4 hours ago
7
It was not a terror attack or an earthquake but something more mundane – a faulty computer system and a rigid bureaucracy – yet it devastated hundreds of ordinary lives. Over two decades, Britain’s Post Office prosecuted its own subpostmasters for crimes they had not committed, based on the say-so of a computer system called Horizon. The software, developed by Fujitsu, and rolled out from the late 1990s onwards, was riddled with faults. But these were not treated as glitches. They were treated as evidence of dishonesty.
The public inquiry into the Post Office IT Horizon scandal, seen as one of the worst miscarriages of justice, began in 2021. In a searing 162-page first volume its chair – the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams – laid bare the human toll, and the often sluggish, inadequate attempts to put things right. Between 1999 and 2015, nearly 1,000 people were prosecuted – and convicted – using data from the flawed Horizon system. Some were jailed. At least 13 may have killed themselves. Many more were ruined – wrongly imprisoned and bankrupted with their health and reputation shredded. The report makes clear: this was not a technical slip. It was a systemic failure that destroyed lives – and one that the Post Office let happen.
Sir Wyn can’t assign legal guilt, but he leaves no doubt about blame. Victims, he writes, suffered “wholly unacceptable behaviour” at the hands of “the Post Office and Fujitsu”. Post Office executives and Fujitsu staff knew early on that Horizon was faulty. Still, prosecutions went ahead. Unreliable data was used to discipline, sack and jail subpostmasters. Complaints were brushed aside. Shortfalls were assumed to be theft. Victims were isolated and disbelieved.
Compensation schemes have followed, but these too have been marked by delay, confusion and red tape. Sir Wyn criticises all three of the major schemes as failing to deliver “full and fair” redress – and retraumatising many victims. He calls for clearer definitions, swifter payments and a permanent public body to handle compensation for people harmed by state wrongdoing. The judge says there are about 10,000 eligible claimants for financial redress.
It seems astonishing that it took a television drama about the scandal to move the government to act. The judge concurs with a barrister acting for the victims who noted that “until a change in political momentum in January 2024, behind the scenes an overly legalistic, slow and potentially obstructive attitude operated to constrain the amounts of compensation paid”.
Sir Wyn also proposes restorative justice: not only money, but acknowledgment. How this is framed has yet to be determined. But there seems much to be gained from public apologies and human understanding. There must be a moral reckoning with the damage caused.
This isn’t the end – more volumes will follow – but even this first report reveals something badly broken in British public life. The real failure wasn’t tech, but people and institutions. The government-owned Post Office, once a trusted part of society, emerges as secretive, punitive and unwilling to admit fault. It failed its reputation for being a pillar of civic life. It was, instead, the state that Nietzsche warned of – the “coldest of all cold monsters” – wearing the people’s face, but turning on them with indifference. The question now is not whether this happened, but what a country should do when it learns what it allowed to happen.
