MR BATES VS THE POST OFFICE - mon to thur ITV 9pm - tv pace no spoilers

[Blondeshavemorefun]

Mon to thur

Mr Bates vs The Post Office is an ITV drama based on a true story of injustice starring Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh, WIll Mellor and Monica Dolan.
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a hard-hitting ITV1 drama starring Toby Jones, Monica Dolan and Julie Hesmondhalgh among others.

The series details one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, where thousands of Post Office sub postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a defective IT system.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office follows Alan Bates (Toby Jones), a sub postmaster who decided to fight back against a scandalous miscarriage of justice.

He was one of thousands of sub postmasters and postmistresses who between 2000 and 2013 were falsely accused of theft due to financial discrepancies thrown up by the flawed Horizon computerised accounting system.

More than 700 were prosecuted and several went to prison while others lost their homes and life savings trying to pay back the money the Post Office claimed was missing.

Many were unfairly ostracised from their communities, who believed they were criminals.

In 2009 Alan Bates decided to form the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (https://www.jfsa.org.uk/), uniting thousands of his colleagues to
fight to clear their names.

Breaking news. Tom Witherow at the Times is reporting that the public inquiry has obtained covert recordings of senior staff, including Paula Vennells. An inquiry source says there are around 80 tapes and they could be "damning".

@Rummikub - Until 2010, Adam Crozier was CEO of Royal Mail which owned Post Office. David Mills was CEO of Post Office 2002-2005 and was succeeded by Alan Cook. He left in 2010. There was then a gap before Paula Vennells was appointed, by which time Post Office was no longer owned by Royal Mail. They weren't mentioned because they weren't as closely associated with defending Horizon as Vennells. Bates didn't start campaigning until September 2009, and that is the period primarily covered by the ITV show, hence the reason we only see Vennells.

An ignorant question as I am not sure how it all works.

Would there have been a way to record all transactions manually or is that ridiculous?
So record all of the outgoings and ingoings manually and then add it up to prove horizon was wrong or is it far too complicated?

Aslo I worry about the court cases as a pp said ? Why didn't they chase the money? Jo had no evidence of 36k spending which was a lot back then. The court seemes to simply accept it was gone despite cctv and bank accounts showing no stolen money.

I am sure its more complicated than this but this is what I am wondering.

Recording transactions manually - possibly, but difficult, particularly in a busy office, and Post Office probably wouldn't have accepted it as proof anyway.

Re the courts, it isn't their job to chase the money. The judge in one case (Seema Misra, who was convicted of theft) was clearly uneasy that there was no trace of the money, but juries were happy to convict based purely on the computer evidence.

Re the courts, it isn't their job to chase the money. The judge in one case (Seema Misra, who was convicted of theft) was clearly uneasy that there was no trace of the money, but juries were happy to convict based purely on the computer evidence.
Just terrifying.

@Blondeshavemorefun why Alan Bates turned down an OBE

Ooh. That's interesting.

@Newtoniannechanics I may be wrong but I got the impression some did do this and could show where Horizon was wrong but it wasn’t accepted by the PO.

Thanks that makes sense.

Just watching the first episode, what a dreadful scandal this is, those poor people.

I wondered the same, I asked my dh who is an accountant, could they have got an independent local accountant to forensically look at their books for them, but of course the single source of ‘truth’ for all of their transactions was bloody Horizon. Which was wrong anyway.

It's worse than that I think.
As I recall, at least one of the postmasters had the books/evidence looked at by the Post Office's so-called accountants/auditors and their report (only later made public as a result of the campaign) made clear that there was no evidence of theft. Despite this the Post Office put the frighteners on the subpostmaster and got them to plead guilty to "false accounting" to escape a charge of "theft" carrying a potential prison sentence - a charge which the Post Office knew that it could not make.
"Malicious prosecution" is too small a label for such evil.

One thing I don't understand - am only moderately techie but I thought it a simple basic requirement of any decent software system, especially one involving money, to have an audit trail built in. Hell's teeth I think even changes to my online shopping list are logged.
But Fujitsu could get its staff to log into the system with no trail at all?
If so this is surely incompetence and worse on a massive scale by both Futitsu and the Post Office which was supposedly managing the roll out/system.
Did no Fujitsu/Post Office managers not ask to see/ask about logs?
If so why not?
Ir there were no logs what was to stop Fujitsu just stealing money on the back of their own system and banking it?
Many of course would say that they stole every penny they received for supposedly developing and running the system.
And I gather are still extracting money from the public purse for other systems.
They should be sacked from every public system they are involved in my view - and definitely not allow them any others.
For future good behaviour across multiple territories (not ours) - maybe they could be given a contract to manage library book borrowings/public toilet cleaning rotas.

@Offwiththecircus I think there was/is a computer log the question is what happened to them.

This is worth a read https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf

They write how the then PO chairman Tim Parker should also be held responsible. He has had many high profile holdings.

Fujitsu had logs. However, Post Office had to pay to get access to them. This, coupled with the investigators suffering from confirmation bias (they had long thought that subpostmasters were on the fiddle), meant that they weren't looked at. Even when they were, the logs weren't adequate to show which entries were made by Fujitsu staff. They were supposed to use high terminal numbers (above 32 IIRC) which would make it clear that this wasn't Post Office staff, but this didn't always happen. And yes, there was massive incompetence, certainly at Fujitsu. Rights that should have been restricted to just a handful of users and used sparingly with a full record kept of what had happened were actually used routinely by a lot of people with no records. And the software developers were very poor. An internal report on the Horizon software stated of one piece of code that whoever wrote it had no grasp of basic mathematics or even the most fundamental principles of programming.

What stopped Fujitsu stealing money is that there was no way for them to do so. Yes, they could manipulate the figures at a subpostmaster's branch, resulting in the subpostmaster having a shortage which they had to pay to Post Office, but that didn't generate any money for Fujitsu.

Sorry yes you are right

Sorry. Sleep deprived

Thanks @IbizaToTheNorfolkBroads

Tim Parker was the head of National Trust for several years recently. Those responsible are a lot wider than Paula Vennells. I tried to look into the PO governance and had to give up as it was too complicated. So many many people and across all the years from before 1999 to present day too.

There are people who pushed for Horizon to be introduced when it wasn't ready and there were known problems, both in the Post Office, potentially Government/ Civil Service? and Fujitsu. Then those who disregarded evidence it wasn't working properly and then those who found out it wasn't working and Subpostmasters were being wrongly blamed and covered it up. And those who continue to obstruct justice and doing the right thing to this day.

Another of the many appalling aspects is that the Post Office is still using Horizon and Fujitsu are still being awarded Government contracts...

ALL the convictions should be overturned now. It's appalling so few have been so far.

really? you think the PO or Fujitsu dumped them/burned them?
Or the PO "redacted" them?
Do you have a source/link for this whatever?
The first step in any decent investigation as opposed to stitch up seems to me to look at the evidence.
I don't rate my chances of getting away with banking fraud.
(mm - maybe I should get a job at Fujitsu).
(PS - anyone ever pondered the first two letters of their corporate brand?
FU?

thank you - you seem to know a fair bit about this.

but
>>Even when they were, the logs weren't adequate to show which entries were made by Fujitsu staff

Surely any log of entries/changes which doesn't make a record of who made the changes isn't worthy of the name log? ie essentially worthless - essentially not a log?

(contemplates career as international fraudster on Fujitsu systems wearing a mickey mouse suit)

Does anyone have a list of current Fujitsu UK government contracts?
Surely this is open information?
or available on request?
Ponders ringing the Fujitsu PR team.

@Offwiththecircus just do an FOI request to each gmt Dept. Look at “WhatDoTheyKnow” https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

This is interesting I just searched Fujitsu https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/Fujitsu/all

mm
current bla from Fujitsu

https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/about/local/responsible-business/

Dig

Pics of
Flowers
Person in wheelchair
People of various colours/ethnicities
Children
Folks of various ethnicities with interesting haircuts having an animated discussion

Key bla phrases about their concerns

"A world that faces a series of complex challenges: from economic inequality to climate change"

"At Fujitsu, we believe that by connecting people, technology and ideas we can tackle these challenges at root, at pace and at scale"

"By doing the right thing and contributing to society in many ways , we hope to earn the trust we need to continue to grow and make long term, stable contributions to our world."

"That’s why we put being a responsible business at the heart of everything we do. It drives how we do business and how we deliver for our people, our customers, society and the planet"

Of course this could all have been generated by their/its AI bot.

I don't understand why there wasn't some sort of report facility in the program, so that the postmasters could see what entries and figures the program was using to calculate any "shortfall"?

I used to have to re-calculate things 3 times on a calculator, as I make entry errors! A spreadsheet is much better because you can see what numbers you have actually entered.