A new television drama has brought to light one of the greatest injustices in UK history, sparking a long-awaited public reckoning and sowing hope for much-needed institutional accountability.
The Post Office Scandal, as it is known in the United Kingdom, concerns the wrongful prosecution and conviction of more than 900 postal workers for theft and fraud between 1999 and 2015, due to a faulty computer system. While the British government has announced plans to exonerate and compensate those convicted, the fact that it took more than 20 years and a television hit to spark public outrage is a poor reflection on the rule of law and the protection of people. civil liberties in the United Kingdom.
The plot of Mr Bates vs. The Post Office, a four-episode television drama, could have been lifted from a dystopian novel. In 1999, the British Post Office introduced Horizon, a new accounting software package developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu. From the beginning, subpostmasters (self-employed individuals who operated post offices, usually inside small general stores) complained that the new system incorrectly reported shortages. Instead of fixing the viruses, management prosecuted hundreds of workers for fraud and embezzlement. Many faced financial ruin, others were imprisoned and at least four committed suicide.
Amid growing media scrutiny, the Post Office insisted Horizon was trustworthy. Today we know that the company was already aware of the system’s flaws in 2003 and still continued to prosecute submailers for financial misconduct until 2015.
Only when Mr Bates vs. was released. The Post Office on January 1, the government sprang into action. On January 10, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced emergency legislation to overturn the convictions of 980 deputy postmasters, offering them compensation packages ranging from £75,000 to £600,000 ($95,000-$760,000). Paula Vennells, the former Post Office CEO, has returned her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) title and may be required to repay £2.2m in bonuses.
Unlike authoritarian regimes, the power of governments in liberal democracies is controlled by constitutions and an independent judiciary. But ‘The Post Office Scandal’ underlines the extent to which systems designed to hold the powerful to account have been eroded in the UK.
But the government’s intervention also highlights the poor state of the judiciary. When hundreds of victims appealed their sentences, the Criminal Cases Review Commission – the body responsible for investigating possible miscarriages of justice – was already struggling, and the volume of cases overwhelmed it. As a result, only 93 convictions have been overturned so far.
The gradual erosion of resources within the British criminal justice system has exacerbated the problem. A serious shortage of judges, staff and attorneys is fueling growing backlogs across the country’s courts. Given the current overload, reviewing Post Office convictions individually would take many years.
But the erosion of accountability goes beyond a shortage of funding. Parliamentary commissions of inquiry, another mechanism intended to uphold institutional integrity, exist essentially to delay the resolution of official misconduct. As columnist Juliet Samuel recently observed, these commissions often function as a way to guarantee “valuable time to neutralize scandal, overturn errors, and sterilize villainy.”
Although a state corporation, the British Post Office has operational independence. As a result, it enjoys neither robust state oversight nor true freedom to manage its own affairs. Its board includes independent directors and government-appointed officials, whose role is to reassure ministers that the company is operating in the public interest.
This minimal government oversight allowed the Post Office to initiate private prosecutions, bypassing police and public prosecutors. Between 1999 and 2012, it generated 735 successful prosecutions against its own postmasters for breach of contract, incentivizing internal investigators and law firms with bonuses tied to the amount of money they “recovered.” While prosecutors were still required to establish the reliability of computer fraud evidence in court, this requirement was absolutely undermined by two major misconceptions.
First, the British appeals system operates on the presumption that judges and juries are infallible and that only guilty people are convicted. In the context of the Horizon malfunction, courts were instructed to consider system data correct unless clear evidence suggested otherwise. In other words, the computer program and its developers were considered innocent until proven guilty, while those facing prosecution were considered guilty unless they could prove their innocence.
The second misconception is that cutting costs improves efficiency. Automated systems like Horizon are often classified as cost-effective, because they do not require food, clothing, housing or entertainment, they operate 24 hours a day, without interruptions, and they do not go on strike. Fujitsu’s faulty computer system demonstrates the dangers of this strategy.
The United Kingdom is just the latest example of a Western democracy moving toward a legal system in which innocence is no longer presumed but must be proven. The Post Office Scandal also illustrates the risk of authoritarian rule through negligence. Whether we like it or not, our freedoms depend on the dedication and vigilance of certain people dedicated to exposing the miscarriages of justice. Without them, the democratic institutions we boast of will invariably fail.
Robert Skidelsky, member of the British House of Lords, is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University. He is the author of an award-winning biography of John Maynard Keynes and The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning (Allen Lane, 2023).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
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