My uncle took his own life after the Post Office went after him – this High Court ruling is too little, too late

The subpostmaster scandal is just one example of ordinary people paying the price for corporate malfeasance. My uncle paid with his life

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This is the time of year when I’d usually see my uncle. Our families saw each other a lot when I was younger, but as often happens when children reach adulthood, big family gatherings became reserved for the festive season.

This year we’d have plenty to talk about. Liverpool’s magnificent season, leading the Premier League, lifting their sixth European Cup. He’d been an avid fan of the club ever since painting the famous red kit on his Subbuteo figures as a kid. Ben Stokes winning Sports Personality of the Year, having propelled England to a thrilling first Cricket World Cup title. My uncle was a cricket man through-and-through; his proudest moments were seeing his daughter capped for England and his son in the club’s first team. Over a glass of port after Christmas dinner, we might debate which partnership should open the batting against South Africa, or Jürgen Klopp’s current XI versus Bob Paisley’s in ’77.

But we won’t.

On Monday, after a fight that dates back over a decade, the High Court ruled in favour of subpostmasters whom the Post Office had wrongfully accused of theft and fraud. These subpostmasters had always protested that shortfalls in their accounts were the result of a faulty IT system. Yet rather than investigating the Horizon software, it held the subpostmasters responsible. Over a thousand of them were affected, with many losing their jobs and being forced to pay back large sums from their own pocket.

My uncle was one of them. After 14 years running a respected sub-post office, an upgrade to Horizon started to cause discrepancies in his accounts. Instructed by the Post Office to pay up, he drained his savings for four years until 2013 when, on the brink of being fired and driven into a deep depression, he took his own life.

With his geeky obsession over sports statistics and love of historical trivia, my uncle was the person in our family most similar to me. Not being able to share these things with him into my adulthood is a loss, but it’s only a fraction of that suffered by my uncle’s children, wife, parents and sister (my mother), whose pain I cannot begin to comprehend.

The Post Office hasn’t even tried to.

Just days before the High Court ruled against it, the Post Office settled its dispute with over 500 subpostmasters, agreeing to pay out £58m. After years of fighting – including two trials, an appeal, and a failed attempt to remove a High Court judge – the Post Office cleverly announced the settlement in a general election-dominated news week. Buried within the press release is an apology so unconvincing it might as well have been penned by Mark Zuckerberg. Allow me to translate its PR guff:

“The Post Office is committed to applying the lessons it has learnt.”

After a decade of ignoring subpostmasters’ concerns, and spending over £23m of public money on legal fees – all while we knew there were “high risk” issues with its computer system – we did something about it.

“In the past, we have fallen short.”

We falsely claimed subpostmasters stole hundreds of thousands of pounds, leaving several of the wrongly accused in prison.

“In the past, we got things wrong in our dealings with postmasters and we look forward to moving ahead now.”

We drove people to suicide. Those people cannot “move ahead now”.

Throughout the Post Office’s subpostmaster scandal, Paula Vennells was CEO. Company emails from 2015 unsealed during the trial revealed that she sought an advantageous answer on whether Horizon could be accessed remotely, saying “I need to say no it is not possible”, years after publicly stating confidence in the system.

At no point during Vennells’s leadership did the Post Office – a publicly-owned company, run for a “social purpose” and the self-described “most trusted brand” in the country – inform my uncle or others that they weren’t alone, that others had experienced similar issues with the Horizon software. While Vennells was drawing 25 times the average UK salary, her business was pilfering her workers’ life savings and pushing them to crisis. Has she now resigned in disgrace? On the contrary: early this year she received a CBE for services to the Post Office before being named chair of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

It’s a depressingly familiar script. Following the collapse of RBS and its £45bn public bailout, many of its directors left for other high-flying roles. After selling BHS for £1, Philip Green avoided a boardroom ban and seems set to retain his knighthood despite precipitating the firm’s failure, obliterating 11,000 jobs and imperiling many more pensions. Before Thomas Cook entered liquidation, jeopardising 22,000 jobs and leaving the government to repatriate over 150,000 holidaymakers, its bosses paid themselves £50m, of which just 2 percent will be recovered.

Time after time, it is workers, customers and taxpayers who pick up the pieces while those responsible slink off to the next seven-figure salary. This signifies a rot at the core of the country’s commercial institutions, a cancer metastasising at the heart of UK Plc. When corporate governance causes such suffering without remorse, it crosses the line from negligence into malfeasance.

What can be done? Journalism, such as Nick Wallis’s crowdfunded coverage and ComputerWeekly’s diligent reporting, has played a big role in shining a light on the subpostmasters’ plight – and I am deeply indebted to them. There is also potential in policy: US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has called for more worker representation on boards; a similar plan was forwarded by Labour’s recent manifesto.

In the meantime, until corporate leaders take responsibility for wrongdoing on their watch, their apologies will continue to ring hollow around empty chairs at Christmas dinner.