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!

I understood that they were still one organisation at the time he worked there.

One of the reasons the Horizon problems were so diligently covered up, it’s been alleged, is because the executives (and the Govt of the day) didn’t want to cause any problems with the splitting of the two or the planned flotation of Royal Mail.

Possibly people wondering why people are only getting outraged about it now, when it’s been in the mainstream news for a few years now. I bet those people haven’t actually watched the TV drama though.

I thought the same until I watched it, then I changed my view. I already know about it a few years ago and was shocked then, but there’s something about the TV drama that really hit the story home in a different way. You really see the human cost in a new way.

Plus they could not have chosen a better actor than the superlative Toby Jones to portray Mr Bates. I thought the casting was absolutely top notch.

the bit where the Indian lady stabbed herself in the stomach was just so dreadful. When you saw the man getting out of his car in front of the coach and you had known from thr minute that kettle boiled in their kitchen what would happen. The cast and writers deserve many plaudits. They have made a "niche" campaign blow up into national outrage.

To your second point, most of the sub-PMs were bullied into taking ‘deals’ to avoid longer sentences.

Faced with the prospect of much longer prison sentences, and with no physical evidence they could use to disprove the bollocks ‘evidence’ the post office investigators were showing them / threatening to use in court, many of the Sub-PMs ‘admitted’ to offences they knew they’d not committed.

If you’ve got young children, and no ready money to fight off a corporation and its lawyers, then almost anyone is going to fold pretty quickly when offered a deal. The post office investigators and the c-suite there knew this. It’s similar to a SLAPP lawsuit in intention and must have been hideously frightening for the sub-PMs caught up in it.

I’m interested to understand how/why the defence counsel for all those convicted didn’t get together to raise the alarm. It was a huge volume of convictions but surely those defending would have looked at the other cases when assessing the strength of their own? Does anyone have any insight into that eg from the podcast?

Also, does anyone have stats on average number of prosecutions pre-Horizon as a comparator? You’d think that they would have been suspicious as to why sub postmasters and mistresses had suddenly turned more dishonest in droves?

I was thinking along the same lines, Stephanie. I mean, where was the audit trail, what happened to the help desk dept fault logs. I think there was a mention of the latter in the programme that followed part 4 of the drama (the smoking guns). But who was monitoring the fault logs, the regular reporting from these etc? Where was the user group? If the Post Office thought this software would reveal the level of fraud it thought was happening, didn't anyone's jaw drop at the sheer numbers? Wasn't anyone curious enough to poke around the data?

To that last point, I pretty much guarantee that most of it was either just a number on a balance sheet where it was basically no more than a rounding error, or it would've been explained as a fantastic feature of Horizon that it's catching all of these crooks that went unnoticed for years, and somebody would've been promoted. Middle management don't go looking for problems, so when something looks like good news it gets spun as such and passed up the chain as something to be celebrated.

And Rishi has just decided to get this dieted now, how many years in? I knew about this 2005/2006 and I didn’t even live in Britain.
Interesting how it’s taken aTV drama, oh and a general election looming, for Rishi to get off his arse and do something.

I really want to watch it but I know I’m going to be too fuming and frustrated by these terrible events. My blood pressure rises just reading about it.

Exactly. His (and many other ) paws are all over this, and they are all sitting quiet and hoping people are stupid enough to be happy to pin all the blame on Vennels. (I am no defender of Vennels, but I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that others who are deeply culpable may not be held to account)

The CPS had nothing to do with it. The Post Office prosecuted privately.

Honestly, I think the CPS would have raised issues far more forcefully (spikes in numbers post implementation of Horizon and the common defence of "the computer did it" and so on).

As for going after the bosses, that's going to be remarkably difficult and even harder to make anything stick. They'll blame Fujitsu and say they acted on their advice and that of the legal section and so on.

This will go the way of other investigations into our respected institutions. Nobody will be to blame. Only following orders. We did our best. Here's some - not enough- money. Lessons will be learned, never happen again. Until the next one.

I'm amazed that so many people were unaware that this was happening, it's been reported for at least 12 years. Why is it relevant that Asian women were involved? Some were Welsh too!

It certainly looks as if some of the Asian women were sentenced more harshly, to me at least.

Because a lot of people who watch iTV drama don’t read or watch much news. More and more these days it’s possible to limit what you hear only to topics that interest you and anything involving post office/IT/accounting won’t get through your algorithm set to murder, celeb goss and sport.

I think this was on the Radio 4 podcast - the official organisation that represented subpostmasters and liaised with the Post Office over any operational or contractual issues was funded by the Post Office, so not independent. Also, at a time when more and more functions were being taken away from post offices and businesses were therefore less profitable, some people involved were apparently worried that making a big fuss would damage their own businesses and they wouldn't be able to sell them on. I imagine if you were a subpostmaster who'd never had a problem you might swallow the PO and Fujitsu line that the system was working perfectly well.

Also, it can be hard to keep up with such a long running issue with many technical aspects. Personally, I'm in awe of the writers and actors being able to make a compelling presentation that does give a significant amount of the important information while at the same time commanding attention.

I think the issue (originally, before they got into cover-up mode) was that they thought that postmasters had always had their hand in the till, but it was difficult to know because they didn't have a computer system like Horizon to show up the shortfalls. So they thought that the problem had been bigger than they thought, and that now they could find all the criminals.

Of course, as time went on, and it became clear the system was at fault, that was when the cover-ups started. The great and noble Post Office couldn't be seen to have anything wrong with it.

As for going after the bosses, that's going to be remarkably difficult and even harder to make anything stick. They'll blame Fujitsu and say they acted on their advice and that of the legal section and so on

And I fear the lawyers will get away with regulatory action on the basis that they were just following information provided to them.

Can someone explain how the PO could have prosecuted people without the involvement of CPS? I thought only the CPS had the power to do so. I understand if they took them through civil courts but these were criminal cases.

convicted didn’t get together to raise the alarm. It was a huge volume of convictions but surely those defending would have looked at the other cases when assessing the strength of their own? Does anyone have any insight into that eg from the podcast

I don't get the impression some of the defence lawyers did a very good job, but in their defence the early cases were before the internet and social media were really a thing, and so they didn't know their cases weren't unique. And probably didn't have the capacity or resources to demand evidence from the PO, which is still refusing to give it to the Inquiry! Later on, once Computer Weekly got the story and Alan Bates started his website, it should have been easier to find this stuff out.

No, they have private prosecution powers.

As does the RSPCA, which has also come under fire for some of its prosecutions, although nothing on this scale, obviously.

Personally I think all cases should have to go via the CPS to stop this sort of abuse and cosiness.

You do have to wonder about the external barristers who were involved in these cases though and why they didn't raise issues. They must have realised there were worrying patterns as time went on.

Surely, there should be questions for Fujitsu to answer too.
Convenient that the visitor book went missing!

The CPS is not the only body in England & Wales with the power to prosecute. That power is granted in legislation (“statutory”).

Other bodies that have this statutory power in addition to the Post Office are the Health & Safety Exec, the Civil Aviation Authority and I think HMRC.

I'm not sure I can watch this. I started following this story some years ago and the sheer impotence of the poor people being accused just brings on acute anxiety in me. Issues were raised YEARS before it all blew up but everyone on the ground was ignored in favour of computer software people who were telling everything that it was all ok, and any anomalies must be human error (ie theft). And people were SCREAMING that it wasn't theft, it was computer problems, and not being listened to, because it was easier to blame the postmasters than the expensive new software.

Argh, it makes me angry just thinking about it. Those poor, poor people. Incidentally, a very good friend of mine is a postman, and I'm not sure that the PO is going to last much longer if some of his stories are to be believed....