To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

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There is already a thread about this on the Telly Addicts forum here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/4970440-mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-mon-to-thur-itv-9pm-tv-pace-no-spoilers

However this seems like such an important subject that I thought I would draw attention to it on AIBU.

The first episode aired tonight but the whole series is available on itvx.

Most of you will no doubt have heard about the Horizon scandal, but whether you have or you haven't this program is compelling. It will probably make you furious but it deserves as wide an audience as possible.,

The CPS now needs to rule that EVERY conviction based on evidence from the Horizon system is fundamentally unsafe and overturn them all.

IF the Post Office has any credible evidence against any individual , they can then bring a secondary prosecution.

The Post Office lawyers need to be removed from the prosecution & appeals process. They have lost all credibility and should be facing charges of their own. As should senior execs from the Post Office who allowed this to happen. Every Post Office CEO of the period should be brought before parliament and asked to explain themselves, and then forced to apologise.

The establishment should hang their heads in shame. British Justice my arse !!

Unfortunately, the CPS cannot overturn convictions. That is the job of the courts. Even if the CPS offers no evidence on appeal, the courts can still decide to uphold the original conviction. In my view, the Court of Appeal has been getting this wrong, upholding some convictions that should have been overturned. The government may be able to pass a law overturning all convictions, but it isn't clear. There may be constitutional problems with doing so.

The government may not be able to pass a law overturning individual convictions, as this blurs the lines between government and judiciary; but they may be able to pass a law that states that any accusation of theft or false accounting based on the evidence of the Horizon system is not safe or accurate for the purposes of proving "beyond reasonable doubt" in a criminal court, and that this applies retrospectively to existing/past prosecutions/convictions. This might mean that the Court of Appeal can then effectively rubber-stamp the over-turning of convictions without having to hear a load of evidence in lengthy hearings. There will inevitably be a few who were rightly convicted having their cases overturned - but I'm afraid that's the fault and consequence of the PO prosecuting innocent SPMs in the first place.

So I’m still half way through the ITV programme.
What I don’t get is why Fujitsu were hacking into the post office accounts.
What were they gaining from it , other than trying to frame the post masters ?
Why? Who did it benefit?
What kind of people would do that and let innocent people go to prison for no apparent reason ?

I'm so disgusted after watching the programme. They need to sort this

Tbf I don’t think they were deliberately fucking over the postmasters. I think they were trying to fix the discrepancies caused by their shitty system. They should still never have been able to access it though it’s appalling

But in that case why did they let the lost masters take the blame when they knew there were glitches with then system?

Because those that were in charge would have lost their jobs and status and their massive salaries and their bonuses and their chance at being given a CBE/top job at ITV/plum job with the Welsh FA/and all the perks that being an executive brought them.

It was far easier to pin the blame on the little person with no resources to fight back than take the massive fall if they admitted fault. @Paul2023

I see that, now that there’s a successful tv drama about it, the government are finally going to have a proper look 🙄

I think it was tech publication Computer Weekly that was first onto this back in the 2000s

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know

This is what interests me too. Corporations are made up of people and I doubt they were evil and consciously trying to frame the sun postmasters.

I'd love to know the story from the post office perspective, my guess is it's a case of group think where they quickly concluded the horizon system was bringing to light long standing fraud and fiddling. Once that idea had taken hold it was so established no one stopped to question it.

Baffling that of all the auditors no one stopped and thought, 'this woman really doesn't seem like a thief, what's going on here?'
No one paused and thought 'all these people protesting their innocence, what if they are telling the truth?'

Once it got political I'm sure arse covering came into it and they were just determined to shut it down to protect themselves and that's when the toxic behaviour kicked in but I'd love to understand what got them to that situation with no questioning of the story they were telling of large scale fiddling by small business owners.

Fujitsu (or ICL as that part of it was when it started) have to take a lot of the blame here.

This is what one former employee had to say -

It doesn't have to start off with corporations deliberately trying to be evil - just self-interested. I know a little about letting of govt IT contracts.

The TL;DR is that any supplier who gets a contract to operate an IT system in addition to supplying it may be able to create enough disruption, at the end of the contract, to bring the entire service to a halt for months. Where "the service" is the Post Office, or the air traffic control system, or the NHS, or HMRC. So replacing an incumbent supplier, because their contract has expired or they have fallen below a Service Level Agreement, can be nigh impossible.

Longer version.
Fujitsu will have produced a system to a deadline, and realised the system didn't work very well, but once the PO had abandoned paper accounting, there wasn't an alternative system the PO could just click its fingers and migrate to.

There would be the visible expense of removing the old, and supplying and installing the new, of tens of thousands of pieces of hardware spread round every sub Post Office in the UK.

But that's peanuts compared with the other damage a supplier can cause.

Suppose a contract expires and the incumbent supplier doesn't win the contract for the next 10 years' supply: the contract is awarded to a competitor.

The original supplier may not be in a mood to co-operate with the new supplier, or with the government. For the many months remaining of the contract, the original supplier may do the absolute minimum required to avoid being successfully sued (which will depend on the exact wording of the contract and how much money the supplier is prepared to throw at lawyers). The supplier might de fact do no work at all for 6 months.

Then there's the on-going user data. Contractually there may be an obligation for the original supplier to hand this over to the new supplier. But why stir their stumps to do this in a timely manner.

And when they do finally supply the data, it might not be in a form readily useable by the new supplier, who has spent months or years building or adapting their own proprietary software. The new software is unlikely to mesh with the original supplier's proprietary software, to which the new supplier will probably not have had access.

And on top of all that, the original supplier may claim it is not able to output any but the most basic user data (certainly not enough to do the year's accounting or keep 7 years of records), because of some way this is embedded in the original supplier's proprietary software which the original supplier does not have to relinquish.

You would think the contract would have covered all these bases, but it might not. Or the supplier might have big lawyers and is hoping either to win outright or scare off the government dept (which just wants to get on with its day job), or at least delay enough to cause enormous loss and nuisance and discourage anyone from dumping or crossing it ever again. Tactic sound familiar?

In addition to all of this, suppliers which fail to get contracts have taken to actually suing the government for the process. Eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/24/virgin-trains-takes-government-to-court-over-west-coast-route

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this particular 2019 case, I'm aware that the arrival some years ago of suing, as a tactic by losing bidders, put the fear of god into procurement departments. It added yet another criteria to the job of choosing which supplier for a mega contract, viz, which supplier was most likely to attempt to sue (successfully or otherwise - the process is the punishment. Again, sounds familiar).

Also did someone mention that there was a real life documentary on the real Mr Bates ? Where can I find it ?

https://www.itv.com/watch/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-the-real-story/10a1798/10a1798a0001

This just goes over the background to the dramatisation. For more detail you need the Radio 4 podcast:

Alan Bates on Newsnight BBC2, starting right now.

I'm assuming Fujitsu have issued a raft of Non Disclosure Agreements to all manner of critical staff

Ugh. Sorry my long post is so incoherently written. Congratulations anyone who slogged through that...

I'd assume that, too. I wonder if there are any legal get-arounds?

I think that NDAs are unenforceable if they seek to cover up criminal wrongdoing, as demonstrated by the ones Harvey Weinstein was doling out that came to light

Im still watching the programme. What I don’t understand is , how was anyone prosecuted when the money wasn’t traced ? Surely the police and CPS needed proof that the post masters had indeed taken the money ?
Where was the money? What account did it go to ? Where was it transferred to ? It must have gone somewhere surely ?
Sorry for being dim, I just don’t understand how anyone could be charged without proof they had taken the cash. The cash didn’t exist as such did it ?

Believe me: YOU are not the dim one who is seeking to ignore sense and justice in order to pursue a personal agenda.

Post Office can investigate and prosecute on its own. The police and CPS weren't involved. And you are right that the cash didn't exist. The subpostmasters didn't owe this money.

I just watched it, then the documentary on itv and bbc i player. Its shocking , what confuses me is, where is the money that went missing then? Where did it go, who had it ? I don't understand. I agree the Post Office should be prosecuted but what about Futijsu, they sold a system that was not fit for purpose?
Shame Paula Vennels cant pay back her 400k bonus to the poor people who lost it all .

There wasn’t any missing money. It was just a number wrongly generated by a computer. And the sums in question were ridiculous, because they were supposed to represent massive amounts of cash taken at the counter - amounts of money these little post offices would/could never have handled in the time frames in question. The actual money involved in this debacle was the money the sub post masters were (wrongly) made to “pay back” to PO. Where that money was held and where it ended up is the question. The programme suggests it just went back into PO profits. The PO were effectively scamming these poor people, and that’s why a criminal investigation is urgently needed against PO.