To be absolutely aghast after watching Mr Bates v the Post Office

[Vistada]

I binged all of this in one go, no spoilers (although the current state of play is easily findable...)

AIBU to be absolutely aghast that this happened, and happened for so long.
Absolutely dystopian!

Very little so far. Computer Weekly has been regularly reporting on it since 2009 which is longer even than Private Eye and other news media. The link shows just some of their many articles and they've pointed out that Fujitsu has not had as much blame as you might expect. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252509066/Fujitsu-escaped-huge-lawsuit-because-Post-Office-behaved-so-badly-in-Horizon-scandal

OP who on earth are the 4% who think YABU???!!!

Quite

Didn’t know that. His star is shining even brighter.

they lied and lied for years to cover their own backs
the fact that these people still havent been proerply compensated and convictions still not overturned is disgusting

paula vennells and others need to be brought to justice

You’re absolutely right. I apologise.

A few point on this digusting episode in UK history:

i) CPS were not involved, the PO took people to court themselves.
ii) In nearly all cases the sub-pm were guilty as charged, they falsified their acccount to 'cover' for the loses and signed for that. That is what they were charged with and they admited their guilt in most cases.
iii) New software catching more 'losses' than previous software would not really be an issue as the belief would be the new software is doing a better job.

What I can not getover is the total lack of communication between courts, surely court officers speak to each other and would have noticed a very very unusually high number of cases - surely this should have triggered the court system to wonder what was going on?

Also what about the prosecution office of the PO - again surely they must have thought this was very strange that so many post-offices were having losses of this scale without the sub-PMs looking like they were rolling in it?

forgot about fujitsu how have they also got away with falsifying doscuments and lying about theirsystem

Apologies if this has already been mentioned but there is a petition going around on social media to demand that Paula Vennells is stripped of her CBE, please look out for it, sign and share it.

I do, yes. I think you're implying that that the private sector is necessarily better in some mysterious way than a private company with a government contract. The only reason I can imagine this being the case is where there is insufficient (or no) user acceptance testing from the post office side, possibly because there may not be a budget available. However, software that cannot perform the absolute basic functions of it's design, the main route transactions that it is for and (apparently) couldn't even log user interactions sufficiently well to show where, how and by whom these deficits were created should not have been implemented by any organisation and those working in Fujitsu know it.

Another who's been following it since Private Eye/BBC regions/Panorama/Wallis started covering it. Good timeline in The Times to day dating back to 1998 when Blair signed off the acquisition of Horizon despite warnings from Harman that it was unlikely to be fit for purpose. While P O management accepted Fujitsu claims that all was hunkydory, SPMs were blaming the system from 2002 while 70 a year were being prosecuted for theft. This predates Vennells and includes Crozier.

While any IT person worth their salt knows (a) there are bugs in every system (b) every large system has software bods who can intervene in remote systems, the fact remains that the large number of prosecutions for the same cause should have made any business manager sit up and query whether indeed there was an IT problem.

In 2006 a Horizon expert at Fujitsu emailed her managers to say Fujitsu had made a major legal blunder in not disclosing all evidence during the Castleton trial. Since then Fujitsu appears to have lied, the Post office lawyers and managers have used weasel tactics to further pursue SPMs and to delay the compensation trial. Many ministers like Blair, Davey et al simply accepted the PO and Fujitsu assurances while some MPs like Arbuthnot saw through it.

Whilst I don't disagree that she has many questions to answer and doesn't deserve a CBE, it would be totally flawed for all the spotlight to be on her and none on Adam Crozier and the other execs who were actually in post at the time of the original prosecutions. It takes many people making many bad decisions for a cover up/fraud of this scale to endure.

It is a fucking OURAGE that this case has only reached this level of public interest from a fucking TV drama!! Thank god it has been made.

Does anyone find it odd that the govt is finally getting involved like some knight in shining armour. They own the Post Office so why weren't they involved sooner. Call me cynical but them sorting things out finally would be an excellent bit of pre election PR.

I knew about the scandal however I watched it today at my parents, with my jaw on the floor for the vast majority of it.

i hope Paula vennells is stripped of her cbe and everything else she holds dear. I can't believe she had the audacity to wear the cloth while presiding over such vast dishonesty. She should lose everything. Just like all those poor postmasters, and so should every single other person involved in this outrageous cover up. From Fujitsu to everywhere else involved. Compensation should not be coming from the tax payer

I'm pretty sure the post office were the prosecuting agency not CPS from what I googled.

i cannot believe that judges convicted people on what appears simply to be computer records. No evidence of how they actually committed the frauds, where the money went, nothing. Those judges should be disbarred as clearly they are totally incapable of assessing evidence.

There’ll be another petition appearing on the Gov petitions website hopefully soon. They’ve already submitted it, but it takes a few days for Gov petitions to get approved for publication. Presumably it’ll be a much more detailed petition.

I totally agree she shouldn't be the only one.
everyone from the lowliest manager to the highest CEO that was involved in this sorry tale should be treated the same way as the postmasters.

You know what’s really sad is that even if Paula Vennells had her CBE taken away, and even if she ended up in prison, she still wouldn’t have her life ruined. According to Wikipedia she’s 64 or 65 so she’d be retiring soon anyway, so she’s already had her career and her life, and I assume a huge pension. Even if she ended up in prison for the rest of her life, she still wouldn’t have her life ruined like all those hundreds of people have, with destroyed careers and businesses, losing their homes, destroyed health, generational trauma going through families etc.

it would be totally flawed for all the spotlight to be on her and none on Adam Crozier and the other execs who were actually in post at the time of the original prosecutions.

Gillian Keegan’s husband, Michael, for one.

Don’t get me wrong, the directors should all be brought to justice, just that they’ve already lived their cushy lives and it probably won’t ruin them in the way we’d hope.

I agree. I think the judiciary and the legal profession need to ask themselves some hard questions too.

Oh good. It would be a very flawed outcome if Vennels was made the easy scapegoat and many others escaped attention .

It's cases like this that cause me to shudder when people talk about a bright future where tech will solve every problem and AI will manage healthcare etc etc etc. Sometimes it's naive bullshit but most of the time is hucksters who know exactly how flaky and unreliable software can be but who are too drawn by the pound signs to care.

There's no getting away from the fact that if everything had been written on pieces of paper, this problem wouldn't have arisen. Humans would be able to see the numbers just didn't add up and the whole thing would have been sorted out. But because the numbers were in a big complex piece of software, Fujitsu were able to manipulate them and convince everyone they were right, to the point where people were actually prosecuted on the basis of them.

If someone went to a piece of paper and crossed numbers out or erased them to put in new ones, there would be no doubt that that was fraud. But because it was done on a screen by a tech company that could distance themselves from the action, they got away with it.

Essentially, the extortionately expensive piece of crap developed by Fujitsu was worse, by a very very long margin, than paper. Having worked in tech for a long time, I hope cases like this make people see that tech solutions are not the bright shining beacons of modernity and progress people with vested interests like to make them out to be - they're systems built by humans and if they're badly built they fail. Tech companies have to be accountable for the damage they can cause - it's only then that they'll be forced to ensure they are not selling gold-covered pieces of shit and walking away.

Yup
I have been aware of the story for some time but not paying full attention
I am now!
I don’t know why the government only NOW, when everyone is watching the itv drama, spurs into action.
best get itv doing some other dramas. About the Michelle Mone scandal for example.