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.

I'm real life Justice Fraser said it's the equivalent of people trying to say the earth is flat

Fujitsu were trying to cover up the fact that the system was not fit for purpose by fixing mistakes secretly through the back door. They weren’t trying to frame anyone, just to cover up the inadequacies of their own system.

I’ve watched one and a half episodes.. got pissed off … almost wanted to throw something at the Tv.
this was people’s livelihoods, it’s a colossal mistake to make and the fact that people knew and covered it up is beyond me. Like technology is never wrong, we are 20 years later and tech still isn’t perfect.

So if they were covering up flaws, why wouldn't Fujitsu's have wanted to make adjustments so that the books balanced, as opposed to adjustments that led to the books being in deficit? Which figure was wrong, and how did they know? What was the baseline for what was "real"?

Fujitsu are so entrenched throughout the Government. Fujitsu have the contract to support the ageing Police National Computer (PNC) Mainframe with the Home Office and they are on The Met Police's Digital Policing Solution Framework. Fujitsu have the Environment Agency Flood Warning system contract....erm! Ministry of Justice Contracts, Ministry of Defence Contracts, Emergency Alert System Contract. HMRC Contract, Border Force Contract, Department for Education Contract. Fujitsu won a £485 million Contract with NI Education Authority and Andy Burnham just signed a partnership agreement with Fujitsu before Christmas.

But in that case why didn’t they speak out ? They knowingly knew post masters were getting blamed and allowed them to get prosecuted, lose their livelihoods?

It is clear from evidence in both the court case and the inquiry that those at the top of Fujitsu's support organisation were incompetent. For example, there was an incident where a customer purchased $1000, paying just under £500. Horizon only recorded one side of the transaction, reducing the stock of dollars but failing to record the cash coming in. If this hadn't been corrected, the subpostmaster would have seen a surplus of nearly £500. Fujitsu detected this and tried to correct it. Following their correction, the cash balanced correctly but the subpostmaster was now showing a shortage of $1000 in the stock of dollars. It should have been clear to anyone even vaguely competent that Fujitsu had messed up the correction. However, a senior person in Fujitsu's support organisation concluded that this was now a genuine shortfall that would have to be made up by the subpostmaster.

The deficits were not all from Fujitsu adjusting the figures remotely, however. There were many other sources of errors that led to shortfalls. This included coding errors in the software, hardware failures, a lack of error repellence, meaning it was easy for counter staff to make mistakes, and so on.

So the petition to strip Vennels of her ridiculous CBE now stands at more than 1 million supporters.

6 days ago it had 5000 signatures.

Mr. Bates, all SPMs and all your families and friends - I do hope you see this as some small start as to how the British public are so appalled by how the British 'Establishment' had treated you.

And I do hope we all continue to step up and root out any corruption in the PO, Fujitsu, Government, the police, the media and anywhere else we find it.

PS Bloody well done ITV and all involved

I signed the petition.

I signed it cos I really want Alan Bates to get one.
And obviously he didn't take his because she had her version of one.

I know someone above said he might not be offered it again.

But I hope it she does get hers taken off her, then there's a petition to give him one again.

@prh47bridge Thanks. May I enquire further?
Horizon only recorded one side of the transaction, reducing the stock of dollars but failing to record the cash coming in.

But how would this have been noticed in the first place? Not all problems were flagged by postmasters ringing the helpline, I presume? Some, I suppose, were known bugs arising from helpline reports - which were then named after the post office where they first occurred.

Was there a huge list of things to look out for? Sounds like Fujitsu staff made a huge number of corrections, most of which, I assume, "worked" in that they did not cause problems for the postmaster whose account was corrected remotely.

I've worked in IT a long time.

Any system where staff can amend live data without a rigorous record of who is doing what ie a robust audit trail should never be allowed in a production environment. Especially one involving financial transactions.

Even if Fujitsu intended their employees amending live data - which is ridiculous to allow - in an un audited way to be a solution to the many bugs in their system their reliance on the competence of their employees to do so was just nuts.

The whole operation at Bracknell can be compared - unfavourably - to the Wild West.

Bunch of cowboys IMO.

I used to think the UK was a fair, modern, '1st world country', unlike the sort of chaotic, corrupt countries you read about in Africa or sometimes even in Europe. But I don't believe we do live in a decent country. And worse still, I think we're all partly complicit because we know what's going on, but do nothing about it.

I fully expect Paula Vennells and everyone else who got paid a fortune in the Post Office, Fujitsu and the government to get away with it. They might have to endure an embarrassing Inquiry session or two, but then we'll all move on to the next story and back to worrying about how to pay the next electricity bill and they'll go back to their mansions and cushy lives.

Remember the P&O scandal in 2022? When they sacked all their workers illegally? They got away with it. The CEO is still there. Still being paid megabucks. Liz Truss is still getting her exPM payments and got her resignation honours through with no problems. We taxpayers bought out the banks and Truss has reinstated their bonuses so they're back to their old ways of shafting us all (if they ever stopped).

Does anyone have an example of a fatcat being held responsible for failings and actually facing any consequences in the UK?

amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/17/one-year-on-has-po-ferries-got-away-with-illegally-sacking-all-its-crew

I don't know. This particular case is recorded in one of the judgements from the court case. It doesn't tell us how it was picked up.

I get the impression with Sunak that he has no interest in us little people. Only people with money and power like him. Witness his 'well, not working class' film clip. Johnson was the same.

The drama has raised a fantastic amount of public awareness and pressure over this awful mess. I really hope for those concerned, it can be dealt with as it should be, compensation paid and put to bed (I know it won't be that easy for those concerned, but from the point of view they've got justice).

For those of us that has been shocked, upset for the people concerned, we all need to keep following this and keep awareness up.

I agree with you @Toomuch44 , but find it disgraceful that it has taken a true life drama to bring it to the fore .

I agree and then take umbridge with the little cosplays he has where he tries to be a man of the people.

Like this: he's acting like he's a normal Sunday night TV viewer just hearing about this abuse of power for the very first time - and that his instinctive reaction is to correct it.

But he's not a normal Sunday night viewer. He's the PM and of course he already bloody well knew about this. He's been content to ignore it for the last year and a bit as PM so his first instinct WASN'T to correct it: it was to do nothing. Now, suddenly, he's all shocked about the injustice and we're meant to believe he cares 😡

Agree @butterpuffed

i don’t like that those in power will only do the right thing once there’s a spot light on it. Instead of doing things because it is the right thing to do.

And that is true in other areas. Consumers are advised to complain on social media /X to get a resolution. Rather than following standard complaints procedures. How is that ok?

Too true @Rummikub

I am starting to realise we have a special kind of corruption in the UK.
Different systems and cultures have different kinds of corruption. In the UK you would not expect to take a bribe with you when you take your driving test, or to skip an NHS waiting list. I used to think that meant we weren’t corrupt. Communist countries had a different sort again - my Ukrainian guest has told me all about how his school got a swimming pool which was meant to be built at another school- the workmen had kids at his school so they just turned up there and built it.
What we have is a corruption that has grown from privatisation, where private contracts have to be seen to be a success no matter how crap the reality, so everyone lies, covers up and asset strips to make it look good, with different degrees of compulsion at different levels, and then the person in charge can claim success, take the big bonus and move on to an even better paid job.
When you start thinking about it there are elements of this in so many recent scandals that have come at a huge human cost.

In fairness to MPs there are some good ones, like the one in the programme (Arbuthnot?) who have been on the Sub Postmasters side and trying to help since the beginning.

Has anyone noticed how the wording or reports seems to have changed over the last couple of days and they aren't being referred to as Sub Postmasters but as branch managers...

The trouble with computer systems seems to be that there aren't many (any other?) companies that can produce and run massive IT systems. And once you have employed Fujitsu to design your IT system, you can never move away from them as you need them to run it for you. Hence Horizon is still in use at the Post Office. I assume still with the same bugs as I don't think they ever started again or they would have changed it's name.

Of course this country is corrupt.
Of course Paula Vennellls or whatever her name is and her cronies will get away with it.

Hillsborough happened in 1989 , look how much covering up and lies went on with that. It took years for people to be prosecuted and even then nothing, very little punishment was given.

In 1998 a black man with mental health issues died in police custody, whilst they chanted racist abuse and laughed at him. He was on the floor at the time dying.They were retired from the force with pensions and payouts .

Liz Truss was a walking disaster who completely fucked everyone up financially. Everyone’s rent and mortgages are higher now directly because of her.

But she walks around without a care in the world , smiling on her Prime Ministers pension.

So , I doubt anyone will face prosecution for the post office disaster, they’ll still keep whatever money they’ve been given and will sail off into the sunset.

Wouldnt it be nice if someone actually in charge there made a public apology? It ain’t going to happen because they all cover each other’s arses. The system is rotten to the core.

People committed suicide and went to jail. They lost everything. Some people died a convicted criminal.

Its stinks doesn’t it

£300 million reasons. In the BBC Podcast (ep13) that was the cost to Fujitsu for development prior to it going live. If they'd said it doesn't work PO might have done what the DWP did and sack them off.

Most complex software with remote terminals has a back door but you can only open it with the say so of the end user, that action will be automatically logged and often a diary entry required. In the case of Horizon Fujitsu, desperate to protect their investment, put in the backdoor secretly to allow them to try fix the bugs. There's mountains of evidence they had people desperately sorting issues overnight - I guess if they hadn't even more SPM could have been accused of fraud and theft. And the PO would have twigged they'd bought a pup sooner. As it was I suspect by the time it became obvious what was going on senior management decided toughing it out was their best bet for fear they'd be blamed for selling/buying software that didn't work. The fate of the SPM was collateral damage from saving their own arses.

The way that the blame is spread around so that no-one is culpable. See also Grenfell. All covering their arses. And the COVID enquiry. 'I don't recall'.
Whenever people like Rees-Mogg talk about a bonfire of red tape this is where we end up. No checks or safeguards.