British Post Office scandal

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office and the statutory authorities of the UK, including the CPS, the PPSNI, and the COPFS, brought forward hundreds of criminal prosecutions of subpostmasters when the Horizon accounting system reported that money was missing from their post offices. In all, between 1999 and 2015, over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison. The Post Office itself prosecuted 700 people. Once the Post Office had secured a criminal conviction, it would attempt to secure a Proceeds of Crime Act order against convicted subpostmasters, allowing it to seize their assets. In addition to those convicted, there were subpostmasters who were prosecuted but not convicted, and many more who, without being prosecuted, had their contracts terminated and lost money as they were forced to pay the Post Office for Horizon shortfalls. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions and prison sentences, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides. By February 2024, more than 4,000 subpostmasters had been identified as eligible for compensation. In Scotland, 73 convicted subpostmasters were identified in 2020. By March 2024, 19 of those 73 had applied for their convictions to be reviewed. The BBC said it was possible that hundreds more people in Scotland were accused of stealing money but not convicted. In Northern Ireland, 53 convicted subpostmasters have been identified. Post Office as private prosecutor At the time of the prosecutions, the Post Office had the same standing in law as any other private prosecutor in the British legal system. It acted as a private prosecutor in England and Wales. In Scotland, it reported allegations of crime to a procurator fiscal, and in Northern Ireland to the Public Prosecution Service. Historically, Royal Mail and the Post Office were part of the same entity and were a public authority. They split into separate organisations in 2012. The Post Office's unique position, with a history as a prosecutor going back to 1683, gave the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) concerns about its neutrality. In June 2020, the chair of the CCRC wrote to the Justice Select Committee asking if the Committee would undertake a formal review of the circumstances, and what safeguards were in place, "when an organisation is allowed to act as a prosecutor when it is also the victim and the investigator of an alleged offence". The committee's report into private prosecutions and their safeguards, published in October 2020, noted that barrister Paul Marshall, who represented several subpostmasters, had argued that the private nature of the prosecutions was not a significant cause of the Horizon scandal. He explained, instead, that it would be unlikely that the prosecutions could be considered distinct from those of the CPS due to the history of the organisation. The report stated: The Post Office is not a typical private prosecutor... The Private Prosecutors' Association question whether the Post Office was conducting private prosecutions at all and was in fact a 'publicly-owned entity and a public prosecutor' during the relevant period... One of the CCRC's principal concerns is whether any organisation with the Post Office's combined status, as victim, investigator and prosecutor, would be able to take decisions on investigations and disclosure 'appropriately free from conflict of interest and conscious or unconscious bias'. == Post Office civil cases against subpostmasters ==

In 2003, the Post Office pursued a civil claim against Julie Wolstenholme, subpostmaster at Cleveleys post office in Lancashire. The Post Office dropped its claim and settled Wolstenholme's counterclaim out of court after a jointly appointed expert, Jason Coyne, reported that discrepancies could have been caused by faults in Horizon. In spite of the outcome in the Wolstenholme case, the Post Office continued to pursue subpostmasters in the civil courts. Lee Castleton, a subpostmaster in Bridlington, Yorkshire, was pursued for £25,859 after he refused to pay a shortfall that had been caused by Horizon. The case was heard before judge Richard Havery in December 2006 and January 2007. Castleton represented himself and counterclaimed damages in the sum of £11,250 on the ground that the Post Office wrongfully determined (that is, terminated) his contract as a subpostmaster following his suspension. The judge found for the Post Office on both the claim and the counterclaim. Unable to afford the losses and the £321,000 in legal costs, Castleton declared himself bankrupt. In September 2023, solicitor Stephen Dilley, who had represented the Post Office in the case, told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry that the Post Office had known Castleton would not be able to pay if he lost, but wanted to send "a message that they were willing to defend the Fujitsu Horizon". Dilley defended the decision not to disclose details of the 12,000–15,000 calls being made every month by other sub-postmasters reporting technical problems with Horizon, saying the request for disclosure by Castleton was 'onerous'. Richard Morgan, who had designed the strategy of the Post Office case against Castleton and represented the Post Office at trial, denied that he had been given instruction to establish a legal point. He said "he would have told Post Office he would not do it if those instructions had been given." This strategy was repeatedly referred to as a "nice legal point" by counsel to the Horizon Inquiry, Jason Beer. Richard Moorhead maintains "The same strategy formed a central part of the Post Office's thinking in subsequent cases and provided a legal rationale for insulating Horizon from legal challenges without proper evidence of its robustness." The Castleton case was analysed and assessed by the University of Exeter School of Law in 2024. == Post Office management structure ==

The Post Office business, along with the Royal Mail delivery service, were formerly part of the General Post Office, tracing its origins back to 1516. It became a statutory corporation after the passage of the Post Office Act 1969. A gradual business restructuring process started in 1969 and was completed in 2012, after the Postal Services Act 2011 placed Royal Mail under separate ownership. Post Office Limited became and has remained a single share government-owned entity with government represented at board level. Oversight of Post Office Limited was assigned to what later became the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. As well as a succession of junior post office ministers, ultimate control was held by civil servants including Brian Bender, Simon Fraser, Martin Donnelly and Alex Chisholm. From 2003, Royal Mail (and thus the post office business) came under the management of the Shareholder Executive, which in 2016 was merged into UK Government Investments. Key personnel who presided over the Post Office while these events unfolded include Adam Crozier, who headed Royal Mail when it owned the Post Office between 2003 and 2010; and Paula Vennells, who became chief executive officer of Post Office Limited from 2012 to 2019. Commenting in January 2024 on the governance arrangements and the scandal, the Institute for Government said The peer James Arbuthnot, who supported the subpostmasters, said in November 2019: There were approximately 11,000 local branches. In Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd, the subpostmasters argued that the Post Office owed a duty of good faith because a relational contract existed. The Post Office relied entirely on the actual wording in the contracts, which stated: Mr Justice Fraser found that the "contractual relationship between the Post Office and the SPMs was a relational contract. This imposes an implied duty of good faith on both parties." He added that "the parties must refrain from conduct which in the relevant context would be regarded as commercially unacceptable by reasonable and honest people." His ruling states that contractual terms which required co-operation in investigating shortfalls were implied into the contracts and that some onerous and unusual terms in an earlier version of the subpostmaster contract would only have been incorporated if adequate notice of their inclusion had been given. Management culture In July 2023, Parliament debated the Post Office's management culture. The then government representative, Tom Cooper, a senior civil servant, had been heavily criticised and had resigned following a scandal concerning Post Office bonuses and the slow disclosure of documents to the Horizon Inquiry. "That is not a great look for the Government and it raises real questions about the governance of Post Office Ltd." said Marion Fellows MP. Writing in The Guardian in July 2023, Marina Hyde said: "It remains something of a downer that the most widespread injustice in British legal history doesn't get the full-spectrum fever coverage that is lavished on more frivolous news – but then, the forces formerly known as The Man have always wanted this one covered up... Wyn Williams's long-awaited and tirelessly fought-for inquiry is hearing evidence, except on the days it can't, because the Post Office is continually failing to hand over evidence." On 27 January 2024, Post Office chairman Henry Staunton was dismissed by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, who said that his departure was about more than just the Horizon scandal, but concerned the governance of the Post Office more generally. In February 2024 it was reported that the government would meet representatives of post office operators to discuss the possibility of handing them ownership of the Post Office. Tax avoidance by Post Office management BBC business editor Simon Jack reported in January 2024 that the Post Office had reduced its corporation tax liability by more than £100 million by deducting payments to victims of the Horizon scandal from its profits. Tax expert Dan Neidle maintained that claiming tax relief for this compensation could be a breach of the law, could mean that the business was at risk of insolvency, and that senior executives may have been overpaid. The BBC highlighted notes in the most recent accounts that stated that the Post Office was "engaged in discussions with HMRC regarding potential taxation liabilities that could arise in relation to past events". Neidle said the Post Office did not have enough money to pay a £100m tax bill and could be technically insolvent. Although compensation payments seem to have been deducted from profits for tax purposes, the BBC report said they appeared to have been ignored when calculating executive pay. In the year ended 2022 the CEO was paid a salary of £436,000 and a profit-related bonus of £137,000.We have to be careful, that we are not creating a cottage industry that damages the brand and makes clients like the DWP and the DVLA think twice. The DWP would not have re-awarded the Post Office card account contract, which pays out £18 billion a year, in the last month if they thought for a minute that this computer system was not reliable... If we are not careful, we damage the brand, we damage the franchise and we cost my members' ability to sell the franchise. If we lose big contracts, [other] members lose their jobs as well. So we have to be careful that we do not create a cottage industry that is built on supposition. The federation was criticised by the judge in the Bates case: "the NFSP is not remotely independent of the Post Office, nor does it appear to put its members' interests above its own separate commercial interests". At the Horizon Inquiry, the NFSP submitted in June 2023 that it had been continually deceived by the Post Office as to the design, integration and integrity of the Horizon system. == Post Office IT systems ==

A 2020 article in Private Eye described the origins of Horizon: Conceived in 1996 as one of the first private finance initiative (PFI) contracts, between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency on the one hand and computer company ICL on the other, the Horizon IT system had an unpromising start. It had been set up to create a swipe card system for payment of pensions and benefits from Post Office branch counters. When, in May 1999, the plug was finally pulled on what the Commons public accounts committee called 'one of the biggest IT failures in the public sector', taxpayers had lost around £700m. Something had to be salvaged, however. So, against the better judgement of its IT specialists, the Post Office decided to use the system to transform its paper-based branch accounting into an electronic system covering the full range of Post Office services. The new Horizon project became the largest non-military IT contract in Europe. As of 2025, the Post Office continue to use the Horizon system, though they state that there have been "several versions" of the system and that they have "continued to make improvements" to it. Despite this, some sub-postmasters still claim the system to be unreliable. The Post Office state that they "plan to move to a new system that is being developed", but that "moving to a new system is a very large exercise" with the 11,500 post office branches they handle. Versions of the Horizon system There have been two main versions of the Horizon system during the period of the scandal, with radically different architectures; the first in use from 1999 until 2010, and the second from 2010 onwards. The first, known as Legacy Horizon within the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, was built on the Riposte product from Escher Group Ltd, and supported offline operation with data held locally. Paul Patterson, CEO of Fujitsu Services UK, said in his first witness statement, "Legacy Horizon used Riposte software from Escher, a third-party specialist provider to post offices in other countries, to replicate data between counters at the branches and correspondence servers at the data centres". Business applications on Legacy Horizon (including EPOSS, the accounting application) were written by Fujitsu. The history and poor state of the EPOSS software is described in 2001 in an internal Fujitsu document "Report on the EPOSS PinICL TaskForce". The second version, known as Horizon Online or HNG-X, was a complete rewrite by Fujitsu, over several years up to 2010, using (as the name suggests) a fully online architecture, with all data held on a central database. An update to this, known as Horizon Anywhere or HNG-A, based on the same online architecture, was deployed in 2017 and is still in use in 2025. Problems with the software The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs. Some of those that came to light were named after the post offices where the bug first occurred. These bugs included: the "Dalmellington bug", where the system would enter repeated withdrawals in the ledger every time the user pressed "enter" at a frozen interface screen; and the "Callendar Square bug", where the system would create duplicate database entries in the ledger. Subpostmasters began reporting balancing errors within weeks of the Horizon system being installed, via the helpline they were instructed to use. The Post Office responded that it "totally refuted" that the system was faulty, and that it had "sent experts... to check it twice". He reported his concerns to Computer Weekly in 2004; sufficient evidence had been gathered by 2009 to publish. A campaign group, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), was formed by Bates and others in September 2009. By 2012, concern in the media, and amongst a number of members of parliament, had grown. As a result, an independent firm of forensic accountants, Second Sight, was commissioned by the Post Office to conduct an independent inquiry in 2012. In April 2021, Post Office chief executive Nick Read announced that the Horizon system would be replaced by a new IT system that would be "more user-friendly, easier to adapt for new products and services, and cloud-based to ensure easy maintenance and ready interoperability with other systems", and presented a plan to share Post Office profits with postmasters. At the Inquiry in 2024, it was revealed that Fujitsu was aware that the Horizon software contained bugs as early as 1999, but this was not disclosed to the subpostmasters or to the courts in which prosecutions were conducted. At least two subpostmasters using the system were accused of fraud, but protests that the accounting problems were a "glitch in the system" were ignored. In December 2024, the government recognised that Capture could also have created shortfalls affecting postmasters. It commissioned an independent Kroll report into the software. As a result, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds promised to provide redress for postmasters who suffered losses as a result of Capture errors. Horizon predecessor: Ecco+ In late 2024, reports emerged of subpostmasters having been prosecuted and/or chased for payments relating to an even earlier IT system known as ECCO+, which had been used in post offices throughout the 1990s. Ecco+ (Electronic Cash Registers at Counters) was an offline, floppy disk based EPOS system on PC hardware, which was designed for use in Crown offices (directly managed branches, as opposed to sub offices). In its later years it was also used at some subpostmaster-run branches, which had been converted from Crown offices as part of the general reduction in the directly managed network. In October 2024, the National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) requested that an investigation take place into ECCO+, In March 2025 the NFSP asked for former Crown office staff to come forward if they had experienced problems with ECCO+. == Investigating Post Office IT problems ==

Second Sight reports In 2012, forensic accountants Second Sight were appointed by the Post Office to conduct an independent investigation of the Horizon software at the request of a group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA). Second Sight issued an interim report in July 2013. Their preliminary conclusions stated that, although "[w]e have so far found no evidence of system wide (systemic) problems with the Horizon software", the Post Office was aware of the existence of at least two defects or bugs in the software, one of which had occurred at least twice before being detected and fixed, which had led to false shortfalls in accounts at 76 branches. The losses in two of these incidents had been identified by the Post Office and the subpostmasters had not been held liable, but one incident "resulted in branches being asked to make good incorrect amounts." It also identified incidents when communication and hardware issues had caused account imbalances, noted the Post Office's failure to investigate reports of IT issues, and criticised the Post Office's focus on account recovery and prosecution over discovering how shortfalls had occurred. It stated that Horizon had not been accurately tracking money from lottery terminals, Vehicle Excise Duty payments or cash machine transactions – and Post Office investigators had not looked for the cause of the errors, instead accusing the subpostmasters of theft or false accounting. George Freeman, a minister at the Department for Business, maintains that when, in 2015, he was required to read out a speech written for him stating that Horizon was reliable, he initially refused and insisted on a meeting with Paula Vennells. "She and officials told me that there was no evidence of a systemic failure in the software, and the department's lawyer insisted I mustn't accept liability for the department or Post Office". Freeman went on to make the speech in the House of Commons: "Second Sight produced two independent reports – one in 2013 and the other earlier this year [2015] – both of which found there was no evidence of systemic flaws in the system". Another minister, Stephen Timms, claimed to have been similarly duped in 2004 when he wrote a letter to MPs insisting that “[Post Office managers] have found no evidence to suggest there is any fault with the Horizon system and maintain that the decision to terminate Mr Bates’ contract was legitimate.”. In 2020, Vennells, who stood down from her Post Office role in 2019, said of the 2013 report that "it concluded, while it had not found evidence of system-wide problems with the Horizon software, there were specific areas where Post Office should consider its procedures and operational support for sub-postmasters". In December 2019, Ron Warmington of Second Sight said in a statement: The Post Office has improperly enriched itself, through the decades, with funds that have passed through its own suspense accounts. Had its own staff more diligently investigated in order to establish who were the rightful owners of those funds, they would have been returned to them, whether they were Post Office's customers or its Subpostmasters. When is the Post Office going to return the funds that, in effect, belonged to its Subpostmasters?... It also seems to be clear now that some of those funds could have been generated by Horizon itself, or by errors made by the Post Office's own staff, or by those of Fujitsu. They weren't 'real' losses at all. They were phantom discrepancies... If the Post Office Board had believed... and acted on... what Second Sight reported... instead of being led by the nose by its own middle management and in-house and external legal advisors, huge amounts of money, and human suffering, would have been avoided. Mediation scheme After the publication of Second Sight's interim report, a mediation scheme for affected subpostmasters was set up in August 2013, to be funded by the Post Office and run by a working group comprising the Post Office, Second Sight and the JFSA and chaired by retired judge Sir Anthony Hooper. By December 2014, MPs were critical of the mediation scheme and 140 had withdrawn their support for it. James Arbuthnot, who was leading the 144 MPs who had been contacted by subpostmasters about the issue, accused the organisation of rejecting 90% of applications for mediation. He said the Post Office had been "duplicitous", and suggested there would be legal and political campaigns in response. In 2014, the Post Office board set up a sub-committee named Project Sparrow to oversee its interactions with Second Sight, JFSA and MPs. The sub-committee was led by Post Office chair Alice Perkins and included chief executive Vennells, senior in-house lawyer Chris Aujard, and Richard Callard, a senior civil servant at UK Government Investments, then a division of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The project first became publicly known during the Bates & Others case under the name of the 'X Working Group'. The Post Office claimed privilege in respect both of the name of the project and some of the contents of a document referred to as the 'X Action Summary'. The Evidence-Based Justice Lab Post Office Scandal Project at the University of Exeter noted that "The judge criticises [the Post Office] for what appears to be excessive redaction, which includes concealing the name of a working group called 'X' [Project Sparrow is our assumption] and other redactions." In January 2024, the BBC obtained and published an un-redacted version of minutes from two Project Sparrow sub-committee meetings which took place in April 2014. The minutes revealed Post Office plans to sack Second Sight. In March 2015, the Post Office terminated the contract. He said that these files were still outstanding 18 months after they had been requested. Detica report In October 2013, Detica undertook a detailed analysis of the Post Office's systems. It advised the Post Office that its systems were "not fit for purpose in a modern retail and financial environment". "The basis of the application ... was the desire to prevent a widespread loss of confidence in a public institution or, a loss of trust in a system operated by such an institution or to prevent journalistic speculation about systems relied upon by the public." On 15 July 2013, Clarke wrote an advice to the Post Office which became known as the "Clarke advice". He reminded the Post Office of its obligations as a prosecutor regarding disclosure and of the duties of an expert witness and expressed a view that several trials had been misled as to the reliability of the Horizon system. He said that Fujitsu employee Gareth Jenkins, even though he was aware of bugs in the system, had given expert evidence to the court attesting to Horizon's accuracy. Cartwright King then carried out the "CK Sift Review", which was in turn reviewed by Brian Altman, counsel for the Post Office. The review, which was concluded in 2014, identified 26 potential miscarriages of justice since 2010 and led to four prosecutions being halted. The second piece of advice was written in August 2013, after Clarke became aware that the head of security at the Post Office had given instructions to shred minutes of a conference call about Horizon bugs, and again reminded the Post Office of prosecution disclosure obligations. It was described by Lord Falconer of Thoroton, former head of the judiciary, as a likely "smoking gun". In May 2023 the Evidence Based Justice Lab – University of Exeter published a 41-page analysis and assessment of Brian Altman's "General Review". Concluding their executive summary, Richard Moorhead, Karen Nokes and Rebecca Helm say: Deloitte Review In 2014 auditors from Deloitte found that branch accounts could be altered remotely by Fujitsu. In February 2016 they began a further review, intending to look at Horizon transactions since its launch in 1999, but the Post Office halted their work four months later on legal advice after the subpostmasters had launched their group action. == Exposing the IT problems ==

In 2004, Bates approached Computer Weekly investigative journalist Tony Collins over suspicions about the Horizon IT system. Five years elapsed before the journalists felt able to 'stand up' the story. Horizon was legally declared unreliable in Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd, in 2018. The unlawful nondisclosure of knowledge by the Post Office in its prosecution cases was established in law in the case of Hamilton & Others vs Post Office Ltd, in 2021. In September 2015, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, on behalf of the government, instructed the incoming Post Office chairman Tim Parker to "determine whether any further action is necessary ... to respond to the concerns about Horizon raised by individuals and MPs". Parker commissioned a public law barrister, Jonathan Swift, to investigate. The resulting document was written by two authors, Swift and barrister Christopher Knight, and became known as the Swift Review. The report was completed in February 2016 but was not shared with the Post Office board, and not made public until a Freedom of Information request was successful in August 2022. In an analysis of the Swift Review, the Evidence-Based Justice Lab Post Office Scandal Project at the University of Exeter said: Arbuthnot, sitting in the House of Lords as Baron Arbuthnot of Edrom, in a written question asked "whether the Accounting Officer with responsibility for the Post Office has played any role in advising ministers on the Government's policy in relation to... the sub-postmasters' litigation against the Post Office". In 2024, Andrew Bridgen MP said in parliament:I was in the original Post Office review group. By 2015, a whistleblower from Fujitsu had come forward from the boiler room, as they called it. He had been altering accounts without the knowledge of the sub-postmasters. The MPs in the review group knew. The investigator from Second Sight, Ron Warmington, knew. The Post Office knew that the convictions were unsafe, as did the Government, yet it took another five years of very expensive litigation from the 555 before justice was done. == Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd ==

When mediation with the Post Office broke down, the subpostmasters began to consult and combine their efforts into legal action. The action taken against the Post Office took the form first of group litigation in the name of Bates and others, a civil action in the High Court by some 555 people. There were six lead claimants, and 23 common issues (that is issues common to all the cases) were identified and agreed to enable the court to examine the 555 cases. The case was settled mid-trial by consent and without judgment as to costs; Post Office costs have been estimated as £100m and those of the subpostmasters as £47m. The Post Office agreed to pay the subpostmasters £58 million, but after legal costs the claimants were left with £12 million to share. During the trial, which had been divided into a number of sub-trials, those acting for the Post Office attempted to persuade the judge to recuse himself. Journalist and writer Nick Wallis, commenting on the two very senior lawyers who had advised the Post Office Board on the strategy, described it as "misuse (of) a very serious instrument designed to aid fairness as a weapon purely for their wealthy client's benefit". At the Horizon inquiry, a former Post Office manager admitted that the ultimately lost case was seen by the Post Office as a way of "killing off" challenges to the Horizon system. Kathleen Donnelly, one of the barristers who acted for the subpostmasters in the case, said: It is obvious that the Post Office had a strategy to withhold material until they were forced to produce it. This caused delay, disruption and ran up costs. We only received significant documents after a battle and were left with little time to review them, sometimes just days before a witness was cross-examined. It was exasperating. On 22 March 2017, Senior Master Fontaine made a group litigation order (GLO) with the approval of the president of the Queen's Bench of the High Court and, on 31 March, the then Mr Justice Fraser was nominated managing judge in Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd, brought by 555 claimants. David Cavender, Alisdair Cameron, Ben Foat, staff from Womble Bond Dickinson and from Herbert Smith Freehills. There was an unsuccessful application by the Post Office that the judge recuse himself, an appeal, and two separate submissions described by judges as attempts to put the courts in terrorem. At the Judgment No. 6 the judge said: The high cost of High Court battles means that some cases may not make it to court without them. The matter ended by consent when the Post Office agreed to pay costs of £58 million, without admitting liability, and compensation was therefore not awarded. Of that payment, £46 million went to the financial backers. Vennells, the then-Post Office chief executive, in December 2019, after the Post Office conceded the court cases, apologised to workers affected by the scandal, saying: "I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused." In a letter to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Select Committee she wrote: During the case, six separate judgments were handed down, two of them (POL-subpostmaster contract common issues, and Horizon system issues) dealing with substantive matters, while the other four dealt with procedural matters. == Appeals against convictions ==

The ruling in Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd that the Horizon software contained "bugs, errors, and defects" that could cause shortfalls paved the way for subpostmasters to have their convictions overturned. More referrals followed and in May 2021 the Law Society Gazette reported that the organisation was 'not adequately resourced' if 200 cases were to be brought forward for review. The Post Office states that the total number of all overturned convictions, as of 2 February 2024, is 101. This includes eight cases in which Post Office was not the prosecutor. Of the 147 completed cases, 37% were refused permission to appeal or withdrawn from Court. In August 2023 the chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, Christopher Hodges, wrote to the CCRC setting out the view of the Board. "Our strong belief is that the overwhelming majority of convictions of Sub-Post-Masters and -Mistresses (SPMs) related to Horizon, and possibly also a significant number of those not directly related to Horizon, are unjust." The letter was also sent to all UK statutory prosecuting authorities. The Times on 7 January 2024 reported that Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, was looking at whether the Post Office can be stripped of its role in the appeals process, with many victims still attempting to overturn wrongful convictions. On 9 January 2024 Nick Read, Post Office's chief executive, wrote to ministers saying it would stand by the prosecution of more than half of the post office operators targeted during the Horizon scandal: it would be "bound to oppose" appeals in 369 cases. In the letter, Read wrote: "This clearly raises acute political, judicial, and communications challenges against the very significant public and parliamentary pressure for some form of acceleration or by-passing of the normal appeals process." Moorhead, a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, posted his thoughts on what was wrong with the Post Office appeal cases in his online newsletter: When that failed, the Post Office then resisted Ground 2 as a "damage limitation strategy", Hamilton & Others vs Post Office Ltd – April 2021 In April 2021, after an appeal before three judges, Lord Justice Holroyde, Mr Justice Picken and Mrs Justice Farbey, thirty-nine of the convicted former postmasters had their convictions quashed. The case was heard over four days in March 2021. The forty-two appellants were represented by seven teams of barristers; the Post Office representatives were led by Brian Altman QC. Forty-two historical convictions of dishonesty had been referred by the CCRC to the Court of Appeal: For the other applicants, it was submitted all were concerned about delay: The thirty-nine appellants whose convictions were quashed included: • Noel Thomas, who had worked for the Royal Mail for 42 years, ran the village post office in Gaerwen on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales. He was convicted of false accounting in 2006, when a Horizon error showed a shortfall of £48,000 in his accounts. He spent 13 weeks in prison and was disqualified as a local councillor. After his conviction was overturned he was honoured by Anglesey County Council in 2022. • Rubbina Shaheen, who ran Greenfields post office in Shrewsbury, was jailed for 12 months in 2010 due to an error caused by Horizon. She and her husband lost their home and had to sleep in a van, before being helped by a local charity. After her conviction was overturned she was able to make a donation out of her interim compensation payment to the charity that had helped them. • Seema Misra ran a post office in West Byfleet in Surrey and was prosecuted by the Post Office when her Horizon accounts showed a false shortfall of over £70,000. She was convicted of theft and sent to prison when pregnant. A few days before Misra's trial began in October 2010, three Post Office solicitors, Rob Wilson, Jarnail Singh and Juliet McFarlane, had been told about a bug in Horizon but had not disclosed the information to Misra's defence team. The solicitors have been reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It was part of a much larger failure of disclosure on the part of the Post Office, a failure that cost Misra a fair trial. Giving evidence at the Horizon IT Inquiry, Warwick Tatford, the barrister who had represented the Post Office at Misra's trial, acknowledged the failures of disclosure and said that he was ashamed to have been part of the case. He also acknowledged failures in how Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins was instructed as an expert witness. Misra, recalling the moment when she was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2010, said, "It's hard to say but I think that if I had not been pregnant, I would have killed myself." Post Office solicitor Singh meanwhile sent a celebratory email to Post Office managers, in which he said: "it is to be hoped the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon". Criticism and assessment of Hamilton In October 2023, Moorhead, Nokes and Helm observed how relatively general the court had been in its consideration of the wrongs in Hamilton. They emphasised lack of enquiry within the proceeding and the need to find out what had happened and why, and concluded that the Hamilton appeal itself requires investigation: Marshall criticised the Court of Appeal in Hamilton for "having done nothing more than the bare minimum that was required to determine – and adjudicate upon – the outcome of the appeals." Marshall argues that the court followed, in the absence of argument and relevant evidence, a "dichotomy/taxonomy" canvassed by the CCRC for those appeals that it considered to be "Horizon cases" and those that were not "Horizon cases". It ought, argues Marshall, to have considered why, in so many instances, "innocent people had been wrongly convicted on seriously incomplete and unsatisfactory evidence, and had as a result became victims of the miscarriage of justice on a scale hitherto unknown". Marshall refers to the deficits in the Bates judgements due, he says, to the inadequate disclosure by the Post Office during the progress of Bates and in the Hamilton appeals. == Exoneration ==

Legislation Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024 and Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Act 2024 On 10 January 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the government's intention to introduce legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted Post Office branch managers and said there would be a "new upfront payment of £75,000 for some of those affected". However, the new legislation would aim to ensure that any subpostmaster guilty of criminal wrongdoing was still subject to prosecution. Kevin Hollinrake, the Post Office minister, said that all those claiming compensation would have to sign a "statement of truth" to confirm they had not committed the crimes of which they were accused. He explained, "Anyone subsequently found to have signed such a statement untruthfully will be putting themselves at risk of prosecution or fraud." The BBC described the proposal as 'unprecedented', with a number of possible problems that might make implementation difficult. David Davis MP warned that the plans would fail to distinguish between the genuinely innocent majority and the guilty minority. He suggested that former Supreme Court judges be brought out of retirement to exonerate innocent postmasters. Solicitor Joshua Rozenberg commented on 15 February that five weeks after the prime ministerial statement there had been no bill, no draft, and no consultation paper. Rozenberg had speculated that the courts would respect whatever legislation Parliament might pass but, on 15 February thought that remarks made by the Lady Chief Justice, Sue Carr, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, at the Justice Committee on 16 January and at a press conference on 6 February indicated otherwise. The Chief Justice had been asked by the Justice Secretary to 'speak urgently' with him and had two short conversations. But, said the Chief Justice, "any suggestion that the judiciary has given any proposed legislation the green light is simply not true." Carr added that it was not for the judiciary to comment on the wisdom of proposed legislation. On 22 February, the minister announced the detail of the proposed legislation in both houses of Parliament. In a letter of the same date to the chair of the Justice Select Committee, Sir Robert Neill MP, the justice minister and the business minister wrote jointly that the legislation would include victims of pilot schemes as well as of Horizon. Rozenberg commented that the proposed legislation would present problems to those "who want to show that their convictions have now been quashed". Writing for the Law Society Gazette, Rozenberg compared the proposed legislation to the Policing and Crime Act 2017 that awarded pardons. On BBC radio's Law in Action, Moorhead recognised the radical nature of the proposed legislation but explained that the need to exonerate the victims of the scandal "at pace" was imperative, to enable compensation to be paid quickly. The former president of the Council of HM Circuit Judges, Isobel Plumstead, criticised the proposal as dangerous: "if you do it once you can do it again". She said, "It is overriding the whole judicial system. It will inevitably lead to pressure for action in respect of other findings in criminal cases where a sort of moral right to exoneration is urged." Barrister Sam Fowles wrote in an opinion piece in The Guardian: The government could give the commission and the courts the resources to investigate outstanding wrongful convictions. But this would risk exposing more Post Office wrongdoing and/or highlight the long-term flaws in the justice system that allowed false prosecutions to go on for so long. Instead, the government is sweeping the whole thing under the carpet by overturning all the convictions in one fell swoop. But it's a transparently political manoeuvre. Ministers (despite knowing about the scandal for years) showed no interest in mass exoneration until it saw a political upside. This sets a dangerous precedent, overturning criminal convictions based on political opportunism rather than justice, fact, and law. The Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill was introduced into Parliament on 13 March 2024 and approved on 23 May. It received royal assent the next day, and the ' (c. 14) came into force immediately. The legislation makes provision to quash the Horizon-related convictions of subpostmasters and others in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who were prosecuted by the Post Office or the Crown Prosecution Service, including those who are no longer alive. The government announced that those whose convictions are quashed by the act will be eligible for compensation via a scheme administered by the Department for Business and Trade rather than by the Post Office. The government had set aside £1bn for compensation to victims of the Post Office scandal in 2021. In January 2024, after the announcement of the exoneration bill, Downing Street confirmed that it expected compensation to exceed £1bn; authorisation to pay the compensation was given by Parliament in the ' (c. 1). Post Office (Horizon System) Offences (Scotland) Act 2024 The Scottish Government criticised the UK legislation not covering Scotland. The Scottish Parliament passed similar legislation, the '''''' (asp 6), on 30 May 2024. == Redress and compensation ==

There are three schemes for different groups of victims: the overturned convictions scheme for those who were convicted; the Horizon shortfall scheme for those who suffered losses but were not convicted; and the GLO scheme for those who took part in the group litigation. The Horizon shortfall scheme, originally named the historic shortfall scheme, was established by the agreement between the Post Office and the 555 subpostmasters in Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd. It was designed to compensate subpostmasters who had lost money due to shortfalls caused by Horizon, but had not taken part in the group action and had not been convicted. The scheme is administered by the Post Office. By 15 January 2024 the scheme had received 2,753 eligible claims and paid out £93 million to over 2,172 claimants. In December 2019, at about the time of the high court verdict in Bates & Others v Post Office, the government decided this group could not apply for compensation through the historic shortfall scheme. The details of the settlement between the subpostmasters and the Post Office were not made public until August 2020. In February 2022, MPs from parliament's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) committee expressed concerns about the time taken to make settlements to former Post Office operators who were wrongfully convicted and warned that compensation needed to be concluded urgently, as many of those affected by the long-running scandal are elderly, some having died while awaiting redress, while others remained at risk of losing their homes. In April 2021, Nick Read, Post Office chief executive, urged the government to provide funding for compensation, saying "The Post Office simply does not have the financial resources to provide meaningful compensation." Shortly afterward, the government promised "fair and speedy" pay-outs for the 555 victims of the Horizon IT scandal who had been excluded from the Post Office's compensation scheme. In July 2021, the government announced that subpostmasters wrongly convicted of offences would get interim compensation of up to £100,000. On 22 March 2022, a government scheme was launched to compensate the 555 subpostmasters at the same level of compensation as subpostmasters who had had their convictions overturned. In December 2022, the Horizon Inquiry heard from Tim Moloney KC that some postmasters who had been made bankrupt after being wrongly prosecuted were receiving a fraction of what they were due. The Law Society Gazette reported: In March 2023 Marshall, in a submission to the Horizon Inquiry, criticised the structure of the compensation schemes and their lack of independence. He writes that, since English company law requires the board of a company to act in the interests of its shareholders, the Post Office is bound to act in the government's interests and keep compensation paid to as little as possible and that "averments by the Post Office about its concern for fairness require to be read against that legal constraint". In September 2023, the government announced that subpostmasters who have had their convictions on the basis of Horizon evidence overturned would be offered compensation of £600,000 in full and final settlement of their claim. In March 2023, the Law Society Gazette wrote, "Journalist Nick Wallis, who wrote The Great Post Office Scandal, tweeted today that 27 claimants who would have qualified for the group litigation scheme have died waiting for compensation." In January 2024, postal affairs minister Kevin Hollinrake told the Commons the families of the 60 people who died before receiving any compensation will be able to apply for compensation in their place. It is estimated that more than 4,000 people have been told they are eligible for compensation. The Guardian reported that of the 700 post office workers prosecuted in England and Wales, about 250, more than a third, have yet to respond to contact despite efforts by the Post Office and, separately, by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. In Scotland, 73 potential victims have been contacted but just 19 have so far come forward seeking review. On 27 February 2024, Nick Read, Post Office CEO, told the Business and Trade Committee investigation into fair and fast redress for sub-postmasters that all of the original applicants to the Horizon shortfall scheme had been made offers and that he thought "in the region of 62%" had been settled. Read accepted that settlements in the overturned convictions scheme had been slow. Simon Recaldin, director responsible for compensation and disclosures, explained that closure of the Horizon shortfall scheme had been planned for March 2025, but a further 1,000 claims were made following the transmission of Mr Bates v The Post Office. The additional claims meant the closure date would have to be put back. Possible claims concerning Capture, a predecessor of Horizon that had been used by over 1,000 subpostmasters in the 1990s, were discussed. Remediation matters director Ricaldin told the committee that, of the eight cases of people experiencing problems with the Capture system, four had resulted in convictions and were being investigated. The committee had heard from James Hartley and Neil Hudgell, solicitors for different groups of victims. In the complex cases they had not been seeing fair offers. The process was too legalistic and offensive to a lot of postmasters. Hudgell said "there is too much lawyering going on. Everything is over-engineered." Of the Horizon shortfall scheme Hudgell said more than 2,000 cases have been settled without legal advice and in his opinion needed to be reviewed. Kevan Jones, MP and member of the Horizon compensation advisory board, said to the Post Office Minister, during an urgent question in the House of Commons, 22 February, The minister replied that the Government is keen that those detrimentally affected are included in any compensation. == Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry ==

, seen in 2013 After the success of the JFSA in the Bates case against the Post Office, the organisation began to campaign to highlight the government's handling of the Post Office. The alliance raised £100,000 through crowdfunding, to complain to the Parliamentary Ombudsman that the government had failed in its duty by allowing the Post Office to wrongly prosecute SPMs. The government resisted the complaint and declared that it had been lied to. The government resisted requests for a statutory inquiry for months before acceding to an independent inquiry. On 26 February 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to commit to an independent inquiry but was equivocal. Evidence of the legal costs in the Bates case was heard by parliament's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee on 10 March 2020. On 19 March 2020, in a debate in the House of Commons, Kevan Jones MP criticised former Post Office chief executive Vennells for her role in the scandal. The terms specifically excluded the Post Office's prosecution function, the Horizon group damages settlement, and the conduct of current or future litigation. Of the review's terms of reference, Lord Arbuthnot asked in the House of Lords chamber on 6 October, "[W]hy have the Government excluded these most important things?" The minister replied that the Bates settlement agreed was full and final and the Post Office was not currently conducting any private prosecutions and had no plans to do so. First round of non-statutory hearings The non-statutory inquiry, now titled The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and led by Sir Wyn Williams, began work in autumn 2020 and issued a call for evidence on 1 December 2020. The first public hearing took place on 15 January 2021. During the non-statutory inquiry, two public hearings were held in early 2021. A preliminary hearing on the provisional List of Issues was held on 8 November 2021. Neil Hudgell, representing SPMs, said "Now Post Office officials must face criminal investigation for maliciously ruining lives by prosecuting innocent people in pursuit of profits", and called for the prime minister to convene a judge-led inquiry. After the subpostmasters' successful appeals on both grounds one and two of abuse of process, in an article headed "Calls grow for SRA and police to investigate Post Office lawyers", Hudgell wrote that the Post Office engaged in "legal gymnastics to seek to persuade the court away from finding a clear systematic abuse of process of the criminal law", adding "the SRA and BSB [Bar Standards Board] should investigate whether anyone should be held to account amid professional concerns about who was responsible for disclosure issues". Solicitors for subpostmasters wrote to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy asking it to re-establish the inquiry on a statutory footing and to reconsult on the terms of reference, saying: "The department should be called as witnesses under oath, not have effective control of the inquiry ... The Post Office wrongly prosecuted so many upstanding pillars of the community and its owners want to mark (their) own homework – that is unconscionable." Conversion to a statutory inquiry On 19 May 2021, the government announced that an extended statutory inquiry into the scandal would deliver its conclusions in autumn 2022. Sir Wyn said that the inquiry would produce a statement of approach and that, in September 2021, a further statement would set out all relevant details. The extant non-statutory inquiry was formally converted to a statutory inquiry on 1 June 2021 with additional powers, including the ability to compel witnesses and demand evidence, with potential fines or imprisonment for non-compliance. Scully said he and Sir Wyn had agreed that the context of the events had changed after convictions were quashed and hundreds more were expected to follow. Boris Johnson said in May 2021: On 28 July 2021, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy issued its fourth statement of approach, which included the terms of reference. After setting out preliminary and organisational matters – the appointment of solicitors and counsel to the inquiry, establishment of a website and of premises, etc. – the statement set out terms, in essence: {{ordered list|type=upper-latin On 13 February 2022, in a report prior to the start of the hearings, the BBC quoted a prosecuted, jailed and subsequently cleared subpostmaster: "I want someone else to be charged and jailed like I was." This request was later repeated by other subpostmasters. Phases 1 to 4 of the Statutory Inquiry The Phase 1 hearings, covering Human Impact, opened on 14 February 2022 at Juxon House in the City of London. The Phase 2 hearings, covering the Horizon IT System procurement, design, pilot, roll out and modifications, started in October 2022. They were streamed online, as were the later phases of the inquiry. The inquiry also investigated whether the Post Office and ICL's owner, Fujitsu, knew about the faults. Richard Moorhead, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at the University of Exeter, said in an oral submission: Immediately after the November hearing, Williams said he would ask Post Office Limited, IT supplier Fujitsu, and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy to waive privilege in respect of material relevant to the terms of reference, and he set a deadline for a response. On 16 November, Williams reported that all four parties had responded within the timescale specified and added "The response of POL, on any view, goes a very long way towards meeting the request I made of them. It is clear to me that in respect of many of the most crucial lines of investigation for the Inquiry POL has waived legal professional privilege." The Post Office published its response to the request on 15 November 2021. One commentator, Elisa Wahnon, wrote that although BEIS was prepared to waive privilege: The Phase 3 hearings, covering operational issues, were held between January and March 2023. Phase 4 hearings, covering action against sub-postmasters and others, were held between July 2023 and January 2024. In the course of these hearings, Paul Patterson, director of Fujitsu services in Europe, admitted there were "bugs, errors and defects" with the Horizon software "right from the very start" and reiterated the firm's apology for its part in the scandal. Interim report The inquiry issued an interim report on 17 July 2023. Its eight recommendations were: • The Horizon Compensation Advisory Board (HCAB) should not be prevented from monitoring individual cases. • The HCAB shall produce written reports in respect of each of their meetings. • The HCAB shall consider whether full and fair compensation is being paid. • Membership of HCAB should be increased to ensure that it has sufficient capacity. • The government should within 28 days seek directions under section 306 of the Insolvency Act 1986 to ensure that compensation payable to bankrupt claimants is not diverted to insolvency practitioners. • The government should publish proposals for ensuring that applicants to all schemes are treated equally and fairly with regard to income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. • The government should ensure that legislation is enacted to allow compensation under group litigation orders to be made to applicants after midnight on 7 August 2024. • No applications for compensation to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme should be entertained after such date as agreed by the minister, the Post Office and the HCAB. The government accepted the recommendations in full or in part on 26 October 2023. Phases 5 to 7 On 9 April 2024, the inquiry commenced Phases 5 and 6 to cover "[r]edress, access to justice, Second Sight, Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme, conduct of the group litigation, responding to the scandal, governance, monitoring of Horizon, contractual arrangements, internal and external audit, technical competence, stakeholder engagement, oversight and whistleblowing". Fifteen weeks were scheduled for the hearing of evidence. The resumed hearings began with a day for the evidence of Alan Bates, who described Post Office officials as "thugs in suits" and contended that the government should have been involved far earlier. Former MP Lord Arbuthnot, appearing in week one, told the inquiry: "[Post Office management] knew there was a large number of bugs in the system that they hadn't told MPs about. They were operating some sort of behind-the-scenes deception process which suggests to me now that they were stringing MPs along in order to preserve the robustness of Horizon, the existence of Horizon and possibly the existence of the Post Office". Other witnesses gave evidence in weeks one and two. Alan Cook, former managing director of the Post Office, expressed regret, both for an email in which he wrote that subpostmasters had their "hands in the till" and for not realising sooner that the organisation itself was prosecuting victims of the scandal; he had assumed that the police or the Crown Prosecution Service were responsible for the decision to prosecute. Adam Crozier, former CEO of Royal Mail, said he was not aware of the prosecutions brought by Post Office Ltd against subpostmasters during his tenure. David Miller, former Post Office COO, told the inquiry that he should not have said to the board that Horizon was "robust and fit for purpose". Rodric Williams, a litigation lawyer for the Post Office, said there was a "bunker mentality" among staff in relation to the media's coverage of the Horizon system; asked by a journalist when was the last time the Post Office did research into subpostmasters' satisfaction with it, Williams said: "We don't need to do research ... the vast majority of our agents and other users work with it just fine". During week three, Susan Crichton, former general counsel of the Post Office, testified that problems in the system came to be referred to as 'branch exceptions' rather than 'bugs' and agreed that this demonstrated the use of 'smoke and mirrors'. Angela van den Bogerd, a former senior manager at the Post Office, was questioned about her statement to the High Court in 2019 in which she said she had only become aware in 2018 that transactions could be input to Horizon without a subpostmaster's knowledge; emails given to the inquiry showed she was told about this in 2010 and 2014. Van den Bogerd told the inquiry that she did not remember receiving the December 2010 email, calling it "very strange". In week five, Simon Clarke, who advised the Post Office to stop prosecuting branch owner-operators, testified that he was "now sure" that the company "must have deceived" him because it failed to provide him with "highly relevant material" and that his law firm "had been mis-instructed" by the Post Office about whether the IT system could be accessed remotely by Fujitsu staff. In week six, Alisdair Cameron, Post Office CFO and former interim chief executive, told the inquiry that former CEO Vennells had been "clear in her conviction" that nothing had gone wrong with Horizon and did not believe there had been miscarriages of justice. Paula Vennells testified over three days during week seven. Before her appearance, she was called on by former subpostmistress and campaigner Jo Hamilton to tell the truth at the inquiry as she was "heading into the corner where there’s no way out". When she began testifying, Vennells said that the Post Office's structure and the failure of some employees to pass on information meant that she was unaware that subpostmasters were being required to make good Horizon shortfalls or being wrongly prosecuted. Given evidence that showed that she had been told in 2011 that remote access to Horizon was possible, she said that she had not understood what she had been told. Vennells agreed that "the right and honest thing for the Post Office to have done" would have been to let the CCRC know immediately in 2013 about the doubts over the evidence of Gareth Jenkins, the Fujitsu engineer who designed the Horizon accounting system and who had withheld information from the courts about bugs in the software. Testifying over two days in week eight, former Post Office chair Alice Perkins said that, while she was warned about potential faults in the Horizon IT system when she took up the role in 2011, at the time she did not make a link between those faults and the prosecution of subpostmasters. She also said that the 2013 Clarke advice, raising concerns over expert witness statements, had not reached her. During week nine, Andrew Parsons, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson (a law firm advising the Post Office for more than seven years), testified that in 2013 he had counselled the Post Office to remove apologies from letters sent to subpostmasters and to "maintain a more cold, procedural approach", writing that apologising would be "admitting some degree of culpability". In a 2015 email, he wrote that the Post Office could "start attacking the postmasters' credibility by calling out Thomas, Misra and Hamilton as the liars and criminals that they are". On 18 June, Ian Henderson and Ron Warmington of the forensic accounting company Second Sight gave evidence. They stated that the Post Office had interfered with their investigation, and seemed to be concerned mostly with self-protection. By February 2015, Henderson said, he felt they "were dealing with a cover-up" by the Post Office "and possibly a criminal conspiracy". They also stated that they had been the subject of legal threats by the Post Office. Also testifying in week 10, Richard Christou, former CEO and executive chairman of Fujitsu Services Holdings, said he had always regarded the rollout of the Horizon IT system as one of Fujitsu’s "major successes". In week eleven, Gareth Jenkins, the former senior Fujitsu engineer who played a leading role in specifying and designing the Horizon system, testified that he had "thought the system was working well" and that he had been "confident, possibly wrongly so, [bugs] were quickly fixed and weren't left to fester in the system and have a large impact". He admitted that, during prosecutions of subpostmasters, he changed crucial expert testimony at the request of the Post Office, in particular to state that "it looked as though [Seema] Misra had stolen money rather than that it was incompetence". Tim Parker, part-time PO chairman from 2015 to 2022, gave evidence on 3 July. Questioned about the report he commissioned from barrister Jonathan Swift, he said he regretted accepting internal legal advice which meant the full findings of the report were not shown to the PO board, UK Government Investments (UKGI) or the responsible minister. Former Post Office minister Ed Davey, who was in office between 2010 and 2012, said that during that time he was "lied to" about "serious flaws" in the Horizon IT system. Appearing before the inquiry in the penultimate week of Phase 6, Vince Cable, business secretary between 2010 and 2015, said he was unaware of the prosecutions, despite being in charge of the organisation while in government, and that he agreed with Alan Bates's description of Post Office middle-management as "thugs in suits". Phase 7, covering current practice and procedures and recommendations for the future, commenced on 23 September 2024 and lasted six weeks. In the first week of this phase, it was revealed that in May 2024, Fujitsu's Patterson had written directly to Nick Read, chief executive of Post Office Ltd, rejecting a request by Post Office investigators for Horizon IT data to support a criminal case against a sub post office owner. Patterson wrote that the request was "inappropriate" and that the Post Office was "well aware there have been and there continue to be bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system". Appearing before the inquiry over three days in October, Read said he had not been made aware of the "scale and enormity" of the scandal before taking the CEO job in 2019. He expressed surprise at a survey (commissioned by the inquiry) which indicated that subpostmasters are still using their own money to make losses good, while admitting that new subpostmaster contracts which still refer to the Post Office's investigatory powers might be "heavy-handed". The inquiry was told in the fourth week that, as recently as 2023, Post Office executives changed data on the Horizon IT systems used by subpostmasters, without their knowledge. Kemi Badenoch, who had been Secretary of State for Business and Trade from February 2023, told the inquiry in its final week that it was "extremely disappointing" that it took the 2024 ITV drama about the Post Office scandal to get the government to accelerate compensation payments for wrongfully prosecuted subpostmasters. Testifying again in the final week of the inquiry was Fujitsu's Patterson who contended that the previous seven months of inquiry hearings had revealed that many organisations were to blame for the scandal, not just Fujitsu and its faulty software. Closing statements were heard on 16 and 17 December 2024, after which the inquiry began Maxwellisation prior to drafting the final report. In his end of year message, Sir Wyn said, " [T]he evidence I have read and heard throughout the Inquiry has made a deep impression upon me and emphasised the scale of the hardship and suffering endured by those affected by the scandal." Final report The 162-page volume one of Sir Wyn's final inquiry report was published on 8 July 2025. The Post Office, Fujitsu, and the government have until 10 October to respond. Sir Wyn found that Post Office managers "maintained the fiction" that Horizon was accurate. In the report, it was revealed that at least 13 suicides had been linked to the scandal and at least 59 further people had had suicidal thoughts, of whom at least ten had attempted suicide. == Data leak ==

On 19 June 2024, the Post Office accidentally published a document on its corporate website containing the names and addresses of 555 former sub-postmasters who had been involved in litigation against the Post Office. In a letter written to Post Office's chief executive Nick Read and interim chairperson Nigel Railton, former sub-postmaster Christopher Head wrote that the leak had "caused a great amount of upset, distress and anger amongst those whose data is now within the public domain" and observed that many sub-postmasters whose data had been leaked "hadn't shared details with their own families". Ron Warmington of the forensic accounting company Second Sight, which had investigated the Horizon system in 2023, stated that the data leak was "another example of Post Office incompetence". Post Office took the document down from its corporate website and referred itself to the Information Commissioner's Office in respect of the data breach. == Criminal investigation ==

When handing down the Horizon issues judgment in December 2019, Fraser said he had passed a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions relating to evidence given by Fujitsu employees in actions brought by the Post Office. In January 2020, at the request of the director of public prosecutions, the Metropolitan Police initiated a criminal investigation into potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice during the investigations and prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Two former Fujitsu expert witnesses were interviewed under caution. The Metropolitan Police confirmed in January 2024 that they were investigating possible additional offences of fraud in relation to "monies recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions". == Regulatory action ==

In January 2024, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) confirmed that it is continuing to investigate "live cases into a number of solicitors and law firms who were working on behalf of the Post Office/Royal Mail Group". The Bar Standards Board (which regulates barristers) is a core participant of the public inquiry, and said in February 2024 that no evidence heard by the inquiry "indicates that any members of the Bar present an ongoing risk to the public that requires the BSB to act immediately". In June 2024, the SRA stated it was conducting more than 20 investigations into solicitors. As of April 2026, the BSB had ten live investigations into barristers who had advised the Post Office. A public interest investigation by the computer scientist Junade Ali in January 2024 found that Gareth Jenkins, who gave evidence in court attesting to the accuracy of the Horizon system (and later became a person of interest to the Metropolitan Police), solely relied upon qualifications obtained by the British Computer Society (BCS) to be accepted by the court as an expert, despite the society being obligated by the Engineering Council to uphold the conduct of its members. The BCS later stated they would take action after the public inquiry and legal processes had been completed. In June 2024, Karl Flinders of Computer Weekly reported that the day before he was to give evidence at the public inquiry, Jenkins had resigned his BCS membership and Chartered IT Professional status after he was informed earlier that month that he could face disciplinary action for breaching the society's code of conduct. The Post Office is also regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Research by Tussell has found the FCA was one of numerous governmental organisations that also had a contract with Fujitsu. == Reactions to the scandal ==

Call for reform on digital evidence In May 2021, the British Computer Society, a professional body for those working in IT in the UK, called for reconsideration of courts' default presumption that computer data is correct. Horizon was not subjected to a full, rigorous system audit. In 2010, senior Post Office management took a decision that Horizon would not be subjected to an independent review because: No independent review was conducted until Second Sight was commissioned in 2012; their contract was terminated abruptly before it could formally report. The Post Office have not offered any evidence that their own internal auditors conducted an appropriate system audit. == Media ==

Investigative reporting A Computer Weekly article written by Rebecca Thomson in July 2013 listed over 300 articles on the scandal published by the magazine, since it first broke the story in May 2009 with seven case studies. In November 2010, the husband of Surrey subpostmistress Seema Misra, who had been jailed while pregnant, spoke to Nick Wallis, then the presenter of the breakfast programme on BBC Radio Surrey, who after some research and discovering the prior mentions, used his contacts to get the issue reported on 7 February 2011 on both BBC Radio Surrey, and regional BBC One television current affairs programme Inside Out. A former Fujitsu employee saw the BBC South report and decided to blow the whistle to the JFSA, and later to BBC Panorama. A BBC Radio 4 series about the scandal, The Great Post Office Trial, presented by Wallis and produced by Whistledown Productions, was named "Best News and Factual Radio Programme" in 2020 by the Voice of the Listener & Viewer, and won two gold awards in the 2021 New York Festivals Radio Awards. In November 2021 Wallis' book, The Great Post Office Scandal was published by Bath Publishing. The drama brought the scandal to the centre of public and political attention. During the period of broadcast, an additional fifty victims contacted lawyers, five of whom seek to get criminal convictions quashed. The drama was followed by a documentary, Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The Real Story, which included interviews with subpostmasters. Following the broadcast, a petition to strip Vennells of her CBE passed one million signatures. On 9 January 2024, she announced that she would hand back her CBE. On 23 February 2024, King Charles III revoked Vennells' CBE. In January 2026, British Scandal, a podcast published by Wondery, covered the event in four episodes. Alice Levine and Matt Forde interviewed barrister Paul Marshall for the final episode. == See also ==