To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

Both DH and I shed a tear at the end. The figures shown at the end were even more shocking!
Alan Bates is an absolute legend.

Thank you for that! I'm going to listen!

We just binge listened to all the BBC Radio 4 podcasts 'The Great Post Office Trial' and it's even worse than it appears in the drama.

What an absolute disgrace.

Alan Bates was offered an OBE and turned it down. Good man.

We binge watched all the episodes the other day.
Absolutely heartbreaking- and shameful. The acting was brilliant, it really made you feel what they were going through. Those poor people went through hell, and still haven't come out the other side.
And Alan Bates needs a knighthood!

She stepped down as CEO of Post Office in February 2019. At that stage the board of Post Office still seemed to think they could win the group litigation. And no, she did not report to the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State. She reported to the Post Office board and the chairman, Tim Parker.

Did it go deeper into government? Yes - Tony Blair carries some of the responsibility for what happened. And the civil service definitely wanted the whole thing to go away. They resisted any form of inquiry. I could be wrong, but I don't think Vennells was being given a thank you for taking the fall.

One thing that needs to be addressed is the god-like status some senior managers seem to be accorded in their organisations.

I've just started watching and am raging and horrified in equal measure.

Those poor, poor people.

The petition has gone through the roof thankfully.

There is - the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP). It has been funded entirely by Post Office since 2016. Even before that, it failed to defend subpostmasters. They seem to have been concerned that acknowledging problems with Horizon would damage the value of subpostmasters' businesses. Subpostmasters experiencing problems who turned to the NFSP got little or no help.

Yes. Where is her integrity?

Surely an application for the forfeiture of her pension can be made? Should be made.

And yes, corporate manslaughter should also be looked at.

I too haven't read the whole thread, but wanted to add a point, which I apologise for if it is a repeat of someone else making the same point.

My point is about the PO being its own prosecuting authority, with the power to bring cases to court for criminal prosecution, bypassing the Crown Prosecution Service.

I can see how, in the days pre Horizon, this would have made sense. Sub post masters would have kept their own records manually/via double entry bookkeeping. These would have been audited by the PO, and mistakes/fraud picked up without having to involve the police and CPS and extra, unnecessary steps in gathering evidence etc. The PO were effectively "independent" of the sub post masters' accounts.

Once Horizon was introduced, and sub post masters compelled to use this system, the PO was no longer independent of these accounts. In fact, they were directly and evidentially involved in the accounting process, and fundamentally conflicted from any semblance of being fair prosecutors. As such, they should have been stripped of their power to prosecute for accounting anomalies picked up by this system. That they were not is part and parcel of this massive scandal, because they were able to rely on their own wrongdoing (a botched computer system) and cover it up via what can only be described as a set of malicious prosecutions.

I know, right? It’s not even she knew, stepped down and stayed silent. She stayed in role. Enabled it. Lied to cover it up. Then took a cbe and a golden handshake and buggered off.

even if someone in government was directing this strategy. (And I’m guessing ed davey has just played the incompetent fool as people are going to start asking about government oversight, ) she still was complicit, enabled it, she knew, she knew they were being persecuted, robbed, she she lied, covered it up, enabled it.

I agree that a bit of common sense and looking at the type of post office/the number and type of transactions carried out would ( and should) have raised questions. I was fortunate that my PO was very small , not very busy and we could between the 3 of us pretty much list who'd been in and how much the transaction had been which made it easy to keep track so I knew week to week how much cash there should be but in a busier office that's not so easy.

Ah ok! I've only watched one episode.

Yes - the Federation does exist but I was running a business , my husband was also running a business - both 7 days a week in the tourist season. We had a young family and were very rural so it really wasnt feasible to attend meetings (and im not sure there were very many regular Federation meetings in my area). Most subpostmasters are in a similar position running a small business with not much spare time.

The national federation of sub post masters, it's mentioned in the program and one of the characters who had been a fed rep is in the program.

Isn't there some kind of trade association or professional body for postmasters? That's amazing and also explains why the PO got away with it.

Listen to the podcast mentioned above. A lot of this money never really existed. The Horizon system would put through one side of a transaction and not the other, or double post things, and the so called deficit it threw up at the end of the week was often entirely fictional. The Post Office found it convenient to believe that this money actually existed and so pursued the subpostmasters to get it from them. Nobody appears to have used any common sense in this. It's pointed out on the podcast that the amount the Post Office wanted from Jo Hamilton was far in excess of any amount of cash she could ever have had in her tiny sub post office. Where was it supposed to have come from?

Sorry havent read full thread but also wanted to add that many subpostmasters are actually quite isolated. I was a subpostmaster for a couple of years in a very rural area so there was only me and my dh and my bil worked for us for about a year. I had no contact with other subpostmasters. It's not like in an office/other work environment where you can say "has anyone else noticed that the system does x,y, z first thing on a Monday" at teabreak.

It was also made very clear that you were responsible for any shortages no matter how they happened and that it was a big deal to be investigated or audited. I think the PO took advantage of the isolation of subpostmasters and that most of us were decent, law abiding people.

I count myself extremely fortunate not to have got caught up in the whole thing and think "there but for the grace of God go I " every time I see/read anything about this. I also wonder how Paula Vennels can sleep at night

@Janieforever

"pure evil"

Let us not forget she was an ordained C of E priest as well. I think the fires of hell would be quite apt.

I hope Paul Vennells burns in hell

agree. Even if a government minister above her was ultimately guiding this, she stayed in. She made it happen. She knew, and she did nothing to prevent it. She did everything xhe could to allow it to continue and cover it up.

pure evil.

The thing is the contracts saying sub poster masters were liable were put in place when it was a paper system. When horizon came in the contracts were not changed. With the paper system the sub post masters could go back and trace it, they had the documentation. Losses were rare. But when horizon came in they couldn’t trace it, they had no means to do so, but the old contracts still existed, and the post office leveraged them

but more importantly they also leveraged they could bring their own cases, had their own powers, and used that to convict people. And then they used the legislation regarding proceeds of crime, after conviction, to strip them of their assets, their homes, their savings.

it is utterly shocking . Absolute power corrupted absolutely.

It’s like the millions of normal Germans who didn’t do much about the nazi atrocities.

Most people are sheep like, will follow orders if it’s in their interests and they will have been told to protect that system at any cost because the alternative is extremely expensive. So that’s what they did. Milgram experiment all over again.

I hope Paul Vennells burns in hell.

But what happened to the money that the sub postmasters paid to the post office through the proceeds of crime legislation? As the shortfalls in accounting didn't actually exist, where did that money go? I've heard a lot about compensation but nothing about actual repayment. Apologies if I've missed it.

I've just listened to the podcast linked to above - https://audioboom.com/posts/8417438-ep-34-where-did-all-the-money-go

I think MasterBeth's point above is the crucial one here, and @PerkingFaintly said the same thing in a different way:

Just as with Crapita, the DWP and DWP service-users, so too do Fujitsu, the PO and the subpostmasters & mistresses sound like a classic case of Supplier, "Customer 1" and "Customer 2". Customer 2 is the end-user, and is captive with no choice but to use whatever product or service Customer 1 procures. The supplier and Customer 1 care only about their cosy relationship with each other; Customer 2 gets screwed.

The Post Office had no incentive whatsoever to sort the problems out. They believed (wrongly, I think, as decided in one of the court cases) that their contract with the subpostmasters meant they could retrieve all losses from them, no matter how they arose. The examples given in the podcast aren't just about the Horizon system. The PO could demand subpostmasters reimburse the PO for things like this too.

1. Employee of subpostmaster steals money from till, subpostmaster knows this but the Investigation Branch refuse to look into it, police say 'Nothing to do with us, the PO investigate all crimes to do with the post' and the employee has vanished along with the cash. PO say to subpostmaster 'Hand over the money, it disappeared on your watch, it's your problem'.
2. The PO's central accounting office puts the wrong code on a transaction or miscounts the money sent to a sub post office or somebody there miskeys an amount. The sub post office ends up in deficit. See above for PO response.

They went to great lengths to vet subpostmasters to make sure they were honest decent people before allowing them to take on the role, but from that point on seem to have switched to the default assumption that everyone in the system was dishonest and on the take.

They also seem to have been too ignorant about computer systems to be competent to assess what Fujitsu were palming them off with. There isn't a computer system in the world that is free of software problems. How could they claim Horizon was running perfectly and expect to be believed? Why, indeed, were they believed, in court case after court case?