Largest ever miscarriage of justice?

I find it odd that no sub-postmaster appears to have used internal communications about problems as evidence for their defence.
 
KAJ said:
Revealed: the quarter-billion-pound payday for Post Office scandal lawyers
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In the interest of saving you a click:
£256.9m was paid to 15 law firms and two barristers’ chambers between September 2014 and March 2024.​
It's kinda weird to frame this as a payday for law firms, as if they were somehow complicit in the Post Office's misdeeds.

It's entirely appropriate to hire lawyers when involved in a legal dispute. It's entirely appropriate to pay lawyers good money to ply their trade on your behalf. It's not the lawyers' fault Her Majesty's Government wanted to hire them instead of do the right thing. Why drag them into this? Why not frame it as a waste of government funds, instead?
 
theprestige said:
In the interest of saving you a click:
£256.9m was paid to 15 law firms and two barristers’ chambers between September 2014 and March 2024.​
It's kinda weird to frame this as a payday for law firms, as if they were somehow complicit in the Post Office's misdeeds.

It's entirely appropriate to hire lawyers when involved in a legal dispute. It's entirely appropriate to pay lawyers good money to ply their trade on your behalf. It's not the lawyers' fault Her Majesty's Government wanted to hire them instead of do the right thing. Why drag them into this? Why not frame it as a waste of government funds, instead?
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I think it's in the book how the PO's lawyers recommended dragging out the cases so the defendants would run out of money. That's despicable.
 
Rolfe said:
Point of information.

In the context of this discussion, the word "subbie" is not shorthand for "subpostmaster". It is in fact shorthand for deputy or substitute subpostmaster, a person who was brought in to run a subpostoffice in the absence of the tenured subpostmaster.

Another point of information. George Thompson's successor in 2018 was Calum Greenhow, the subpostmaster of the office in the village where I live. I believe he was Thomson's deputy before that. (To be strictly accurate, Calum's wife Gillian is now the subpostmistress, having taken over from her husband in 2018.)
Also in 2018 Calum (and Gillian) suddenly started attending church, although I don't remember seeing them there before that.

Calum is generally believed in the village to have been supporting the subpostmasters, because that's the natural assumption when you know he is General Secretary of the NFSP. That's not how he is portrayed in "The Great Post Office Scandal" though. He seems to have been a continuation of the Thomson regime.
I feel rather uncomfortable about all this. I wonder if he will be called to give evidence?
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Calum Greenhow will be giving evidence to the inquiry on September 26.

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/phase-7-timetable
 
Oh, thanks for that.

In other news, it appears our post office is closing. All the cards and trinkets are marked down. I don't know what we'll do without it, especially since the bank closed a few years ago.
 
Orphia Nay said:
I think it's in the book how the PO's lawyers recommended dragging out the cases so the defendants would run out of money. That's despicable.
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I disagree. It would be professional misconduct for a lawyer to withhold from their client every possible stratagem that the law provides. It's despicable that the Post Office chose that stratagem instead of doing the right thing.
 
Orphia Nay said:
I think it's in the book how the PO's lawyers recommended dragging out the cases so the defendants would run out of money. That's despicable.
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That was covered in the TV drama. Public services, with unlimited taxpayer pockets, will try to outspend people who sue them. It is a vile practice that the Hillsborough Law should end.
 
Rolfe said:
In other news, it appears our post office is closing. All the cards and trinkets are marked down. I don't know what we'll do without it, especially since the bank closed a few years ago.
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Ours is in trouble. It's a concession in a Costcutters. Understaffed for years, the staff they did have resigned en masse. Considering they were constantly rebuffed when they asked for pay rises despite being overworked and earning far less than the staff at a crown post office got for doing the same job, I don't blame them.
 
There's a family joke. In the 60's we visited family at Seilebost on the isle of Harris. Between Seilebost and neighbouring Horgabost was a small shop and Post Office. My cousin and I decided to buy something nice for our uncle's family as a thank you. We asked if they had nice chocolates, no. Tin of fancy biscuits, no.
"What do you have?"
"Bacon and toilet rolls".
We didn't think either was a "proper present" so left it. Being adolescents the phrase stuck with us for a long time, exchanging xmas presents and pretending to decide whether the parcel was bacon or toilet rolls.
Apparently, like a lot of such small village shops at the time it was only the Post Office that kept them viable. It was so wide spread there was even a joke about a Highland shopkeeper finding himself on a train talking to the owner of Harrods (boy does that date it) who says how Harrods sells everything. The highland shop keeper asks if has the Post Office in his shop. On being told no he says "Shame, it's not worth a damn without the Post Office".
 
Wudang said:
There's a family joke. In the 60's we visited family at Seilebost on the isle of Harris. Between Seilebost and neighbouring Horgabost was a small shop and Post Office. My cousin and I decided to buy something nice for our uncle's family as a thank you. We asked if they had nice chocolates, no. Tin of fancy biscuits, no.
"What do you have?"
"Bacon and toilet rolls".
We didn't think either was a "proper present" so left it. Being adolescents the phrase stuck with us for a long time, exchanging xmas presents and pretending to decide whether the parcel was bacon or toilet rolls.
Apparently, like a lot of such small village shops at the time it was only the Post Office that kept them viable. It was so wide spread there was even a joke about a Highland shopkeeper finding himself on a train talking to the owner of Harrods (boy does that date it) who says how Harrods sells everything. The highland shop keeper asks if has the Post Office in his shop. On being told no he says "Shame, it's not worth a damn without the Post Office".
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Lewis & Harris now have a load of brilliant community run shops, that variously combine cafes, post offices, gift shops, petrol stations and food banks. They are well stocked.

Where I lived in the Highlands, the local shops were fine, but ran into problems of holiday makers who would bring their holiday's worth of food with them from Asda. The combined shop, petrol station and post office has now lost the petrol part as they could not compete there.
 
The Post Office at the centre of the community, combined with a cafe, shop, petrol station etc, in rural areas, is a major part of life. The sub-postmaster become one of the best knowing faces in the community. To be destroyed by faceless lawyers & civil servants, is utterly despicable and cruel. That is why everyone with any responsibility needs to be held to account.

We deter rioting with quick, severe justice. We should do the same to those people and deter such incompetence in the future.
 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gqd7zrxqno

Post Office campaigner Sir Alan Bates has married his long-term partner on Sir Richard Branson's private island in the Caribbean.

The 70-year-old tied the knot with Suzanne Sercombe on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands last month, the Sunday Times reported, external.

The pair have been together for 34 years but had never married.
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Sir Richard reportedly invited the couple to the island after Sir Alan said in a January interview with the Times: "If Richard Branson is reading this, I’d love a holiday.”
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As enterprising as ever. :)
 
Mr Bates Vs The Post Office wins 3 awards at the National TV Awards.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office was voted best new drama and Toby Jones won best drama performance for playing the title role.
In his acceptance speech, the actor said: "This means an awful lot, not just to me but to the extraordinary people who inspired our show, some of whom are in the audience this evening."
A group of the subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted of fraud and false accounting joined the show's stars on stage at the ceremony at the O2 arena in London.
The programme also received a special impact award, with one of the real Post Office scandal victims using the acceptance speech to criticise the support offered by the new government.
"What I'd like you to know is I went to Westminster a couple of weeks back and saw the new minister," Jo Hamilton said. "And trust me, nothing has changed."
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx289zw7rkeo
 
I saw some of Nick Read's testimony in the inquiry over the last couple of days. These people really do live in their own little, dysfunctional world. How is it that no one on the board said, "Hey, instead of continuing to get our teeth kicked in, we just abandon the wounded and give the police what they ask for,"? Instead, they said and wrote down that the board needed to be consulted about cooperation with the numerous law enforcement agencies investigating.

The best part were notes about being surprised by the volume of police inquires. Um... PROTIP, if you wrongly prosecute and ruin nearly a 1000 people and their families, the police are going to take an interest.
 
catsmate said:
Mike Young is lying, evading and refusing responsibility, as usual.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/15/post-office-horizon-it-inquiry-mike-young
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“Still, to this day, I am unaware of an identified part of Horizon code that someone can point to to show that Horizon is fundamentally flawed. I understand Horizon Online is still used today.”

And Subpostmasters are still having problems.

So first he denies any problem, then blames Paula Vennells.

'He told the inquiry: “We all have to take responsibility, that includes me. I highlighted all the issues we had with Horizon. I left the second week of March 2012. I think I did everything I could. Paula Vennells was there seven years later [and did not investigate Horizon].”'
 
Orphia Nay said:
“Still, to this day, I am unaware of an identified part of Horizon code that someone can point to to show that Horizon is fundamentally flawed. I understand Horizon Online is still used today.”
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Interesting choice of words. I assume he doesn't have access to the code and Fujitsu have resisted making details available so there could be horrendous bugs but he will still not be aware of an identified piece of code someone can point to.
 
Wudang said:
Interesting choice of words. I assume he doesn't have access to the code and Fujitsu have resisted making details available so there could be horrendous bugs but he will still not be aware of an identified piece of code someone can point to.
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It was indeed very carefully worded.
 
Wudang said:
Interesting choice of words. I assume he doesn't have access to the code and Fujitsu have resisted making details available so there could be horrendous bugs but he will still not be aware of an identified piece of code someone can point to.
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If it's fundamentally flawed, there is unlikely to be any isolated piece of code you can point to. It's more likely to be an architectural issue like (just a made up example) the way remote servers communicate with the central system. The code may implement the algorithm flawlessly but, if the algorithm allows for dropped or duplicated transactions, you are screwed.
 
Here's a handy scapegoat for the Post Office bigwigs.

But evidence in the latest public inquiry hearing has confirmed the Met Police is now investigating an individual. During his evidence session, John Bartlett, director of assurance and complex investigations at the Post Office, confirmed that the Metropolitan Police was now investigating: “We told the inquiry about it, we told the Met Police about it and it is now a Met Police investigation.”

When asked, Bartlett confirmed that the person under investigation, who is currently suspended, is not involved in giving evidence in the current phase – Phase 7 – of the public inquiry.
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https://www.computerweekly.com/news...e-worker-over-evidence-destruction-allegation

The individual may have destroyed evidence of interest to the inquiry.
 
jeremyp said:
If it's fundamentally flawed, there is unlikely to be any isolated piece of code you can point to. It's more likely to be an architectural issue like (just a made up example) the way remote servers communicate with the central system. The code may implement the algorithm flawlessly but, if the algorithm allows for dropped or duplicated transactions, you are screwed.
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Very true and we know instances of this like the unvalidated XML schemas.
 
The post office categorised PO operators as “negroid types”, “Chinese/Japanese types” and “dark skinned European types” until 2016.
 
jeremyp said:
If it's fundamentally flawed, there is unlikely to be any isolated piece of code you can point to. It's more likely to be an architectural issue like (just a made up example) the way remote servers communicate with the central system. The code may implement the algorithm flawlessly but, if the algorithm allows for dropped or duplicated transactions, you are screwed.
Click to expand...

The fact that it was rural POs, where power and broadband dropouts are most likely, that seemed to have most of the problems suggests your "made up example" may be spot on.
 
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jeremyp said:
If it's fundamentally flawed, there is unlikely to be any isolated piece of code you can point to. It's more likely to be an architectural issue like (just a made up example) the way remote servers communicate with the central system. The code may implement the algorithm flawlessly but, if the algorithm allows for dropped or duplicated transactions, you are screwed.
Click to expand...

Or even underlying libraries may introduce bugs into flawless code (once developed and published a spreadsheet that couldn't add up properly - yeah a slightly significant bug in a spreadsheet - in turned out to be a bug in the supplied C libraries rather than our code).
 
Pixel42 said:
The fact that it was rural POs, where power and broadband dropouts are most likely, that seemed to have most of the problems suggests your "made up example" may be spot on.
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That's optimistic, at least for the early days of Horizon. It's more likely, I think that they were using modem connections over telephone lines in the rural areas.
 
Up until recently* I always tried to ensure I had enough cash for enough petrol to get me home as many petrol stations in Hampshire (pre 1999) and Yorkshire/Derbyshire used dialup for debit card readers and they often timed out repeatedly.

*for a 66 year old's values of "recently"
 
Anyone else think that Paula Vennels has many of the characteristics that seem to be requirements for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury?
 
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