Post Office and their Horizon System
As I chair the Justice For Subpostmaster Alliance I thought I should add a few comments to the forum on this item. We have been trying to raise this issue for many years and maybe you should visit our website and read some of the cases as described by the victims. Go to www.jfsa.org.uk and visit the cases page.
The report which I have read, in detail only looks at 4 cases and no final conclusions have been reached in those (this is an interim report, not final). Along the way the independent investigators have found a number of issues that they are either continuing to investigate or are awaiting a response from the Post Office.
Post Office have, so far, disclosed two instances of bugs in the system that have affected people and many of the comments on this page allude to them. However the investigators have a further 43 cases to investigate and we have many, many more to take to them when they have worked their way through those.
One very real concern with all of these cases is that there seems to be no evidence to show when a subpostmaster has a problem and Post Office 'auditors' turn up, their priority seems to be placed on asset recovery rather than establishing the root cause of the subpostmasters' problem. So Post Office uses the courts to obtain a conviction that in the majority of cases is for false accounting.
This comes about because when a postmaster start finding problems using a very complicated system (there are some transcations you have to go through 14 screens to complete) due to the way it is set up and support that often isn't, a subpostmaster can find themselves digging a hole from where there is no return until the roof falls in on them.
So technically they may well have returned figures that were incorrect as they wait to see if the matter sorts itself out, but it rarely does. Even in the court cases it is often stated and accepted that the defendant had not benefited or had the missing money. It is often a technical charge that they are found guily of. But that is all the Post Office need to enable them to recover the funds through the courts that Horizon system has stated are missing.
However the report does pick up on the shortcomings of training and support for a subpostmaster and as the investigation progresses, I have no doubt at all, that many other issues will appear.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
