The Post Office

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Speaker 4 I was taken to Chester Crown Court in the UK

Speaker 4 where I had to be handcuffed and put in this bulletproof box actually in the courthouse while my case was talked about. But before I'd gone in there,

Speaker 4 I had like a meeting with my barrister and he said to me, well, you know, because there's no evidence to the contrary, you're going to have to plead guilty.

Speaker 4 If you plead not guilty, you might go to prison.

Speaker 5 This is Scott Darlington. About 10 years years earlier, Scott had been working as a sound engineer for concerts and as an extra for television shows.

Speaker 5 But he was in his late 30s and had a young daughter and wanted to find steadier work.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I had enough money to buy some sort of a business.

Speaker 4 And then I noticed in the local sort of businesses for sale newspaper that the post office in a place called Alderley Edge, which is only six miles away from where I live, came up for sale and I thought, hmm, you know, what's this?

Speaker 5 In the UK, people can purchase and run their own post offices. There are more than 11,000 of them.

Speaker 5 The people who run them sign a contract with the post office and are called sub-postmasters.

Speaker 4 And you, as a sub-postmaster, take over a branch and

Speaker 4 you do all the post office transactions alongside running your own retail business. And the post office does everything really from postage to car tax to benefits, pensions.

Speaker 4 It's like bank accounting as well, business, bank deposits,

Speaker 4 even fishing licenses and foreign currency. It's a bit of a jack of all trade.
It's a lot of things.

Speaker 5 The post office branch Scott saw in the newspaper was being sold for £154,000.

Speaker 5 He says it was a little more than he'd expected to spend but he decided to visit alderly edge to see it anyway

Speaker 4 lots of famous footballers and people from stage and screen used to live around there it's all very large houses and it's uh it's very up market um the whole the main street is just lined with up market restaurants bars and things like this and there in the middle was the village post office you know which was run down you know it was actually in a poor condition when I looked to take it over so I thought there was an opportunity of bringing it up to date and making it suit the village and everything.

Speaker 4 And we decided it was a bit of a goer, so I went ahead with it.

Speaker 5 To make it work, Scott and his partner took a loan out against their house. And Scott's brother agreed to co-sign the lease on the property.

Speaker 5 Then Scott put in an offer for the business. It was accepted on condition that he also pass the post office's screening process.

Speaker 4 You have to go through an incredible identification check. They check into all your financial history and it has to be whiter than white.
You can't have any blemishes anywhere.

Speaker 4 Things like that, enhanced criminal records, checks, and things like this.

Speaker 5 Scott says the whole process took nearly a year.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 they're really looking to make sure you're a good person before they give you this role.

Speaker 4 Well, they're very trusted. You know, the people in the post office, postmasters are very trusted.
And they

Speaker 4 you were kind of like a doctor, you were in that category, you know, the local doctor and everything, or policemen and stuff like that. People did actually hold postmasters in high esteem.

Speaker 5 After Scott passed the post office's background check, the next step was attending two weeks of training.

Speaker 5 He says it was mostly helping fake customers in a dummy branch.

Speaker 5 He was also taught how to use something called Horizon, the computer system that the post office had adopted in all of its branches in 1999.

Speaker 4 It was a very large system. At the time, it was the largest IT system in Europe.
But when we started using it in training, it was very, very old-fashioned.

Speaker 4 I mean, it was literally running on Windows NT, which was discontinued, if I've got this right, in about 1996.

Speaker 4 And this was 2005 now. So it was an old, clunky system, but it did seem to just about work.

Speaker 5 After he finished his training, Scott signed a contract with the post office,

Speaker 5 and then the branch was his to run.

Speaker 5 Scott had inherited three staff members from the previous owners, including a man named Jack, who was 78 years old and had spent decades running his own post office.

Speaker 5 He told Scott to make sure to always keep the greeting cards well stocked. He said they sold really well.
It's somebody's birthday every day.

Speaker 1 And what about just the job?

Speaker 5 I mean, was it fun to be interacting with customers and selling things?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was.

Speaker 4 Once everything had calmed down and I knew what I was doing, which did take quite a long time, and I'd refurbished the shop and we got all new products in and everything.

Speaker 4 It was nice then. And I had music on.

Speaker 4 It was good fun. Everyone was encouraged to have a good laugh with the customers.
And so it was fun.

Speaker 5 Scott got to know most of his customers. Alderley Edge is small, only about 5,000 people.
The soccer player Ronaldo lived there for a few years when he played for Manchester United.

Speaker 5 And once he came into the shop to pay taxes on a sports car.

Speaker 5 Scott says he often had around £80,000 in cash on hand at the post office for things like pension payments.

Speaker 5 Once a week, a secure van would stop by to drop off stock or pick up cash.

Speaker 4 And that was always a slightly dangerous time because that's the most likely time where you could have, you know, somebody could attack the post office because of money going over the counter like that.

Speaker 4 So it's always a bit worrying, but you got used to it.

Speaker 5 Scott says one of the most tedious parts of the job was doing something called the office balance every week.

Speaker 4 And when you came to do the balance, everything that you had in the office had to correspond with what the computer system also said.

Speaker 4 So if there's anything wrong, for instance, if I'd got 10,000 stamps and when I came to count them, I'd only got 9,998, then I'd have to alter the system to reflect what was in the shop, and that would make a little discrepancy in the cash amount.

Speaker 4 Then,

Speaker 4 so there's always slight discrepancies just from human errors, maybe giving somebody the wrong change, a pound difference, or giving someone some first-class stamps when it should have been second-class stamps, and things like that.

Speaker 4 And every week, you had when you did the balance, you alter the system to suit what you've got in, and then it'd give you the figure that it was out.

Speaker 4 And it was usually four or five, six pounds or something like that.

Speaker 4 And as long as the discrepancies were only small like that, nobody really thought too much about it, you know, because there's always going to be a tiny bit of human error.

Speaker 5 Scott would stay after work on Wednesdays to do the weekly balance on the Horizon system. He says at first, it would take hours.

Speaker 5 And then one day, three years into the job, there was a discrepancy that was a lot bigger than usual.

Speaker 4 And the system is telling me I was £1,700

Speaker 4 down in cash. The system thought I had £1,700 of stamps more in the branch than I actually had.

Speaker 4 Well, we all make slight mistakes, but there's no way any of the staff made a mistake with £1,700 of the stamps. You know, that's like

Speaker 4 a suitcase full, if you do what I mean. It's just ridiculous.
So we knew that it wasn't us.

Speaker 4 But we tried to, we got, we recounted everything, double recounted, treble recounted, and we're still saying that we've got this discrepancy.

Speaker 5 In training, Scott had been instructed to call a helpline if he ever had any trouble with the Horizon system.

Speaker 4 So I rang the helpline and said, there's something wrong.

Speaker 4 It thinks I've got all these stamps I haven't got. And they basically said, well, how are you going to pay? You know, you're responsible.

Speaker 5 Scott says he didn't want to risk violating his contract, so he paid.

Speaker 5 Did you ask your employees about it? Did you say, what's going on?

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, because we were all shocked, you know, and everyone's dreading the next balance then to see what happens then.

Speaker 5 Did it happen again?

Speaker 4 Well, it did. I mean, I think the following few balances were within a few pounds again, and then all of a sudden, another big discrepancy.

Speaker 4 This time, I think it was for, I can't quite remember fully, it was either £4,000 or £6,000.

Speaker 4 And this is where the trouble started because I didn't tell them because I knew their reaction would be, Well, how are you going to pay?

Speaker 4 And I wouldn't be able to stand six thousand just coming out like that. You know, there would be no help from them.

Speaker 4 So I thought, I've got to try and get to the bottom of it myself.

Speaker 4 So we used to stay till midnight sometimes reprinting out everything we'd done, going through everything we've done to see if there's any transaction that pops out where someone's made a big error or anything like that.

Speaker 4 There was nothing, you know, everything was just normal. And we're all scratching our heads.
We just couldn't understand this.

Speaker 5 And the total amount of money the system said was missing just kept growing week after week. How bad did it get?

Speaker 4 Well, over the next few months, it got to £44,000.

Speaker 5 This must have been stressful.

Speaker 4 Terrible. I mean, now I'm dreading every balance and it's going worse and it's going worse.
The financial crash happened in 2008 and 2009. We were in the middle of that.

Speaker 4 And it was just getting all out of hand. And I was so stressed, I couldn't sleep.

Speaker 4 I was losing weight. It wasn't much fun to be doing this anymore, you know, at all.

Speaker 5 For about five months, Scott was able to operate without the post office knowing about the discrepancies.

Speaker 5 But then, in February of 2009, Scott got a notification from Horizon that he had too much surplus cash at his branch and it told him to send in £50,000.

Speaker 5 But Scott didn't have that money.

Speaker 4 So I ignored that request. And two days later,

Speaker 4 one of the post office auditors turned up on the doorstep and

Speaker 4 closed the branch for an audit.

Speaker 5 What did you think when they showed up?

Speaker 4 I was kind of pleased, really, because I thought that,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 somehow we'll get to the bottom of this.

Speaker 4 But the auditor, he asked me if I'd got the money in the branch that Horizon was saying, and I said no. And

Speaker 4 he said, Oh, right, okay. So then he made a few phone calls, and they've got their own internal fraud squad at the post office, who are not the police, but they've got similar powers.
And

Speaker 4 the first thing they said to me was they read me my rights, like the police do when

Speaker 4 they suspect you of committing an offence. And I said, Oh, I thought you were here to help.

Speaker 4 But no, they then took me away in a car to another branch,

Speaker 4 a larger branch, and upstairs there was a room set aside with tape for tape recorded interviews. And I was interviewed there and they were stood up shouting down at me, where is the money?

Speaker 4 Where have you put it?

Speaker 5 Scott says they wouldn't listen when he tried to explain. They just kept insisting he'd stolen the money.

Speaker 4 And I told them, what's the point of stealing from your own business that you're responsible for? You know what I mean? So it just didn't add up, but

Speaker 2 they wouldn't have it.

Speaker 4 And they came to look to search my house and they could see that there was no

Speaker 4 really nice television sort of lovely car outside and things like that. So they realized there was nothing there.

Speaker 5 The investigators left, but they told Scott they were going to look at his financial records and that he needed to give them access to his bank accounts. He was also suspended.

Speaker 5 He decided to reach out to the sub-postmasters union for help.

Speaker 4 When I rang the general secretary, who's the top man,

Speaker 4 and and told him my issue, I said, Look, I've got these big discrepancies. What can you do to help me and everything? And he just said,

Speaker 4 Well, before we start, have you got any gambling problems? He said to me. This was the head man of the union.
So straight away, I knew whose side he was on. And I said, Oh, hang on a minute, you know.

Speaker 4 I've got issues, you know, I need some help.

Speaker 4 And he's basically just dismissed me. And he put the phone down, literally.
And I knew straight away that they weren't going to help.

Speaker 5 Did you ever think for a second,

Speaker 5 maybe I am making a mistake? Maybe someone is taking money. You know, that did it ever cross your mind that, okay, maybe I am doing something wrong?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it did. I mean, I had doubts.

Speaker 2 I just, I started thinking, what have I done?

Speaker 4 Maybe I've done this. And not in denial, but I just haven't realized or not noticed that it's been me.

Speaker 5 About two months into his suspension, Scott received a letter saying his contract had been terminated. He was charged with theft and five counts of false accounting.

Speaker 5 He says his lawyer told him there was a risk he would go to prison, but if he pled guilty to the false accounting charges, it would be less likely.

Speaker 4 So, this was the first time I'd realized that there's a possibility I might be going to prison. Well, at that time, my daughter was only eight.

Speaker 4 There's no way I could be going down to prison and her dad being in prison and things like this.

Speaker 5 Scott says he refused to plead guilty to theft, and the post office ended up dropping the charge after Scott's lawyer discovered an internal document that stated that the post office had found no evidence of theft.

Speaker 5 But Scott took his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to false accounting. He says he could see how that could be true because he had covered up the discrepancies in the weekly balances.

Speaker 4 And the judge decided I was guilty of false accounting, and he sentenced me to two months in prison, suspended for

Speaker 4 two years, which means you don't actually go in, but you still have the consequences of a criminal record.

Speaker 5 What were you telling your family and friends?

Speaker 4 Yes, very, very difficult. Only the very closest people realized what trouble I was in.
My brother, my partner, my daughter hadn't told her much.

Speaker 4 She knew there was something wrong, but I didn't want to to know the ins and outs of all this financial dealings at only eight years old. So I kept it fairly quiet to her.

Speaker 4 I didn't tell her too much about it.

Speaker 4 My friends, there was only a couple of friends really confided in her about it because obviously this is it's really grim, it's really awful.

Speaker 4 But after when I've been to court though and been found guilty, I was all over the newspapers then.

Speaker 4 I got online hates, you know, from the online versions of the newspapers.

Speaker 4 And it was awful because now there's me on the front of the newspaper saying I've pleaded guilty to false accounting at Alden Ledge Post Office.

Speaker 4 So I presumed, and rightly so, that everybody would think I was guilty because I'd pleaded guilty.

Speaker 4 It was very difficult to go around and say I wasn't guilty, really, you know, there's all these issues.

Speaker 4 So it just put me in an awful situation. Now I felt like a pariah in society, you know, walking around.

Speaker 5 He says he struggled to find a new job with his criminal record.

Speaker 4 I was 50 at the time as well, so I was freshly 50 with a nice new criminal record looking for work. You know, this isn't easy.

Speaker 5 He became depressed and says he could barely function. At one point, he collapsed from stress and had to go to the hospital.

Speaker 5 He kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. And he kept thinking about the post office's computer system, Horizon.

Speaker 5 So one day he googled it. and he found a website with stories just like his.

Speaker 5 I'm Phoebe Judge.

Speaker 2 This is Criminal.

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Speaker 5 In November 2010, a journalist named Nick Wallace was working at the BBC in Surrey.

Speaker 5 One morning, he got a message on Twitter from someone who worked at a local taxi company asking if the BBC needed drivers.

Speaker 2 If we had a taxi account, I would have just forwarded the tweet to my manager and let them deal with it.

Speaker 2 But we didn't, so I said something quite flippant, like, oh, well, that depends on whether or not your drivers will come on air and tell us some of their great stories.

Speaker 2 And I got a response back saying, Oh, I've got a story to tell you, all right.

Speaker 2 And I thought, oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 5 Nick exchanged numbers with the man who ran the taxi company. His name was Devender Misra

Speaker 5 and gave him a call.

Speaker 2 And over about 40 minutes,

Speaker 2 very tearful minutes and at times slightly rambling, he told me that his pregnant wife had been thrown in prison for a crime she didn't commit.

Speaker 2 And his pregnant wife was called Seema Misra, and she had been the sub-postmaster at West By Fleet Post Office.

Speaker 2 So Seema had been convicted of theft

Speaker 2 because she was alleged to have stolen £74,000 worth of money from her sub-post office and the evidence against her came from the Horizon IT system which said she had holes in her accounts.

Speaker 2 She was complaining all the time that she was having problems with this computer system that she couldn't get the numbers to add up and that's when the post office had told her well if she didn't make them good she was going to lose her job as a sub-postmaster.

Speaker 2 So she covered up these discrepancies that she was getting and the post office then decided that that was a criminal offense and they prosecuted her for false accounting and theft.

Speaker 2 Seema admitted false accounting but she denied theft. She said, no, I have never consciously taken any money out of this system.
It's just disappeared.

Speaker 5 But Seema was found guilty of both false accounting and theft and sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was eight weeks pregnant.

Speaker 5 Nick was interested in the story, and Devender Misra told him there was someone else he should talk to, another former sub-postmaster named Alan Bates.

Speaker 2 He was sacked in 2003 for refusing to accept liability for discrepancies in his account. He said, it's not me.
It's not my staff. I've trained them well.
It's your IT system.

Speaker 2 It's creating these discrepancies. Give me the proper tools that I need to interrogate my accounts properly, and then we will find the source of this discrepancy and we'll get it fixed.

Speaker 2 and the post office just said no the discrepancy is your liability you make it good or you will get fired and there was a standoff and alan got fired and he was so outraged by his treatment that he set up a a website called postofficevictims.org.uk

Speaker 2 and he

Speaker 2 asked for people who'd suffered at the post office's hands to get in touch and by the time it got to 2009

Speaker 2 They arranged their first meeting and there were only about 20 sub-postmasters, former sub-postmasters sub-postmasters who turned up at the meeting, but it was the first time they'd all met face to face, and they shared their stories.

Speaker 2 And they all realised that the post office had treated them in exactly the same way whilst telling them that they were the only people having problems with the Horizon IT system.

Speaker 5 The Post Office in the UK dates back to the 1660s, when it was set up by King Charles II.

Speaker 2 This was before Great Britain even existed. It's, we think, the oldest secular

Speaker 2 branch of government in existence. It was considered to be part of the fabric of the nation.
It's very proudly run. It was always government-owned.

Speaker 2 And it was, I mean, it's a bit like the Pony Express in America. It has that kind of legendary status.

Speaker 2 And then in the 20th century, the image of the kindly couple running your local village sub-post office, trustworthy, honest, center-of-the-community, upstanding, entrepreneurial individuals who would always be looking out for people whilst providing the services that the post office did, became embedded in the national psyche as well.

Speaker 2 So you had this slightly warm, fuzzy community image.

Speaker 5 The sub-postmasters were handling things like people's pension payouts, banking deposits and withdrawals, and utility bill payments.

Speaker 5 Before 1999, it was up to the sub-postmasters to keep track of their transactions by writing everything down in a ledger.

Speaker 2 And the post office hated it. And what they didn't like was the fact that when they handed over money from cash centers to an individual post office, they lost sight of it.

Speaker 2 They were entirely reliant on the trustworthiness of the sub-postmaster and their signing of correct accounts. So when Horizon came along, it was like the Big Bang.

Speaker 2 It was going to open an electronic window on everything that was happening in a post office branch.

Speaker 5 The post office had contracted a software company called Fujitsu to develop Horizon.

Speaker 5 What they came up with was full of bugs and glitches. But Nick says the post office had already spent hundreds of millions of pounds on Horizon.

Speaker 5 So they decided to go through with the rollout.

Speaker 2 Because the post office weren't carrying the financial liability the individual sub-postmasters were.

Speaker 5 According to their contract, sub-postmasters were responsible for any losses due to their negligence or error.

Speaker 5 And unless they could prove that any error was Horizon's fault, quote, deficiencies must be made good without delay.

Speaker 5 The sub-postmasters weren't told about the flaws in the system.

Speaker 5 Nick says the training on how to use the system was inconsistent. Some sub-postmasters received three weeks of training, but others were only given a single day.

Speaker 5 And at the time, some of the sub-postmasters weren't very familiar with computers.

Speaker 5 They were told if they had trouble with the Horizon system, there was a helpline they could call,

Speaker 2 which colloquially quickly became known as the Horizon Hell Line, whereby sub-postmasters who, if they couldn't make their numbers add up, were supposed to call up and get some guidance.

Speaker 2 It quickly transpired that the helpline that was available to sub-postmasters was as patchy and ad hoc and sometimes downright inept as the training that they got.

Speaker 2 And they were often talking to frontline call center workers who knew less about the system than they did, who were working to a script and who told them what to do.

Speaker 2 And if that didn't solve the problem, chances are they would be told, well,

Speaker 2 it's obviously a mistake at your end. You're going to have to make it good.

Speaker 5 Sometimes the calls to the helpline did end up being escalated enough that technicians would investigate. And sometimes they remotely implemented fixes.

Speaker 2 But of course, the Post Office had a vested interest in not telling its sub-postmasters about any errors in Horizon because it didn't want word getting out that it might be operating a substandard IT system.

Speaker 2 It was paranoid about protecting the reputation of this system because they'd bet the farm on it. So protecting the mothership became the prime directive of the Post Office.

Speaker 2 They could not countenance any criticism made privately by sub-postmasters and certainly not publicly because the whole edifice would come crashing down.

Speaker 5 Nick says the post office also told individual sub-postmasters who reported issues that they were the only ones having problems and that it couldn't be Horizon.

Speaker 2 And so they

Speaker 2 were told specifically by the post office that it couldn't be the IT system because it was a computer system and it's like a glorified calculator and it works brilliantly. And no one

Speaker 2 has ever had a problem like the one that they're describing. So they were very, very much on their own.

Speaker 2 And it had an appalling effect on them because not only did they have to keep shoveling money into this system in order to get the book spaz, but these were competent, often very skilled business people who started doubting their own sanity because they could not understand how money was falling through their fingers and yet didn't know what they were doing wrong.

Speaker 2 And of course, it led to all sorts of paranoid issues. They would sack innocent staff because they assumed that they had to be the problem.

Speaker 2 In fact they were often advised by their unions that they had to watch their staff like hawks. The post office sometimes said, well who else works behind the counter?

Speaker 2 Well if it's your wife, have you looked at what your wife's doing? You know it broke up families.

Speaker 5 Several former sub-postmasters say that they became so overwhelmed with stress that they had a heart attack.

Speaker 5 By 2011, dozens of former sub-postmasters, including Scott Darlington, who had bought the post office in Alderley Edge, had joined Alan Bates' group, Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance.

Speaker 5 Scott remembers the first time he went to a meeting, people took turns telling their stories.

Speaker 4 And once you heard other people's stories, it was like a sense of relief that

Speaker 4 you knew for sure then that this wasn't you. But there's a long road ahead.

Speaker 4 I mean, even Alan said that, you know, we know there's some problem, but getting something done about it is another, you know, kettle of fish and it could take years, if at all.

Speaker 5 By this time, Nick Wallace had begun reporting on the story, but he says it wasn't really picked up by the national media.

Speaker 5 But one member of parliament did hear about it. And in 2012, he and other members of parliament pressured the post office into starting an external investigation into the problem.

Speaker 5 The external investigators struggled to get the post office to cooperate. They said requests for documents were often delayed or ignored.

Speaker 5 One of the lead investigators, a forensic accountant named Ian Henderson, said that when they finally received everything, it didn't take long to realize that, quote, we may be looking at a significant number of miscarriages of justice.

Speaker 5 Within a year, the investigators released a report.

Speaker 5 It revealed that there were flaws in the Horizon system.

Speaker 2 And the post office was so appalled by this report that although it was forced to make the first iteration of this report public, it then engaged basically a black ops team to start undermining the credibility of this independent team and besmirching all their future work, literally issuing rebuttal documents to their own independent investigators over the course of the next two years that they were working for them.

Speaker 2 And so the post office knew it was sitting on a very, very serious problem. So we had the scandal of the prosecutions of these poor people being sent to prison despite not having committed a crime.

Speaker 2 And then from 2013 onwards, the post office knew it had a problem and it did everything possible to stop that problem from becoming public.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 5 Ian Henderson, the forensic accountant investigating the post office, said that he, quote, felt we were dealing with a cover-up and possibly a criminal conspiracy.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, more and more former sub-postmasters had joined Alan Bates' group. In 2016, they filed a legal claim that became a class action lawsuit the following year.

Speaker 5 The case was called Bates v. Post Office, and it included hundreds of former sub-postmasters.

Speaker 4 The number of postmasters like myself had grown to 555, which became we were known as the 555.

Speaker 5 The judge assigned to the case decided to break proceedings up into separate trials.

Speaker 5 The first would focus on the contract the sub-postmasters had signed with the post office.

Speaker 5 It began in November 2018, and many of the sub-postmasters traveled to London from all over the country to attend.

Speaker 5 A lawyer representing them argued that the post office held too much power over the sub-postmasters, partly because the contract itself was unfair, and partly because many of the sub-postmasters had never even seen the whole contract.

Speaker 5 Alan Bates testified that he'd only been sent three short documents and that he'd had no idea the full contract was 114 pages long.

Speaker 5 Another former sub-postmaster testified that she'd taken over the job from her husband after he died.

Speaker 5 She said she'd never seen any contract and had never heard her husband mention it. And it turned out the post office had no record that he had ever signed a contract.

Speaker 5 The judge hadn't ruled on the first trial yet when the second trial began three months later in March 2019.

Speaker 5 This trial would be investigating the Horizon system itself.

Speaker 5 A former employee from Fujitsu, the company that created the Horizon system, testified.

Speaker 2 Richard Roll worked at Fujitsu between 2001 and 2004, 2004, and he was hired to work in a team of 30 in the secure unit at the Fujitsu headquarters in Berkshire in the UK,

Speaker 2 fixing problems with Horizon. They would deal with support tickets that came through that pointed to faults with hardware, software, communications, whatever.

Speaker 2 And he described the system as very, very shaky. In fact, he used a particular word, which is quite rude, to describe how bad the system was.
What word did he use? He said it was a pile of shit.

Speaker 5 Richard Roll also spoke about the work he'd done at Fujitsu and about doing something that the post office had said was not possible, remotely accessing the sub-postmaster's horizon terminals.

Speaker 2 He said he and his colleagues went into the terminals that were sitting remotely on postmaster's branch counters and fixed problems in them overnight.

Speaker 2 They even had the power to download everything that was in a postmaster's branch, look at all the code, alter it, including the numbers in the branch account, and then re-download it.

Speaker 5 And it was important because before, you know,

Speaker 5 it was the post office was saying, well, only the sub-postmasters have access to the system, so they're the ones making the mistakes. No one else could be making mistake.

Speaker 2 Exactly that. The post office flatly denied that it or Fujitsu had any way of altering the branch accounts of a sub-postmaster.

Speaker 2 And they had to deny it because they prosecuted these people on the basis that they were the only ones who had control of their accounts.

Speaker 2 Now, if remote access was not just possible, but people like Richard Roll had been doing it on a regular basis, then there was no way these prosecutions could be safe.

Speaker 5 And then, in the middle of the second trial, the judge issued his ruling on the first trial.

Speaker 5 The judge wrote that parts of the sub-postmaster's contract were, quote, oppressive, and that at times the post office acted as though it is answerable only to itself.

Speaker 5 He also wrote that during the trial, one senior post office official had tried to mislead him and quote, paint the post office in the most favorable light possible, regardless of the facts.

Speaker 2 And it was damning of the post office to the extent that the post office applied to have the judge booted off the case.

Speaker 5 The post office claimed that the judge was biased. The judge refused to remove himself, so the post office went to the court of appeal.

Speaker 5 But the court of appeal ruled that the post office's attempt to remove the judge was, quote, absurd.

Speaker 5 When the second trial finally resumed, independent IT experts testified that they'd found dozens of bugs with the Horizon system, and that they'd uncovered a report from 2001 that explicitly stated there is a bug with Alan Bates' Horizon terminal.

Speaker 5 Before the judge's ruling, the post office and the sub-postmasters agreed to a settlement of £57,750,000.

Speaker 5 Nick says even though it looked like a big number, it didn't leave much for each individual sub-postmaster. When Scott Darlington heard the news, he started doing the calculations.

Speaker 4 45 million of that was taken up in legal fees. There was only 11 million left between the 555.
Well, unfortunately, if you do the maths on that, it's only about 20,000 each.

Speaker 4 And most of us had lost our homes, our livelihoods, businesses,

Speaker 4 everything, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds. This isn't going to touch the sides.
So this was a bit of a, it was a great result, but a disastrous outcome financially for us all.

Speaker 5 And many of them, like Scott Darlington and Seema Misra, still had criminal convictions.

Speaker 5 The judge issued his ruling for the second trial five days after the settlement was announced.

Speaker 5 He wrote that the post office, continuing to claim that Horizon was reliable, was, quote, the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.

Speaker 5 And then he said one last thing.

Speaker 2 He was was so gravely concerned about some of the evidence that he had seen given in previous trials

Speaker 2 where post office and Fujitsu

Speaker 2 witnesses had essentially given false evidence that he was going to pass a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which he did.

Speaker 2 And the Director of Public Prosecutions passed that file on to the Metropolitan Police. And the Metropolitan Police started their investigation in January 2020, and it's still ongoing.

Speaker 2 It's called Operation Olympus. It's been running for five years now, and they have said on the record that they are looking to start charging some of the people responsible in 2027 or 2028.

Speaker 5 After the Post Office settled in late 2019, the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the UK started referring cases of convicted sub-postmasters to the Court of Appeal.

Speaker 5 In December 2020, six sub-postmaster convictions were overturned. Seema Misra and Scott Darlington were both exonerated in April of 2021.

Speaker 5 A public inquiry began formally hearing evidence in 2022 and found a, quote, disastrous human impact. and that at least 13 people affected by the Horizon errors have died by suicide.

Speaker 5 When we reached out to the post office press office for comment, they directed us to a statement on their website, which reads in part,

Speaker 5 We apologize unreservedly for the suffering which the Post Office caused to postmasters and their loved ones.

Speaker 5 At least 900 convictions have been tied to the Horizon errors, but by May 2024, only 103 of those had been overturned.

Speaker 5 That month, in what The Guardian called an unprecedented act of Parliament, the British government passed a law overturning all the remaining convictions.

Speaker 5 The Criminal Cases Review Commission has said it's, quote, the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.

Speaker 5 Compensation plans have been set up for the sub-postmasters affected by the Horizon errors, but many are still waiting to be paid.

Speaker 2 And there are people who've applied for compensation who are nearing the end of their lives,

Speaker 2 who still haven't yet been processed by

Speaker 2 this compensation system. So it's had to be taken off the post office.
It's now in the hands of the government, which has added to the delays.

Speaker 2 And although a billion pounds in compensation has been paid out already, there are people with complicated cases who are unwell, who are desperate for money, who are potentially nearing the end of their lives, many of whom have died.

Speaker 2 I mean, we think the figures are now more than 200 people have died waiting for their full and final compensation.

Speaker 5 Five former sub-postmasters, including Seema Misra, have received awards from the British state honoring their work campaigning for justice.

Speaker 5 Alan Bates was knighted.

Speaker 5 Scott Darlington still lives six miles outside Alderley Edge.

Speaker 5 Do you... go into the post office branch to

Speaker 5 to do things now? I mean, is is it kind of bittersweet walking into the post office?

Speaker 4 I don't go in, no. I have had to go in a couple of times in the last 16 years, but as a rule, I don't go in no

Speaker 1 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

Speaker 5 Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 1 Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sudrico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane.

Speaker 5 This episode was mixed by Michael Rayfield. Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti.

Speaker 1 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.

Speaker 5 You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

Speaker 5 Nick Wallace's book is The Great Post Office Scandal, the fight to expose a multi-million pound IT disaster, which put innocent people in jail.

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