The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

The Post Office Horizon IT scandal began at the turn of the century when the Post Office network was automated. A novel PFI-funded IT system called Horizon was rolled-out into the Post Office network. At the time, suppliers Fujitsu described it as the “largest non-military IT system in Europe”. Horizon didn’t work properly, and errors and discrepancies appeared in hundreds of Subpostmasters’ accounts. The Post Office held Subpostmasters liable for these discrepancies. Thousands were forced to pay the Post Office sums they didn’t owe, many were sacked. Some 800 people were prosecuted by the Post Office and many were sent to prison. In 2019, after a three year multimillion-pound legal battle, in which the Post Office was supported by the government, the Post Office admitted defeat and settled out of court. Dozens of criminal convictions are due to be overturned at the Court of Appeal in March. There have been suicides, mental health breakdowns and hundreds of family tragedies. No one has been held responsible for the false prosecutions. The Great Post Office Scandal is the extraordinary story behind the recent ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. This gripping page-turner recounts how thousands of subpostmasters were accused of theft and false accounting on the back of evidence from Horizon, the flawed computer system designed by Fujitsu, and how a group of them, led by Alan Bates, took their fight to the High Court. Their eventual victory in court vindicated their claims about the defects of the software and exposed the heavy handed attempts by the Post Office to suppress them. The book also chronicles how successive senior managers, business leaders, lawyers, civil servants and Government ministers, at best failed to expose the injustice or, even worse, sought to cover it up, resulting in one of the largest miscarriages of justice in UK history. The author, Nick Wallis, is a journalist and broadcaster who has been reporting on the scandal for over ten years and who acted as script consultant on Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that brought the affair into the national consciousness. As the public inquiry reaches its climax, and senior figures such as Paula Vennells come to be questioned, The Great Post Office Scandal reveals the full scale of what happened and will leave you enraged at how so many of our trusted institutions allowed the saga to go on for nearly a quarter of a century, shattering the lives of thousands of innocent people. This factual thriller from the journalist Nick Wallis details a scandal which has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in legal history. On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. They had been prosecuted by the Post Office using IT evidence from an unreliable computer system called Horizon. When the Post Office became aware that Horizon didnt work properly, it covered it up. Nick describes how a group of Subpostmasters worked out what was going on, formed a campaign group and fought the government-owned Post Office through the courts to eventual victory. The Great Post Office Scandal has been described as an extraordinary journalistic expos of a huge miscarriage of justice by Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye Magazine . Dame Joan Bakewell says Nicks narrative has the power of a great thriller as he lays bare the lies and deceit that has ruined so many lives. In April 2021, the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters for theft and false accounting were quashed. In total over 700 people had been wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office using evidence from an unreliable IT system. This is the story of their 20 year fight to clear their names in the face of institutional arrogance and obstruction. This is the story of how hundreds of innocent subpostmasters fought back to clear their names after they had been prosecuted using evidence from a faulty software system, a fight dragged out by the Post Office's refusal to accept responsibility for its failings.