Dozens of forgotten Post Office victims finally secure review

Times

7 days ago

Subpostmasters prosecuted by the Department for Work and Pensions during the Horizon computer scandal are to have their cases reviewed by the government.
Horizon was a faulty accounting system created by the Japanese software company Fujitsu that showed incorrect shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts.
The Post Office blamed the subpostmasters and successfully prosecuted more than 700 of them between 1999 and 2015. Tireless campaigning by Sir Alan Bates and others meant they were exonerated en masse in January last year, although by then many had lost businesses, families, reputations and, in some cases, their lives.
Separately, however, the DWP carried out its own prosecutions until 2012. Between 2001 and 2006, it secured the convictions of 61 Post Office employees for welfare-related fraud offences, mainly involving cashing stolen pensions dockets which many subpostmasters claim they did only to settle Horizon balances. They claim they are also the victims of the Post Office scandal — but they have not been exonerated.
Now the DWP has said it will undertake an 'independent assurance review' of these cases.
'They put me in the back of a car'
One of those who will have their case reviewed is Holly*, who began a career in a Post Office as a clerk in northeast England aged 20. Her name has been changed for this article.
'My role at the Post Office did not include balancing of the accounts: this was left to the postmaster. When the postmaster was on holiday, a temporary postmaster would come in,' she said.
Shortly afterwards, in 2003 when she was six months pregnant, she was barred from entering the branch by someone who said they were from the 'Post Office investigation team'.
'They took my car keys and put me in the back of a car. I was firstly taken home so they could search the house. I was asked if there was anything in the house that they needed to be aware of,' Holly said.
She was taken to a police station and held in a cell until questioning. 'I had no legal representation or union worker; I was on my own.'
During a second interview, the issue of stolen benefit books was brought up. 'I remember being questioned about benefit books that had been cashed. This was the first time that these were mentioned,' she said. 'I was asked about transactions that were made and payments which were made for each transaction. This was when I began to understand what the last few months had all been about.'
• After the Post Office scandal, I'm a cleaner for those who supported me
Holly denies she had anything to do with the shortfall. She suspects she was unfairly blamed for pensions dockets that had been cashed.
She said that, during the trial, 'my biggest memory was the prosecution telling the jury that I knew how to defraud the Post Office. The jury gave their verdict of guilty of theft.'
She was told she would receive a suspended sentence due to having a young baby but ended up serving four months of a 15-month custodial sentence. She then had to wear an electronic tag for about four months and attend a probation centre every week.
When she heard about the review, she said she was 'not getting my hopes up' that her conviction would be wiped. 'I'm not expecting anything,' she said. 'I don't want to build myself because I have been here so many times and been let down. My expectations are zero.'
She added: 'Twenty years later years later, I have moved on with my life to the best I can but the impact it has had on me, and my family, has been something else.'
Mr Allen v the Court of Appeal
The DWP review will not include those who have already had their cases rejected by the Court of Appeal.
One of those is Roger Allen, a subpostmaster from Norwich who spent six months in prison in 2004 after being convicted of a £37,000 fraud. The Horizon system was installed in his branch and his daughter, Keren Simpson, remembers her father 'coming home from work every week and he would always say that the balances didn't match up'.
The DWP presented him with unsigned pension booklets that had been cashed in. Allen took his case to the Court of Appeal in 2021 but the judge said he was 'wholly unpersuaded … that this is, indeed, a Horizon case.'
Roger Allen and his daughter Keren, below
A document from 2003 showed the DWP, the police and the Post Office worked together to secure convictions. It has since emerged that tactics used by Post Office investigators in interviewing subpostmasters and retrieving evidence to secure convictions was unethical.
Before Allen died in March last year, his daughter promised him she would fight to overturn his conviction.
'He'd given up,' said Simpson. 'He couldn't even talk about it, it was so difficult for him. I wanted him to know that I wouldn't give up. And I won't.'
'Dad did what he did because of Horizon'
Alan Robinson, 83, from Halifax in West Yorkshire, was also convicted by the DWP. After Horizon was installed in his branch in May 2000 he started to notice shortfalls. He says he made good the losses by cashing spare pensions dockets and leaving the money in the till to balance the books. 'I robbed Peter to pay Paul,' Robinson said.
He was accused of stealing £43,000 and given 12 months in prison when he was 62. Robinson failed to have the sentence overturned at the Court of Appeal.
'Dad did what he did because of the Horizon system,' his daughter Sarah Finnell said. She believes that those pursued by the DWP should have the same blanket exoneration as those in the Post Office prosecutions.
'They are both government organisations,' she said. 'They [the DWP and Post Office] worked together to secure convictions. All of those convictions, not just Post Office, should be deemed unsafe'
Lord Sikka, the Labour peer who has been campaigning for a review of the DWP convictions, said: 'There are scandals within the Post Office scandal. The DWP has never come clean about its prosecution of postmasters. After nearly 30 years the slow progress of the DWP investigations, lack of urgency and transparency is very disappointing. No postmaster should be excluded from the review, as at the time of the original prosecutions and subsequent appeals, the flaws in the accounting systems were not publicly known. Those unfairly prosecuted and their families deserve justice'.
A DWP spokesman said: 'We have committed to commissioning an independent assurance review where Post Office members of staff were prosecuted by the department for welfare-related fraud.
'These cases involved complex investigations and were backed by evidence including filmed surveillance, stolen benefit books and witness statements. To date, no documentation has been identified showing that Horizon data was essential to these prosecutions.'
Despite her father's case not being part of the review, Simpson said she would continue the fight to clear his name. 'It feels like a bit of a hopeless mission at times,' she said. 'But I do still believe that the truth will prevail.'