.

The question arises: why has it taken so long for anything like action to be taken? It is not as if it was business as usual at the Post Office. In the early 2000s, why did nobody at the state-owned company wonder how the number of prosecutions for fraud or false accounting jumped from five or six a year to 10 times that number? Why did no Post Office manager alert their superiors? Why did they assume the Horizon IT system was working when so many things had gone so obviously wrong? Why did the Post Office’s own finance team not investigate this properly? When did the various people in charge of the organisation, such as Adam Crozier and Paula Vennells, learn of these extraordinary problems?

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses based on information from Horizon. It was an absurd situation, yet one that was not only tolerated but seemingly regarded with pride, and pursued with a degree of malevolence bordering on sadism. How did this come to pass?

Responsibility for the widest miscarriage of justice in British history cannot be confined to the Post Office alone. What role did Fujitsu play? Why was their software so unreliable? What did independent Post Office auditors make of the complaints made by so many subpostmasters? Hundreds of millions of pounds are involved – material sums even for a business of this size.

Why did none of the many relevant ministers in the Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson administrations apparently ask so few questions and fail to get to the bottom of the scandal? Why did their successors allow the Post Office to drag its feet on compensation, redress and exoneration? Why did brave backbenchers such as Kevan Jones and James Arbuthnot, who did campaign for the wronged branch managers, meet with such stubborn resistance? Why, after the High Court found against the Post Office in 2019, has it taken this long to make such little progress in putting things right?

Justice should have been delivered years ago. The public inquiry led by Judge Wyn Williams will no doubt provide a definitive narrative from which appropriate legal action against the real perpetrators of crime can be taken.

We should be clear that this matter is far from closed. Exoneration for the innocent will soon be a reality, but even then it will be imperfect. The new law conferring blanket exoneration risks substituting the injustice of wrongful conviction with the new injustice in some instances of wrongful exoneration. Indeed, many of the subpostmasters feel this legislative solution is inferior to the normal court process because it mingles the genuine cases with an unknown number of spurious ones.

Constitutionally, this law is also deeply troubling. Parliament should not be able to pass a law quashing convictions. It sets a dangerous precedent for the chamber to overturn jury verdicts delivered lawfully, if wrongfully, by an independent courts system. For obvious reasons, it is contrary to that constitutional principle for politicians to be able to overrule judges. The truth is that we should never have ended up in this situation which now requires such an unsatisfactory solution.

So now the chapter of the Post Office scandal marked “exoneration and compensation” is closing – and the next one is all about accountability. It does look to be a tale of collective failure by the political establishment, but individuals must also take their share of the blame. Thus far, none of those concerned at the Post Office, Fujitsu, the business department, or among the various ministers of all parties involved, have been troubled by so much as a fixed penalty notice.

When the judge-led inquiry is complete later this year, and a clearer evidence-based narrative emerges, there must be prosecutions, justice and retribution for the malevolence and malfeasance. This story is far from over.