London: Seema Misra was pregnant when she was wrongfully found guilty of stealing from the Post Office she ran in a small town south-west of London.
Seven months later, including four spent in jail, she gave birth in the hospital wearing an ankle tag used to monitor released criminals.
Misra is among the victims of arguably the biggest scandal in British legal history.
Between 2000 and 2014 the Post Office, the taxpayer-owned provider of unfashionable services that still make an economy tick – think postage stamps and pension payments – accused thousands of its storekeepers of stealing.
It secured more than 900 convictions of sub-postmasters, as they are known. Most lost their businesses, many were bankrupted. At least four died by suicide.
Miscarriage of justice
After a two-decade struggle for national attention, it was a TV drama watched by nine million people that finally prompted the government to promise a swift end to the saga in favour of the victims.
Until last week, hundreds of sub-postmasters had been left in limbo even after a court ruling in 2019 blew open the scandal and ordered the Post Office to pay compensation.
But it’s also a story about flawed software, a 1990s state contract worth an initial £1bil to modernise the Post Office’s accounting system, and now the intense pressure on Japanese IT company Fujitsu Ltd to set out what it knew and when about errors that led to sub-postmasters’ books showing up shortfalls that weren’t real.
With Britain on the hook for millions of pounds of compensation, ministers said the company should pay its share, too.
Since entering Britain in the 1990s, Fujitsu has become one of most prolific private contractors to the government, from the tax department to the Home Office and the Defence Ministry.
Illustrating how interwoven it is to core state functions, one of Fujitsu’s contracts is to maintain the criminal-record database, which includes the wrongful convictions of sub-postmasters.
Fujitsu has won £6.8bil of British public sector work since 2012, according to data company Tussell, which started keeping track of contracts that year.
Some deals came after a bombshell 2019 High Court judgement, which set out the bugs in Fujitsu’s Horizon software and said Fujitsu employees knew about them and debated whether to tell the Post Office. The government has also faced criticism for handing it more contracts.
“If they made big mistakes, then frankly we need to know how they have had the temerity to carry on taking public contracts,” said Liam Byrne, chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, who has summoned Fujitsu’s Europe chief executive Paul Patterson to testify in Parliament this week.
A Fujitsu spokesperson said the company is committed to supporting Britain’s ongoing public inquiry into the Horizon scandal. A Post Office spokesperson said it is “for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues that it is examining”.
In a 2020 letter to the Parliament committee, the company acknowledged the bugs and that its employees could access Post Office computers remotely – contrary to critical evidence in some of the convictions – while reiterating that it had no role in the Post Office’s decision to prosecute its sub-postmasters.
Still, Fujitsu was closely involved in Misra’s 2010 trial via one of its employees.
Gareth Jenkins, who according to an official submission by the chair of Britain’s official inquiry is under police investigation, was the expert witness who testified that the Horizon system was free from bugs. The legal representative for Jenkins didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A memorandum of a meeting circulated between Fujitsu and the Post Office in September 2010 – before Misra’s trial – discussed the effect of a bug in the Horizon system, according to a submission to the public inquiry by lawyers on behalf of several accused sub-postmasters including Misra.
Major projects
Fujitsu’s entry into Britain came via its purchase of British IT supplier International Computers Ltd, which won the contract to develop a new digital system for 17,000 Post Office branches.
There were issues from the start. The plan was a system to let pensioners and benefits claimants to be paid at the Post Office using a swipe card, removing the need for cash.
But the Post Office doubted the software’s reliability and in 1999, scrapped the project in what the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee called “one of the biggest IT failures in the public sector”.
Instead of risking further political embarrassment, the government stuck with the software and decided to use it to upgrade the Post Office’s system of recording transactions on paper spreadsheets.
Almost immediately after the Horizon terminals were installed, some sub-postmasters began finding discrepancies between the amount of cash held and how much Horizon said there should be. At Misra’s branch in West Byfleet, it was £75,000. They began calling a designated Horizon hotline in a panic, according to witness statements to the British inquiry including from a former Fujitsu employee.
The Post Office, which has the power to bring criminal prosecutions without involving Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, accused some sub-postmasters of stealing and took them to court.
Sub-postmasters were forced to dip into savings and borrow to make up for the shortfalls. Some told the inquiry they were pressured by the Post Office to admit false accounting to avoid prison.
The Post Office was effectively saying that the new computer system had unearthed a secret crime wave.
That premise was shot down at the High Court trial in 2019, when 555 sub-postmasters sued the Post Office for compensation.
Richard Roll, who worked at Fujitsu’s British headquarters in Bracknell between 2001 and 2004, testified that employees could not only access Horizon terminals remotely but did so regularly – to fix bugs.
The revelation changed the narrative.
“If we were unable to find the cause of the discrepancy then this was reported up the chain and it was assumed that the postmaster was to blame,” Roll told the court.
But while the ruling cleared the path for sub-postmasters to apply to clear their convictions and seek compensation, their struggle to achieve either is key to understanding why such a long-running scandal has suddenly shot to public prominence and dominated Parliament’s return from the winter holiday.
A New Year drama by broadcaster ITV set the wheels in motion.
Using a star-studded cast with credits including The Crown and The Hunger Games, the four-part Bates vs the Post Office tracks a real-life campaign against the Post Office led by Alan Bates on behalf of wrongly accused sub-postmasters.
Systemic failure
Paul Marshall, a barrister who represented a group of sub-postmasters who had their convictions quashed at the Court of Appeal in 2021, said the drama “hit a nerve” with the public in a way that “reading any number of law reports or journals or articles was simply incapable of effectively conveying”.
Labour MP Barbara Keeley, a shadow minister, told Bloomberg the drama had left the public “outraged” and “in a general election year the government party will be especially sensitive to public opinion.” A British vote is expected to be held in the second half of 2024.
The Horizon scandal was “an appalling case of systematic state failure and the actions of all involved must be reviewed”, former Cabinet minister Priti Patel, whose father was a sub-postmaster, said. — Bloomberg
