Background
The recent post office scandal has hit the us again. This has been fuelled by the brilliant recent ITV drama, which has now resulted in (a) the UK Police looking to investigate this as a criminal activity and (b) many UK politicians panicking and trying to distance themselves from the scandal.
For those who do not know, the UK post office implemented a new system (called Horizon) around 1999-2000 across its 11,500 branches. The new system covers payments and stock control. To be fair to the Post Office it was a very complex system which employed a challenging client service architecture which was further complicated because nobody had high-speed broadband. This resulted in a clunky and troublesome remote dial-up to update and synch data. Like all complex systems, there were many issues with Horizon. These issues resulted in Horizon incorrectly recording cash and stock balances against what was physically held in individual branches.
However, instead of the Post office, admitting there were issues with Horizon and working with the individual branches to fix them, they covered them up and blamed the branches for the errors. The result was that branch owners (called sub masters or mistresses) were forced to pay up the ‘missing amounts with many individuals losing their jobs, their savings, their reputation, and their livelihoods. There are also at least four suicides. In total approximately 700 individuals were prosecuted with some resulting in prison sentences.
The impacted individual post offices formed an action group to try and address this wrong. This group was led by a person called Alan Bates.
Despite a massive amount of evidence, the post office continued to insist that there were no issues with Horizon and that the branches were at fault. However, after much time (circa 20 years by way !!!) and several expensive court rulings, the truth finally came out and Horizon had bugs which caused these problems and the individual branches and the sub masters and mistresses
This has been viewed as the UK’s biggest miscarriage of justice of all time.
However, the horror has not finished yet for the sub masters and mistresses. They still need to clear their names. At the time of writing only about 95 of the 700 have had their convictions overturned. It is unlikely that many of them would have their names clear before they pass away. .
So, what needs to be done?
Post masters and mistresses need to have their names cleared immediately.
One of the reasons that so few post masters and mistresses have had their names cleared, is that that legal process takes such a long term.
However, as this is such a miscarriage of justice then it should be able to clear their names ‘en masse’. Legislation would be required but the UK governance can implement legislation very quickly when it wants to.
Therefore, this should be done immediately. The government has implemented legislation quickly previously so why not now?
Post masters and mistresses need be compensated fully and generously.
As noted above, many of post masters and mistresses lost their life savings, their homes, health, reputation, etc but very few of them have been fully compensated.
Again, this process needs to be sped up to ensure the post masters and mistresses receive this before they pass away.
It should be possible to create a set of rules for this. For example, any financial losses and loss of earnings should be refunded (considering inflation). These amounts should be increased dramatically if the individual was convicted (say 10-fold) or went to prison (say 15-fold). I appreciate that this will cost a large amount but so many people have been badly damaged by the scandal then this is the least that can be done. (PS This process should be run by an independent panel and not the Post Office or the UK Government).
The money will no doubt have to be funded by the taxpayer (remembering the UK government owns the Post Office) and it could result in irreparable damage to the Post Office.
However, is this such a bad thing if makes things better in the long term? After previous corporate scandals (such as Enron, News of the World, WorldPay, etc) these organisations either failed or had to be reinvented dramatically. This improved society to some extent.
Need to find out what really happened.
While there have been several disclosures from the court cases and the inflight public enquiry, there are still many questions that need to be answered:
- So why didn’t somebody in the post office realise that the individual post offices were all having the same issues and realize that there was a single set of causes?
- Why was there a constant flow of denials to the individual post offices, the courts, the government, and the public? They must have known that they would have been found out sooner than later.
- Why were the post office contractors able to amend records of individual post office work without their knowledge?
- How robust was the supplier selection process?
- When individual branches were being prosecuted, why did the post office withhold evidence?
- How much money had the post office wasted on this? Remember the post office is still owed by the UK government so therefore any money they waste is UK taxpayer money.
- What does annoy me is if the above has happened to any normal person like you or me then we would have probably been looking at a very long jail sentence.
- Plus, a million other questions.
Until we know the truth then nothing can be done to fix it.
Why did it take a TV show for the UK government to start really looking at this.
Not wanting to sound sceptical but doubt nothing material would have happened if ITV had not made their programme.
Now there is loud public outrage, with politicians either jumping into action to try and resolve the problem; or looking to distance themselves from it by saying they were not aware, not our fault, I was lied to, etc, etc.
I suspect that a general election in the next 12 months does not help to motivate politicians.
So what needs to be done?
While I am not a fan of witch-hunts (because innocent people are caught up in the process), we need to find out who causes the problems, who knew about the issues, who covered the issues up, who lied about them and so on.
These people need to be held accountable for their decisions. If this means prosecutions, then so be it.
Also legislation needs to be implemented to try and stop this happening again and it should cover the following
- There needs to be more transparency of public money being spend, issues, progress and other problems.
- Supplier selection should not just focus on the cheapest but on supplier cultural fit, delivery, and functionality.
- Organisations should not always look for bespoke solutions (because they are risky) but focus on changing or adapting their processes to use existing systems.
- Effective and truly independent board members and advisors need to be in place (not just cronies of management)
- There must be safe whistle-blower processes in place to allow issues to be raised.
- The law must always be followed.
- If there are problems, then people should ask “why is there a problem?” and not immediately look to allocate blame.
- People should take responsibility and accountability for their roles and their actions.
Failure to comply will result in criminal prosecution. (It is amazing who moral and ethical people are when they are being threatened by prison).
To conclude.
Remember until there is clear and re-enforced accountability in place then (a) nothing will change and (b) similar problems will continue to take place.
We all live in hope.
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