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.

Fujitsu are deeply entenched in the Government, they have contracts with HMRC, Ministry of Defence, Home Office (Police National Computer), Border Force, DWP, Ministry of Justice, Dept of Health and Social Care to name a few. They've all got their snout in the trough. 'Alleged donations' to the Tory party, Infosys partnership/Rishi connection, the leverage and influence the Japanese have over the Government is enormous (Investments, trade agreements etc). Oh and the UK CEO's partner works in the Cabinet Office but I'm sure that influence has never been used!

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

Agreed. Including the appeals that the Court of Appeal has rejected. Given the level of wrongdoing in Post Office that has been exposed by the inquiry, every single conviction should be overturned. Yes, that may mean a few people who were genuinely guilty have their convictions quashed, but that would be a vast improvement on the current situation.

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?

In theory it did. It showed which terminal was the source of the entries. The fact Fujitsu engineers didn't follow the correct process when making modifications to branch accounts undermined it.

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"?

Post Office didn't think that such a facility would be of any use. The subpostmaster in his or her branch simply didn't have the information needed to see where any alleged shortfall came from, nor did they have any mechanism for challenging it. For a long time, Post Office insisted that Horizon had a "dispute" button that a subpostmaster should press if they didn't agree with Horizon's figures. They were eventually forced to admit that there was no such button, nor had there ever been one.

If a bank sees a shortfall in a branch, it has to cover the shortfall itself (unless, of course, it can prove theft). It is therefore incentivised to ensure that its systems are error repellent (i.e. they make it hard for users to make mistakes) and to investigate shortfalls properly. Post Office had no such incentive because they could simply push any shortfall onto the subpostmaster.

I didn't know that Alan Bates had turned down an OBE due to Paula Vennells being awarded a CBE . Hopefully hers will be rescinded .

Hello Blondes

Just to let you know - I'm not ignoring you - I am not receiving your messages (again!). I'm also not able to DM you for some reason.

I watched this on the recommendation of a friend and it is excellent! (If that is a spoiler, I apologise)

That's interesting.

It's good to know that some people have morals.

The petition to strip her of her cbe is now nearly at 500k.

Gosh . . . that's very . . . reassuring . . . 😟

Especially as the PO are apparently still contesting the costs.

I also feel that the Post Office could easily be got rid of now had it has served it's purpose. Local shops could take over all the functions of the Post Office, eg parcel deposits as they do for other parcel companies (or Royal Mail could be Renationalised just concentrate on letters...).

Has it, though?

In many small villages it is the only method available for people to get cash out of their bank accounts (or pay cash in).

A lot of elderly people cannot pay cheques in via phone apps, either. I know that there are fewer and fewer cheques around these days, but they do get issued occasionally.

As far as cash is concerned, if there is no cashpoint in a village, and no bank branch, it can be difficult for people to obtain it.

Again, I accept that fewer and fewer people use cash nowadays but elderly people often do.

Our village bank branch is closing in a month's time. It will not affect me but there are people who occasionally use cash and the post office is vital for that.

All that is required though is an ATM in villages.

(I don't know how to pay in a cheque using a phone app either. Luckily no one gives me any!)

You cannot pay cash in via an ATM.
It doesn't affect me either because I do not use much cash and I can get it out of the ATM.

Mind you, because we only have an ATM in one shop, which is only open between 7 am - 10 pm, there are people in the village who are freaking out about not being able to get cash 24/7.

I mean - who gets cash out overnight?

That doesn't solve the issue of paying cash in (for businesses who deal in cash) either.

(I don't know how to pay in a cheque using a phone app either. Luckily no one gives me any!)

I've had two in the last eighteen months.

I think ability to withdraw your cash put 24/7 seems to be a basic requirement. Who knows what emergency might occur.

@prh47bridge thank you for that detailed info re former CEO’s.

BBC news now reporting that 50 more potential victims have got in touch with lawyers as a result of the programme.

Oh bless you @Emotionalsupportviper Weird. I will message you if that makes any diff

Cheers, Blondes

I don't know what is happening with my account when it comes to your posts.

Just when you think it couldn't get worse:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66594627
The PO have been paying bonuses to managers for working on the scandal inquiry. The current boss returned some of his and then eventually all of it - £50K. No word from PO if others paid to do work on the enquiry will return anything they got for doing their job.

Could someone who has watched the last episode comment on the violence/suicide content please? DD12 and DS14 watched episodes 1 and 2, then we made them skip episode 3 because of the violence (DH watched it before the rest of us), what is episode 4 like? I think it would be a shame if they didn't get to see any kind of positive ending/resolution ( although I know it still isn't resolved in real life).

@Epictantrum, as far as I can recall there is no violent content or references to suicide in the last episode. It’s more about the court case & resolution.

Thanks, much appreciated.

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?

There are lots of ways it could have been configured, but if, for example, the Fujitsu staff were using the SPMs’ login ids to make the corrections, it wouldn’t show. Or if they were using a single generic “admin” login that dozens of people had access to. Or if they had configured it to track normal user transactions but not admin users. But yes, you’re right. But as we’ve seen, they weren’t following standard procedures in lots of ways.

My understanding though is that the underlying issue was a network one- where multiple terminals were in use in one location they were intermittently disconnecting and transactions were dropping, and therefore throwing it out without hitting the audit trail.

I find the lack of a report very strange. Surely one would want to reconcile things eg count the remaining stamps and compare to sales recorded.

Back in the 1980s I worked with personal computers such as PETs and Apple IIs, and I used to support Sage integrated business suite, which we supplied, a good program.

Of course, an application designed to run on a massive network of 40,000 terminals will be much more complicated, in terms of managing the central database etc. But the user end of it sounds primitive and unhelpful, even by the standards of a decade before.

@SequentialAnalyst i never actually did a balance myself, but the basis was that all sales went through Horizon. On a daily/weekly/monthly basis (obviously you reconciled every day but the main balance when you counted the stock was done monthly) you’d count all the stock you held and enter this in, at which point Horizon would tell you what you were short - you were always short never over, at least in our 20 years of running a Post Office with Horizon. And I know it sounds unbelievable but there was no way to go back and check the transactions, no audit trail. All you could do was to call the helpline.

my dad bought his staff digital cameras to take photos as they went along to show how the balance would just suddenly change for no apparent reason.

When institutions cottoned onto the possibilities of computerisation, there were repeated instances of computer companies and consultants coming in, starting the project, running up millions in fees, and then the project being abandoned as unfeasible. .This happened when the Stock Exchange first tried it. Other huge ambitious projects also met the same fate. I haven't checked exact dates, but this was in 1980s and 90s.

(At a smaller scale I have personal experience, as a CAB advisor in around 2000, of the CAB wasting money on crap software designed by people who did not know how to do a specification, which was started to be rolled out, and then dropped.)

I suppose following this kind of thing happening, there was pressure to get something out there and running, rather than making a sensible evaluation of the software. Which is the wrong way round to how it should have been!