Post Office Horizon IT scandal a 'damning indictment', says former Scottish sub-postmaster

In what represents a seminal moment in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history, the first volume of an independent statutory public inquiry’s final report into the scandal found that at least 13 people had taken their own lives amid the fallout, including six former sub-postmasters.

A quarter of a century has passed since the first convictions were handed down as a result of new accounting software, Horizon, that was rolled out by the Post Office starting in 1999. Now, the phase one report from the inquiry’s chair, Sir Wyn Wiliams, has detailed how 59 other people contemplated suicide, while others subjected themselves to self-harm, endured abuse in their communities, or turned to alcohol.

Such is the scale of the harm, his report added, it was “impossible to ascertain” how many people suffered, but it pointed out that there were around 10,000 eligible claimants in schemes providing financial redress, a number that is likely to rise in the coming months.

The Horizon system, designed by Fujitsu, was meant to improve operations across its network of local branches, but fundamental failings led to inexplicable shortfalls appearing in accounts. The Post Office’s pursuit of those non-existent sums led to some people using their own life savings to cover the “illusory” losses. Others were pursued in the criminal courts for false accounting, theft and fraud.

Sir Wyn, who characterised the evidence detailed in his report as “profoundly disturbing,” said the Post Office and Fujitsu employees knew Horizon was deeply flawed, yet “maintained the fiction” that it could not produce errors when prosecuting innocent sub-postmasters. Employees at the Japanese IT group were aware the system was “afflicted by bugs, errors and defects” even before it was rolled out, it added.

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In all, there were more than 983 convictions in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in modern British legal history. The Scottish Government identified 141 potential cases after legislation exonerating wrongly-convicted victims in Scotland came into force in June 2024.

To date, more than 70 people in Scotland have had their convictions overturned. They include Ravinder Naga, whose family have lived under the cloud of the scandal for the past 16 years, ever since an alleged shortfall of more than £33,000 was identified at Greenock’s Belville Street Post Office, where his mother, Gurbash, was the sub-postmistress.

Mr Naga, fearful of the impact a prison sentence would have on her, decided to take the rap for a crime he did not commit. He pleaded guilty to stealing £35,000, and was sentenced to 300 hours of community service. That conviction was quashed last August by appeal judges.

Having read through Sir Wyn’s report, Mr Naga, 49, said Sir Wyn’s report was full of “common sense,” and said it was now up to the Post Office and politicians to ensure that its recommendations were delivered.

“The fact that these politicians need this to be broken down in a report like this before taking action is gobsmacking, because did we really need this to tell us what has been going on?” he told The Scotsman. “When you see what people are being offered in compensation, it is a slap in the face - people who go on a reality television show are getting more than people who’ve lived with this for 20 years.”

Asked what his message would be to the Post Office, Mr Naga, from Port Glasgow, accused them of trying to “run the clock down” by delaying redress for those impacted.

He said: “They need to stop playing the victim now. I’ve heard so much about how they feel so bad about what’s happened, but they didn’t speak out or feel bad when they were taking their bonuses. Now they can show they have a conscience and be decent human beings.”

Former sub-postmaster Rab Thomson, who was wrongfully convicted of embezzlement regarding non-existent shortfalls at the Clackmannanshire post office he ran, said that while he welcomed the rrpot, it was unclear what, if any, action, would be taken against Fujitsu.

“At the end of the day it's them that's brought this crisis to us - at the moment they've got away scot-free,” he reasoned.

Many others are still waiting for answers, including a far larger cohort who were not prosecuted, but continue to reckon with the fallout of a scandal that ruined livelihoods and tore families apart.

One such former subpostmaster is Alastair Redman, who paid “thousands if not close to tens of thousands” of his own money to address apparent shortfalls at the Post Office branch he ran on Islay amid problems with the Horizon system.

He told The Scotsman that Sir Wyn’s report was a “sobering and damning indictment” of how the Horizon scandal was allowed to unfold and persist for so long, and emphasised that it was about “lives ruined, reputations destroyed, families torn apart, and justice delayed again and again.”

Mr Redman, now an independent councillor in Argyll & Bute, said: “We were promised redress. We were told that lessons had been learned. And yet the report lays bare that over 3,000 compensation claims remain unresolved, and that ‘egregious delays’ have plagued every stage of the process. That is not an administrative hiccup - it is a continued failure of justice.

“The damage done by the Horizon scandal cannot be overstated. Good, honest people were wrongly accused, prosecuted, bankrupted, and driven from their communities. Some were driven to despair. Some lost everything. The Post Office and Fujitsu, and those in government who allowed this to happen, have a moral obligation not just to apologise, but to ensure swift, full, and fair compensation, and to cooperate with prosecutions where wrongdoing is found.”

Mr Redman, who served as a sub-postmaster for 12 years, also called for “full public accountability” for those who caused or enabled the scandal, adding: “The truth is out. The scale of the injustice is undeniable. The time for action is not tomorrow or next month - it is now. Anything less is a continuation of the cover-up, carried out in slow motion and dressed up as due process.”

Christie Allan, an associate with law firm, Livingstone Brown, which has been involving in the quashing of criminal convctions handed to Scottish sub-postmasters in the criminal courts, said many of its clients welcomed Sir Wyn’s recommendations. She added that it they were pleased with the decision to publish them at this stage of the inquiry, given they have been on a “very protracted route to justice.”

While a final report with overall recommendations will be published at a later date, Sir Wyn’s publication said the delivery of redress to claimants under three separate schemes has been “bedevilled with unjustifiable delays,”with more than 3,000 claims yet to be resolved. He criticised the way in which the Post Office and its advisers had in many cases adopted an “unnecessarily adversarial attitude” when making initial offers to those seeking financial redress.

There are 19 recommendations in the newly published report, including a push to ensure consistency across all four redress schemes. Sir Wyn said he expects a written response from the Post Office, Fujitsu and the UK government by 10 October, with details of plans for restorative justice by the end of that month. He added that the government and the Post Office must agree on “full and fair” compensations for victims and their families.

Already, the Post Office said it apologised “unreservedly” for the suffering it caused to postmasters and their loved ones, describing it as “a shameful period in our history.” It said it would “carefully consider” the report and its recommendations.

UK business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said he welcomed the publication of the report and said he was committed to “ensuring wronged sub-postmasters are given full, fair, and prompt redress,” while Post Office minister Gareth Thomas said the recommendations were “immensely helpful,” adding that the UK government would respond in full to parliament after carefully considering them.

But the SNP’s Chris Law said justice was “still being delayed and denied to subpostmasters and their families,” and called on Labour to remove “every bureaucratic barrier and blockade” so that fair and fast compensation can be delivered to the victims.