Surviving the Post Office; BBC1, Monday 22 July 2024

614.

Sorry, I couldn’t work out how to get a picture in here.

Yes, I watched Mr Bates v the Post Office in January this year, the shocking and disgraceful tale of the British Post Office Scandal. I followed the unbelievable story of how the Post Office installed accounting software throughout its branches in 1999. The software was called Horizon and came from Fujitsu, a software company that used to produce things like cameras and film.

Shortly after, they found that the Fujitsu Horizon software wasn’t working properly. Randomly it made mistakes in accounting such that the sub-postmasters were regularly accused of fraud and theft, forced to pay back money they hadn’t stolen and were even prosecuted and sent to jail. For something they not only hadn’t done, but didn’t know how to do.

Worse, Fujitsu set up a secret way for Fujitsu operatives to get into the sub-postmasters’ accounts and fiddle with them.

Many sub-postmasters went to jail, or were hounded for the money the Fujitsu Horizon software had ‘lost.’ Did the Post Office work out immediately what had happened, apologise to the sub-postmasters and replace the duff software?

Nope.

Even though they knew comparatively early on that the Horizon software was completely rogue and useless, they kept on using it until 2019, suing unfortunate postmasters for the mistakes made by the Fujitsu software. Some of those…