Learning lessons from the Post Office scandal

For 23 years, I was a national official with a trade union which represented the staff in the small number of main post offices actually owned by Post Office Limited (POL). Then, for 17 years, I sat on bodies representing customers of post offices.

On one occasion (an awards ceremony), I spent the evening sitting next to Paula Vennells, then CEO of the Post Office. At the time, I thought the business was in good hands. How wrong I was. This week, Vennells appears before the enquiry into the Post Office scandal and rightly her role will be in the spotlight.

But we already know that many individuals and organisations let down those post office owners who were falsely prosecuted: many other managers in POL, members of the Board, POL’s legal advisers, its auditors, Government Ministers and civil servants responsible for Post Office affairs, of course many managers in Fujitsu that supplied the Horizon system, even sections of the media which gave too little attention to the scandal until quite recently, and crucially the Federation (NFSP) that was supposed to represent sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses.

Yet we also know that, huge though this scandal is, there have been many more in a similar vein. Only this week, we have had the report on the scandal of contaminated blood used by the NHS. Time and time again, individuals and organisations are too defensive when challenged and too concerned with neglecting critical evidence and blaming others for institutional mistakes.

We have to learn the lessons. All individuals and organisations with power can misuse or abuse that power and we should not wait until that happens. All organisations – political, public, private, third sector – need to establish proper levels of openness and accountability, systems for internal and external challenge, and independent monitoring and checking, while the Government needs to ensure protection for whistleblowers and enforcement of relevant laws. Sadly this will not happen until there are some cases of corporate fines, docking of bonuses and even individual imprisonment.

I think that sensitive use of artificial intelligence (AI) also has a role to play. AI could have highlighted connections between bugs in the Horizon software and failures to reconcile the accounts of individual post offices. AI might have linked use of specific batches of blood with particular instances of ill-health. We should should use every tool we can find to arrest such scandals.


One Comment

  • James D. Fisher

    AI my eye. The post office case is just rank corruption criminal concealment and protection of a government vendor. The UK court system failed you in catastrophic ways. Having a contingency fee system for lawyers would have allowed postmasters to pursue remedies against the post office and the the lack of discovery for criminal defendants allowed the crown to conceal wrongdoing for years. It’s totally outrageous.