To hope that the Postmasters who were wrongly convicted/accused of fraud are compensated?

[Pottedpalm]

I know there is no adequate recompense for the horrendous stress, loss of livelihood and , in some cases, imprisonment they have suffered, but they deserve compensation and a public apology.

Too late for our local postmistress, she committed suicide over this.

YANBU. I found this story truly shocking. It must have been nightmarish for them, and I definitely feel they should receive a public apology and financial compensation.

Also people have to pay for their board and lodging in prison out of any compensation.

Say what now? That's absolutely ridiculous!

@AlecTrevelyan006

I've been reading up on Paula Vennells, who was CEO of the Post Office during the worst excesses of the accusations against the Post Office managers. She was roundly , and correctly, criticised for her role in the prosecution (and persecution) of the victims

As can be seen, she has been roundly rewarded for her incompetence.

She currently holds the following positions -

CEO of the Imperial College Healthcare Trust
Non-executive board member of Morrisons
Non-executive board member of Dunelm
Non-executive board member of The Cabinet Office

She was awarded an OBE in the 2019 New Years Honours List

She became an Ordained Minister of the Church of England in 2006 and currently preaches at the Church of St Owens, Bromham near St Albans.

The establishment always unites behind its own.

It’s an absolute disgrace.

I first heard about this woman when the series ran last year on R4. Absolutely bloody appalling and she had the power to stop all of it but chose not to. Disgraceful excuse for a human being and she should immediately be removed from all positions she holds.

The Guardian has a piece about her today.

Will cost £100s millions. There must be trail of accountability and who knew what was happening?

Pretty much, the deductions situation is true, some people wrongly convicted have had to repay as much 25%. They lost their appeal against the amount.

It was stated at the appeal "The Independent Assessor was entitled to deduct their compensation to reflect the necessities of life which they would have to buy from wages if they were free."

The courts also failed these people - been following the story for a while and feel the Post Office should be ordered to pay the legal fees of anyone involved with this. And yes to prosecution for the management of the Post Office, although that is unlikely to happen.

If you have shares in Dunelm and Morrisons you may be able to vote against reappointing Paula Vennells, if you attend the church she preaches at you can call her out as non-Christian, you can write to your MP about her relationship to the cabinet office. She's leaving the Imperial Trust this month for "personal reasons".

Our local post mistress was one of those sent to prison. I remember reading about the trial in the local paper & they said she hadn't benefitted from the money & there was no evidence showing where it had gone. I wondered then how on Earth she could have been found guilty of stealing it.

It is appalling for those people. I can’t help wondering whether the computer system churned out as many mistakes in people’s favour though. I wonder how many people fessed up they had too much money?!

Jury trials are shit.

No amount of compensation can un-ruin somebody's life. You can't ever undo the damage of being imprisoned.

I read an in-depth investigative article in the Sunday Times about this quite a while ago, are least one of the post masters committed suicide, incredibly sad

I remember reading about this years ago in the context of lots of them trying to clear their names.

How has it taken this long for the truth to come out?

Disgusting and my god how can you compensate (and they should try) for the life's that have been destroyed.

Absolutely outrageous. The IT company and the PO should be prosecuted

They've also of course lost the money they used to gain ownership of the business initially. Not sure how it's classified but I think it's similar to being a franchisee in that they had to purchase a business interest so they could take on the position.

It's also a warning about what happens when an organisation has invested very heavily in a technology, and then doesn't want to see it "go to waste

From a review from a HA employee Taken from glass door

"OneSanctuary SAP is the name of a multi-million pound software system brought in by Sanctuary in 2016, designed for use by all areas of the business. It has been an unmitigated failure, and is a huge drawback of working for this company.
The issues caused by SAP are staggering and difficult to keep track of. Because SHA tried to implement SAP in a cost effective manner, they ended up vastly under-investing in critical elements. There is no tailoring of the generically presented system ('vanilla SAP'), which is an issue as social housing is a unique environment from a service delivery and CRM perspective, whereas vanilla SAP is more geared towards providing a solution for manufacturing industries. Thus, the system uses corporate nonsensical buzzwords and methods of handling accounts which absolutely do not reflect industry practice.
Here are just some examples of the more specific issues faced by staff:
No rent statements have been issued since it was implemented in August 2016, and if a resident insists on a rent statement it has to be prepared manually in a spreadsheet.
The rent and calculations for accounts are hard to use, and often completely wrong. Mostly because the system was never designed to understand housing benefit payments, and this has a very convoluted workaround which a computer cannot make sense of.
SAP cannot interface with Local Authorities Housing benefit systems so payments are missed, lost or misattributed.
Direct debits do not work reliably, and for a long time following the implementation did not work at all. Front line staff are now preferring standing order.
The front end system of SAP requires far more testing and money spent on it. Each customer account is a total mess of information, with no discernible way to separate notes left between differing departments, with information left by staff often going into the wrong account entirely. This needs looking at as from a compliance (DPA) point of view the breaches are serious.
From a usability point of view, the view of a customers account within SAP CIC does not display appropriate information to the user (as stated before this is likely because the system was never designed to be used by a HA) and the user often has to go trawling around back end systems to find obviously relevant data (e.g tenancy start date, account balance, property type etc). This is a seemingly minor but considerable waste of resources

I remember listening to the podcast on BBC sounds last year and being shocked by the injustice.

I really hope they hold the people at the post office accountable. They knew what they were doing to these people. I think the bit that really got to me was the post office telling the individual victims that they alone were losing money, that they alone were having issues so they simply must be in the wrong.

The recording of the interview with a post mistress (being accused at the time) is so unsettling.

@AlecTrevelyan006

I've been reading up on Paula Vennells, who was CEO of the Post Office during the worst excesses of the accusations against the Post Office managers. She was roundly , and correctly, criticised for her role in the prosecution (and persecution) of the victims

As can be seen, she has been roundly rewarded for her incompetence.

She currently holds the following positions -

CEO of the Imperial College Healthcare Trust
Non-executive board member of Morrisons
Non-executive board member of Dunelm
Non-executive board member of The Cabinet Office

She was awarded an OBE in the 2019 New Years Honours List

She became an Ordained Minister of the Church of England in 2006 and currently preaches at the Church of St Owens, Bromham near St Albans.

The establishment always unites behind its own.

It’s an absolute disgrace.

I've just looked up the first one on your list and she isn't showing as being a member of the board of the healthcare trust. Have they recently done the right thing and sacked her?

Ive also been following this in Private Eye. Good on them for not letting it go.

There needs to be some prosecution over this.

21k!!!! Fucking insult! What some of them went through 21k doesn’t even touch the sides! I’d want atleast a million as the starting point, jailed whilst pregnant, another women taken from her children, another person who killed them selves....21k- talk about rubbing salt in the wound!

@user1636853246842157

Jury trials are shit.

No amount of compensation can un-ruin somebody's life. You can't ever undo the damage of being imprisoned.

Generally society seems to agree with you - hence no compensation for wrongful convictions.

@drpet49

£58 million compensation was awarded but £48 million was legal fees!!!!!! Disgusting parasites. The only ones that ever win are the solicitors and lawyers.

The only way the former sub-postmasters could take the PO to court was with financial backing. These are equity funds that basically like the look of your case and take a chance paying for your legal representation. The complexity of the case meant it was to be split into five separate trials. The PO then did all it could to ramp up the claimants costs by dragging their feet and hoping they'd run out of money. The PO lost the first trial badly, heavily criticised by the judge. He was to preside over the second trial and the PO tried to get him taken off the case because of bias - which would have also meant the first trial verdict would be set aside. The request was rejected as without merit. In the second trial a key witness was a Fujitsu insider who basically destroyed the PO stance that Horizon worked fine. Faced with the loosing another trial the PO did a deal before the trial concluded. They knew if they lost this trial it would cost them £100s of millions. For them it was the cheapest option and importantly they didn't admit any liability. It was from that £53 million that the backers were repaid. Without them there would never have been those trails.

I saw a couple crying with relief/despair today and I got all teary. I can't imagine the trauma of losing your livelihood, being shamed and imprisoned while innocent. They deserve compensation, public apologies, counselling paid for, and so much more. There should be a public enquiry too and Royal Mail needs to have an independent review and likely some people need to lose their jobs, or at the very least lessons learned policies etc.

The courts also failed these people

I'm not sure that that's true. In many cases the defendants pleaded guilty because they were advised to do so to avoid longer sentences and/or more serious charges, and the courts couldn't look beyond those guilty pleas. In other cases the PO did their utmost to hamper the defence, so that on the one hand the courts were faced with supposedly expert witnesses saying the IT system was working fine, and on the other hand with defendants who couldn't explain how money was apparently going missing. I think all the blame lies fairly and squarely with the Post Office.

This story is absolutely heartbreaking. I can't even imagine the horror that these people have been through.

It's unbelievable that some of the people at knew about the software flaws yet let these workers take the flak anyway. Shame on them.