In the UK, the corner shop performs much the same function as the Kiwi dairy: it’s where you buy basics like bread and milk until you visit a supermarket or more dedicated establishment. In many places, these corner shops also double as sub-post offices, charged with selling stamps, dispensing pensions and a multitude of other state-related issues.
These franchises are often run by husband-and-wife teams who tend to form strong links with the local community. Before the turn of the century, something strange began to happen in many of Britain’s 19,000 sub-post offices: large sums of money appeared to go missing. These glaring financial discrepancies coincided with the installation of a new IT system, Horizon.
The sub-postmasters and mistresses diligently reported the unprecedented anomalies in their accounting, believing they were technical glitches that the Post Office would sort out. Instead, in a move that Kafka would have deemed unbelievable, the Post Office insisted the Horizon system was perfectly fine and the problem was due to a sudden upsurge in theft. It promptly launched private prosecutions against the very people who had reported the problem: the sub-postmasters and mistresses.
Over the next 15 years, 3500 branch owner-operators were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting, 736 sub-postmasters and mistresses were convicted, many were imprisoned (including a pregnant woman) and many more were left ruined, with several taking their own lives. All along, the IT company behind Horizon – Fujitsu – and the Post Office itself maintained publicly and to politicians that there was no tech issue at all, despite knowing of endemic problems with bugs and glitches.
They did this for commercial reasons – Fujitsu went on to earn further government IT contracts worth billions, and the Post Office was preoccupied with cutting losses and improving its executives’ generous bonuses.
All this has been known for the better part of a decade, yet it has been the cause of very little public uproar, political concern, media coverage or police interest. Until now.
What brought about this change has little to do with the various public inquiries or legal findings that confirm the Post Office’s vicious campaign of blame and Fujitsu’s repeated dissembling. Nor is it because of the journalistic investigations that have tried to hold the culpable to account.
All such endeavours failed to capture the public attention and a story of an industrial-scale miscarriage of justice passed with minimal fuss. Indeed, the chief executive of the Post Office at the height of the prosecutions was made a CBE after the scandal broke, and other senior figures went on to land cushy directorships.
What has suddenly got them all looking over their shoulders is a four-part TV drama called Mr Bates vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones as the eponymous Mr Bates. Alan Bates is a former sub-postmaster who lost his job after a computer glitch placed him in the position of owing thousands of pounds. Battling against a wall of secrecy – the Post Office told individual sub-postmasters that they were the only people claiming a tech fault – he stubbornly and methodically exposed the truth.
While those responsible for hounding thousands and prosecuting hundreds of innocent branch operators continued to flourish, more than 30 of their victims died before they were able to clear their names.
Already the buck-passing is frenetic but, finally, the police have launched a criminal inquiry and the government, having dithered for years, has exonerated all those who were found guilty.
What did it take to spur this action? A fictionalised TV drama. The real culprit, corporate and institutional crime, alas, proved all too easy to ignore.
