Talk about going postal. Just when the long-festering British Post Office scandal seemed to have hit rock bottom, a way has ingeniously been found to make it worse. The government bizarrely sacked the chairman it had installed to fix the crisis, only to be irked that he’s now spilling some sensational beans about how deeply ambivalent officials remain about atoning for the thousands of people terribly wronged. He has also alleged deliberate governmental foot-dragging in aid of the general election expected in October.
The victims, some of whom died, were felled not by bomb, natural disaster or accident, but by computer error. As is now infamously admitted, Fujitsu’s Horizon software wrongly showed thousands of local post shops diddling the system, resulting in more than 700 successful prosecutions with at least 236 sent to prison, as well as bankruptcies, suicides and unimaginable misery.
The Kremlinesque refusal of officials to recognise the statistical outlandishness of thousands of subpostmasters suddenly turning larcenous is not even the most shocking thing about this debacle. According to sacked chairman Henry Staunton, brought in in 2022 to fix the mess of more than 20 years’ standing, senior bureaucrats and post officials are still sandbagging the settlement process and urging liability to be frozen until after the election.
Frustrated that the Post Office still employs more than 40 of the “untouchables” – in-house investigators who, with what now appears spiteful zeal, pursued the subpostmasters to court – Staunton said he was told they were too powerful to be sacked.
His charges are politically incendiary given the outpouring of public sympathy since the subpostmasters’ plight was televised in the drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Staunton’s sacking came right after that outcry – a decision likely to rebound on his sacker, latest Tory leadership frontrunner Kemi Badenoch. The Business Secretary appears to have acted for the sake of nabbing a timely scalp, despite Staunton having zero culpability.
His allegations of continued Post Office push-back reinforce the impression emerging from various inquiries that while the techies got it badly wrong, the prime villains were the human resources titans who moved heaven and earth to cover up and deny problems.
The ethics of using HR buffers to silo employee and contractor problems took a battering from the #MeToo disclosures. People complaining of sexual harassment were all too often dissuaded from pursuing matters, and even urged to keep working with the alleged abuser. HR can too easily further not a company’s holistic interests but those of management, even while purporting to be on the staff’s side. Sometimes, HR functionaries protect a company by not even telling managers about problems.
This perilously ambivalent status is proving critical to understanding how the subpostmasters’ mass-persecution went on for so long, despite clear public evidence of inaccuracy and gross injustice.
Shudder-making implications continue to flow. It’s been admitted that postmasters’ Horizon accounts were able to be remotely accessed and figures changed. Horizon data was used as evidence in at least one unrelated court case resulting in a murder conviction.
Also unsettling is the Post Office’s continued recourse to its own investigation and prosecution system, which seems a malign power storehouse for any institution, let alone a monopoly.
A further blameless casualty is the hitherto useful word, “robust”, used repeatedly by officials and politicians over the years to try to douse the scandal. “The system is robust.” Now, like “unique” and “awesome”, it has suffered Argentinian levels of devaluation. Once used to describe anything admirably sturdy, resilient and dependable, it’s now fit only for something of dubious and deliberately untested functionality.
Still, it is useful political shorthand. “Do you want a full inquiry, minister, or just a robust, Horizon inquiry?”
