Closer to Home

You hear of scandals and injustices far off, and momentarily you boggle and then move on with your everyday life, because everyone is busy, and most of the time you don’t think much about things you don’t absolutely have to: there isn’t the brain-room. Then, just occasionally, something comes closer to home, and the boggling doesn’t stop, and may develop into more definite and angry feelings.

The stories of sub-postmasters being, they say, ill-treated at the hands of Post Office Ltd have come across my radar occasionally over the last few years. I heard a couple of reports on Radio 4 and wondered what exactly was happening. It seemed bad but remote, a few hard cases of poor communication and official hardheartedness, and I gave it no more mental space.

Then, in the autumn, a sub-postmaster not far from here, whose children I’ve met at school, was suspended by Post Office Ltd. An accounts audit – the first since he took over the business some years ago – had allegedly brought to light a significant deficit in the branch accounts. He instantly paid some £57K to make up the shortfall and began a nail-biting process of submitting paperwork, being asked for more paperwork, attending meetings in Norwich, and then being asked for more paperwork. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ he said. At first the target was to get the branch reopened before Christmas, and then it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. I went to the post office in Hornington and found queues out of the door; most of the customers appeared to be there because their own closest branch was closed. The sub-postmaster was sent a letter from Post Office Ltd in January saying the money had at last been accounted for and no legal action was being taken. A fortnight later he received another letter terminating his contract: ‘there is no appeal from this decision’, it stated. Even our local MP, a Government minister, commented ‘well, that’s clearly not true’ when shown the letter at a surgery.

You might well tut and say that a community, and its priest, is always likely to assume that someone it knows is honest and being hard-done-by; and so would I, did this local drama not happen within a wider context. The context is a decade-long controversy over the Post Office’s accounting software. The Major Government in the mid-90s, exercised by the issue of benefit fraud (an understandable thing to be exercised about, in itself), put the wheels in motion for a new accounting system for Post Office branches to be devised. This was all proceeding when the Blair Government withdrew from participation, leaving a subsidiary of IT company ICL, now part of Fujitsu, to develop the system on its own. We know that private companies do everything better than the public sector, don’t we? The Horizon program was finally ready for introduction in 1999, and the problems began almost as soon as it started being used. Gradually over the years more and more sub-postmasters found Post Office Counters (then renamed Consignia, then Post Office Ltd) accusing them of fraud having discovered discrepancies in their accounts. Most were adamant that the problem lay in the system; some alleged that Post Office officials had encouraged them to submit accounts in forms that they thought were not kosher, but were assured would smooth over the apparent problems, and having complied then found themselves accused of fraud. This has now happened to hundreds and hundreds of sub-postmasters, a significant proportion of the whole network. It would, if true, represent an astonishing level of fraud and call the Post Office’s own franchising procedures into question. But is it true? Why are so few sub-postmasters ever prosecuted, merely sacked? Why aren’t they given the opportunity to defend themselves in court? Why are so many, like our local example, told no action is going to be taken against them (no legal action, mind), and then find their contracts terminated with not a word of justification, only ‘there is no appeal from this decision’?

Post Office Ltd has proved solidly unwilling to countenance the suggestion that there may be something wrong with Horizon. In 2015 it was pressured by the Government to launch an investigation, undertaken by a forensic IT firm called Second Sight. In front of a Parliamentary Select Committee, POLtd stated that it was fully co-operating with the inquiry; the chief investigator then stated blankly that this was not true, and that the team were still waiting for paperwork that they had first requested 18 months before. The day before the report was due to be issued, POLtd informed Second Sight that the inquiry was being suspended, and that they were to destroy all the paperwork they had gathered. They then issued a statement that the investigation had exonerated Horizon. This was not the impression gained from a copy of the draft report obtained by the BBC which repeatedly stated it was not possible to rule out the conclusion that the accounting system was producing substantial inaccuracies. All of this can be found on or through the Alliance for Justice for Sub-Postmasters’ website. There is currently a class action being brought by nearly 600 sub-postmasters against POLtd, which comes before the High Court in November. The judge has ordered all the paperwork gathered by Second Sight (which was not destroyed) to be turned over to the court. Presumably at this stage the truth will begin to emerge, though it may be too late for the local sub-postmaster and his family to save their business.

What has shocked me in all this is that it’s possible for a public corporation – POLtd is still, officially, owned by the taxpayer – to behave in such an extra-legal fashion. It’s as though the organisation is accountable to no one – not to natural justice, not to the Government, not to the law. How did this happen? Now, I loathe most of the works of Mrs Thatcher, but one positive result of those years was a degree of increased responsiveness by public bodies to their users, increased transparency and accountability. That new world seems not to have come very near Finsbury Dials. Not yet.