Nick Wallis - The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

Published October 2021

ISBN 978-1-9163023-8-9

Text Nick Wallis

Typography Bath Publishing

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Nick Wallis asserts his rights as set out in ss77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work wherever it is published commercially and whenever any adaptation of this work is published or produced including any sound recordings or films made of or based upon this work.

The information presented in this work is accurate and current as at 1 October 2021 to the best knowledge of the author. The author and the publisher, however, make no guarantee as to, and assume no responsibility for, the correctness or sufficiency of such information or recommendation.

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To Mum, Dad, Nic, Amy, Abi and James.
Thanks for everything.

Many of the Subpostmasters featured in the book and many more not mentioned are still fighting for proper compensation or having to seek damages through malicious prosecution claims. Some will not have the resources to raise a claim, find the documents they need or travel to meet their lawyers or parliamentary representatives. Others may be suffering in silence, without peace of mind.

To help those directly affected by the Horizon scandal, 10% of the revenue generated by this book will be directed to a new fund. The fund will distribute money to assist people who have suffered as a result of the Post Offices punitive methods. This could include helping with expert and legal advice, travel (to meetings, court or evidence sessions of the statutory inquiry), medical help, counselling, media and creative projects and basic hardships. Thank you for buying this book. It will make a difference.

For most of the last century the Post Office was known corporately as the General Post Office. The initials GPO were ubiquitous and well-understood. The GPO governed the activities of Royal Mail and Britains telephony network (which later became British Telecom).

When the GPO was scrapped the Post Office went through various reorganisations. At one stage it was known as Post Office Counters Limited or POCL (pronounced pockell). Soon afterwards it became Post Office Limited, often written up in documents as POL (pronounced poll). Many Subpostmasters therefore call the Post Office POL, though Post Office employees tend to just call it the business.

If its not being called POL or the business, there is a habit (mainly among its representatives) of dropping the definite article, so the Post Office becomes Post Office.

The various official and unofficial names the Post Office has gone by are reflected in the hundreds of documents and interviews which have informed this book.

To save confusion and to be as consistent as possible, I have added, where appropriate, the definite article and changed many (but not all) of the POLs and POCLs to the Post Office. I hope this aids the reader.

I have always been a spiritual person. When I was convicted of theft in 2010, my faith and my belief in justice was shattered. I was pregnant at the time. My despair caused me to think of suicide. I wondered if God wanted me to have something in prison to worry about. Thoughts of my unborn child kept a bit of hope, and me, alive.

The Hindu religion has a concept of Ramarajya. That is the realm of what Ghandi called the moral authority of the people. It is a realm in which peace, honesty, prosperity and security prevail. I had come to England like many, believing Britain was a place of Ramarajya which offered the opportunity to work, to thrive and to prosper.

In 2005, Davinder and I invested our own money in a Post Office branch and retail business. We were proud to have become part of such a famous British institution. When I was sentenced to prison on my eldest sons tenth birthday, all our dreams and hopes were destroyed.

The Post Office did not quite get away with it. They almost did. It was reassuring and comforting to know that others believed something had gone wrong. They have kept the story alive when the Post Office very much wanted the story to die.

Throughout our journey, we have made many wonderful friends who have been like lights in the darkness. Some have helped to restore a bit of faith in English justice. They never believed, even for one moment, that I was a thief.

Reading this book made me cry. Nick brings to life what the Post Office did to me and to my family in a way that makes reading it feel like re-living it. It is a story which broke my heart.

You may think it could never happen to you or to someone you love. This book shows that you would be wrong. It happened to me.

Seema Misra, former West Byfleet Subpostmaster, July 2021

Seema Misra was sacked as Subpostmaster at the West Byfleet Post Office in Surrey and then charged with theft. A jury at Guildford Crown Court found her guilty of stealing 74,000 from her own Post Office. As Seema says in her foreword to this book, she was sentenced to jail for a crime she didnt commit, on her eldest sons tenth birthday.

When I met Davinder Misra, Seemas husband, his wife was still in prison. Davinder was adamant the case against Seema was wholly false. Seema, he told me, had been convicted on the basis of evidence from a faulty computer system called Horizon. It took more than ten years for Davinder to be proved right.

The Misras were not alone. In the first decade of this century, accounting evidence generated by the IT system at the heart of the Post Office branch network was being used to bring private prosecutions against counter staff and branch Subpostmasters on an industrial scale. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 700 people were given criminal convictions.

Yet the largest non-military IT system in Europe, as Horizon was proudly described, was riddled with bugs and coding errors. The Post Office a government-owned company was using the shaky electronic data produced by Horizon to wrongfully charge its own Subpostmasters with crimes which simply did not exist.

Even if Horizon worked as it should, the sheer number of Post Office-led prosecutions during this fifteen year period (more than one a week) should have raised eyebrows. But no one in the justice system or government seemed to be aware of what was going on. Worse still, when the Post Office realised it might have been responsible for unsafe prosecutions, it orchestrated a cover-up, hiding crucial information from MPs and campaigners.

By 2020, enough details had come to light for the MP Julian Lewis to describe the affair in parliament as one of the worst disasters in public life since the infected blood scandal.