The Post Office continued to fight a high court lawsuit against 555 post office operators knowing its defence was flawed, according to a report.
The state-owned company spent £100m defending a civil lawsuit brought by post office operators over the Horizon computer system but knew that losses in a branch’s accounts could be caused by faults in the IT system, according to a newly disclosed internal report.
Hundreds of people running UK post offices were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting and had their lives ruined in what has been described as the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history.
The ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office put the injustice in the spotlight this year, prompting calls for ministers to address the scandal more speedily amid claims they had sought to delay compensation payments to victims.
The scandal is the subject of a public inquiry chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams. Ministers have introduced legislation to quash the convictions of post office operators who were prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018 in a move described as “an exceptional response to a factually exceptional situation”.
The Post Office received a draft report by the consultants Deloitte in 2017 that showed the company knew that losses in branch accounts could be caused by the IT system and Fujitsu staff could remotely alter accounts without a post office operator’s knowledge. The existence of the report was first reported by the BBC.
The draft Deloitte report, entitled Bramble, had questioned whether Fujitsu could “edit or delete transactions recorded by branches in a way that could impact on the branch’s overall accounting position”? It concluded: “Yes – transactions can be deleted at database layer.”
The document, which has been published on the Post Office inquiry website, also asked how “difficult it would be to do” and concluded that for certain users “this could be done”.
However, despite the 2017 draft report, the Post Office continued to defend the civil lawsuit that started in 2018, arguing the branch operators were at fault. It did not disclose the existence of the Deloitte report to the high court legal team acting for the branch operators and the Post Office eventually ended up settling the litigation for £57.75m in 2019.
The high court lawsuit was significant because it helped expose the huge miscarriage of justice after a judge ruled that the Horizon IT system contained bugs, errors and defects that caused financial discrepancies in branch operators’ accounts. The courts then began to quash the convictions of individuals who had been wrongly prosecuted.
Patrick Green KC, who represented the 555 post office operators in the case, told the BBC that the latest findings were “absolutely shocking”. After reading the report, he added: “I don’t think the case should have happened.”
Green said that in his 34 years as a barrister, he had never seen a defendant proceeding with a huge case and “fighting it very aggressively” in such circumstances. Although the Bramble report specifically looked into the branch operators’ claims, the draft report’s existence was not disclosed to them or to the court.
The Bramble report was “exactly the sort of thing that we would have wanted to have and to analyse and put in front of the judge”, Green said.
The Post Office said in a statement: “Alongside financial redress for victims, there must also be accountability. The best forum to achieve this is the statutory public inquiry, chaired by a judge with the power to question witnesses under oath. The next phases of the inquiry will examine the issues raised here and it would be inappropriate to comment outside of that process.
“We are deeply sorry for the impact of the Horizon IT scandal on so many people’s lives and continue to pay redress to victims as swiftly as possible, with £179m paid to around 2,800 postmasters to date.”
