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.

Yes exactly

I do hope this series prompts those in charge to speed up the overturning of convictions and payment of compensation.

I want to know when the Law Society will start investigating and striking off the top bods in the PO legal team. As they organising their own prosecutions they can't have been unaware that so many cases were coming through with the same issues - one of the judges actually said it was perjury on a wide scale so why aren't there professional consequences for those in charge of this?

Also Paula Venells ought to be defrocked otherwise I imagine she'll slip back into the priesthood eventually.

Of course it would. I posted this on the other thread, but it’s standard practice to track the reasons users call IT service desks. The most common call types are investigated to find out whether there’s an underlying problem that can be resolved. If you have a recurring issue causing repeat calls over a prolonged period of time it would be reported, and escalated. In a properly managed IT environment there would be ongoing activity to address the root cause. There’s no way an organisation the size of Fujitsu doesn’t at least pay lip service to this kind of process- it’s absolutely IT industry standard. They must have been actively, deliberately instructing service desk staff not to log the calls in a way that would show the pattern. There would have been dozens of managers involved, complicit. There must have been the most horrendous culture in Fujitsu.

It's making my blood boil and I'm
only on episode one
I hope that this new publicity will make heads roll and make these bastards pay
Well done to private eye and panorama who have also done exposes on this too
These poor people :(

@prh47bridge
Yes, there was some lying going on. "You are the only person having problems" was a common line, although I think it was used more by Post Office's "investigators" (who didn't do anything that could be called a decent investigation).
I recall there's a telling interview with a victim on the BBC Radio series. She had a good relationship with her area manager but when she ran into trouble he said she was the only one he knew off. And he didn't help but distanced himself. Sure enough she later discovered he was lying.
There must have been some pressure put on middle management to go along with this and I can't fathom why non blew the whistle? Though given how tight and oppressive the SPM contracts seem to have been it maybe that there was a climate of fear with threats of much more than loosing your job.
In the end hundreds of PO and Fujitsu employees took the 'only following orders' route. Sad.

It’s shocking and I feel bad that it wasn’t properly on my radar before. I kept seeing references to it in the news but it didn’t fully register for some reason. I’m glad ITV are shining a light on this. Such a great cast too.

It was mentioned today on GM Britain and I was so pleased , although I'm sure that nothing much will happen to the computer company and seems they are still getting huge contracts

Agree with this, however what I will say is, having had interaction professionally with these ticketing systems used by some of the biggest names on the planet, it would not shock me at all if Fujitsu either didn't have a logging system when all this started, or they were using such an outdated logging system that the data wouldn't be able to be extracted. Now, that might not be the case here of course, but having seen from experience how shoddy the systems have been historically in massive companies, it does make me wonder about other companies, other victims of computer errors, how many cases out there are there...

@the80sweregreat Same with Rydon and others post Grenfell

My friend listened to something on the radio (ŕadio 4) about the fact the computer system was not ready and their were some faults that needed tweaking but the post office wanted it NOW!

@Deathraystare that is EXACTLY what happened with SAP and my HA

@JenniferBooth

Yup!

There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY for these kinds of things in the UK NONE!

Well, that happens about 90% of the time ime. You don’t just shrug and pretend everything is fine, you document exactly what isn’t working properly, what the impact could be, how likely it is to materialise, and how much time and money it will cost to fix, and you make someone accept the risk in writing. The bigger the risk, the cost etc, the more senior that person has to be. You don’t leave room for denial of knowledge. Again, like everything else I mentioned, it’s standard practice. Every project manager will have done it dozens and dozens of times.

I was going to say the same thing.

Especially if I think back to the years this problem was happening - massive organisations who may even have logged tickets correctly. But no one had the role of looking for trends, so they were never seen. Likely the helpdesk may have known or suspected just through their own experience but, typically, they are the lowest paid in an IT organisation and the least respected. Again, this was especially true 15 years+ back. They hadzero power. Their manager often had zero power.

For a long time, the 'Helpdesk' in many organisations, was simply told to shut up and do what they were told and treated like mushrooms.

This must be alongside Hillsborough, Wind-rush and the infected blood scandal with regards to moments where the UK and its legal / political system should hold their heads in shame. Normal lives utterly destroyed.

Mr Bates isn't fictitious - Alan Bates is the real person who led the legal action.

I understand that middle managers who suggested that there might be problems with Horizon found that this was the kiss of death for their careers.

So they actually went in and fiddles with someone figures

After telling them they were secure and no one else could get in

I'm about 15m behind

How can the charges increase and debt doubled

Guessing jaz wife sam will take her life

It’s really not a comedy, @FrostyFlo

Take your puerile humour elsewhere. These are real people you’re laughing about.

The help centre is the reason I don't want to work in a contact centre ever again - imagine being trained and audited to say a certain thing (despite the evidence being presented to the contrary) and still doubling down that the problem is all yours 🥺. I couldn't cope with being responsible for everything that comes with the investigation.
I am angry again at the incompetence, like with the Yorkshire ripper investigating fuck up.

Absolutely. These are people whose lives were destroyed.

There are plenty of threads on MN where childish jokes are welcome. This really isn't one of them.