No, not Bath.
MoD procurement has very large base at Filton; referred to as Abbey Wood.
No, not Bath.
MoD procurement has very large base at Filton; referred to as Abbey Wood.
Cheers Frank, aye it's where procurement mostly live along with project teams who manage equipment. It's a mix of CS, military and civilians. They do some great work, but they also do some horrific work. But I would say that as a non-commissioned scumbag.
But even if that happened their process is examined in depth and changes made as required to ensure they can’t do this again.
it sums up the Post office management present and past that their "leadership" last year actually had part of their bonus based on dealing with the fallout from this.
Their current CEO got 50k for his hardwork on the matter although he did have to pay it back after the inquiry chair pointed out a)it was still ongoing and b)he hadnt been asked to confirm the PO had in fact provided "“all required evidence and information on time”. Awkwardly this claim was made in their annual report which probably broke a few more laws.
My very short, in comparison to yours, own experience with the same organisation recently are aligned with that.
I’ve seen more leadership acumen, values and integrity in 20yo NCO’s from council estates than some senior leaders I’ve had the displeasure of having to work with.
20 years in the civil service can confirm the same.
Finally managing to get watch this, bloody hell.
Legislating to overturn a load of convictions en masse is probably the one way to sort out this horrific situation, and I certainly can’t think of any better solution. But it’s also going to set a worrying precedent from a constitutional perspective. After all, if parliament can legislate to say that somebody found guilty by a criminal court was in fact not guilty, then why can’t parliament legislate to find that someone found not guilty by a court was, in fact, guilty…?
When you combine that thought with the way that this government has systematically sought to criminalise the act of peaceful protest and has very publicly undermined the decisions of juries that have decided to acquit, there has to be a risk that all this could be misused in the future as a weapon to criminalise groups of people that the government wishes, for reasons of political expediency, to scapegoat. I guess that would never happen in the UK, right?
I would argue the PO has repeatedly demonstrated and continues to demonstrate (IMO) they lack the integrity to hold the authority to prosecute, so if they want to retain it they allow the appeals to go unchallenged. But even if that happened their process is examined in depth and changes made as required to ensure they can’t do this again.<br /><br />
Mrs S and I were just discussing this. They need to lose that right to prosecute without CPS oversight
Just watching the documentary on the Beeb about it right now.
It's obvious that some laws were broken but it wasn't the Post Masters doing it!
Appalling.
Siome of this stuff beggars belief.
" As early as 2003, a judge in a case where the Post Office was suing a sub-postmistress ordered the Post Office to employ an IT expert to investigate Horizon – something any responsible institution would have done years before. When the IT inspector raised serious concerns, the “delusional” Post Office told him he was mistaken, but abandoned the case against the sub-postmistress. Yet it continued to prosecute others, boasting of deterring sub-postmasters from “jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon”.
"The National Association of SubPostmasters (NASP) has 6,727 members. During the Post Office purge, more than 900 were accused of misconduct, though only 736 were prosecuted. Did it not occur to anyone that, in an organisation whose members were traditionally regarded as pillars of the community, a ratio of one sub-postmaster in seven turning to crime – and, as more and more were sacked, fined or jailed, the offences proliferating in spite of these severe deterrents – was not a credible situation?"
https://reaction.life/postmastergate-britains-dreyfus-case-post-office-scandal/
But it’s also going to set a worrying precedent from a constitutional perspective. After all, if parliament can legislate to say that somebody found guilty by a criminal court was in fact not guilty, then why can’t parliament legislate to find that someone found not guilty by a court was, in fact, guilty…?
A few people have raised this, and it's a valid point. If we were up in arms about the government deciding Rwanda was safe, we should be equally concerned at them deciding who is and isn't guilty.
I can't see a quicker way to resolve this for the victims, but i don't trust this shower not to try and sneak something through in the legislation.
Having watched the whole thing last night, at times it felt that the PO self serving bloody mindedness was a metaphor for the government screwing over public services despitevall the evidence. Probably just me
I would argue the PO has repeatedly demonstrated and continues to demonstrate (IMO) they lack the integrity to hold the authority to prosecute, so if they want to retain it they allow the appeals to go unchallenged. But even if that happened their process is examined in depth and changes made as required to ensure they can’t do this again.
Mrs S and I were just discussing this. They need to lose that right to prosecute without CPS oversight
I don't know if I agree. The ability for organisations like the PO, RSPCA to bring their own prosecutions is and has been there for good reason. I'm all for enquiries and lessons learned and making sure that stuff like this doesn't happen again, but the failings here are not in the ability to bring the prosecutions but down to actual humans (I use the term advisably) who made decisions to prosecute, to withhold / manipulate evidence, to drop cases if they got a bit tricky, and so on to suit their agenda. The issue isn't down to 'The Post Office' but specific people who absolutely should be held accountable.
But I also accept that the organisations themselves bear accountability for their people, the boards and governance in the end should be stopping this, and while the people will be different then PO and Fujitsu can't be left unscathed by it.
It’s not totally ludicrous to imagine that once people realised how messed up Horizon was they could have used the confusion to take advantage. It’ll be really hard in all the noise to know that. And the genuinely innocent have concerns that it possibly leaves a smudge of doubt over them still, which they don’t want.
You've got to remember that a verity of bugs in horizon have been found, which were the basis of the convictions. From transactions doubling to stocktake shortfalls increasing daily/weekly/monthly. So identifying one of these bugs in transaction logs should be possible. But this data has been hidden from the prosecuted post masters.
PO also know how much cash has been delivered to the offices and also how much cash has been withdrawn or used in transactions. So if these figures match (as is Jo Hamiltons case) no wrong doing can be found. Again data not provided to defendants, but the independent auditors did find cases like this.
If we as postmasters took cash or stamps/stock out of our safes it would be pretty obvious and traceable, equally if we digitally deposited it in to our own account tried to hide it digitally some way. If we miss sell a single stamp we know about it at the end of the day! We did a monthly stock take last night and we're a few £ up, I know that I should be within that figure for the rest of the month and it also gives me a little buffer if we miss sell a stamp between today and the next weekly stock take when figures can be rectified.
Most wrongdoing convictions you hear of outside of the horizon issues are postal item thefts, staff stealing items to put on eBay or whatever. Again theres are easy to spot once PO are altered to them, but more difficult to prove than cash theft as warrants are quite often required - which is why is so shocking that PO went after so many PM's for cash theft, all while knowing it was the system and not the individuals. It's in the paper's today the bonus were given out to investgatiors? for convictions so this could have have had significant impact as they were easier to catch and convict than a physical thefts of post.
I don’t know if I agree. The ability for organisations like the PO, RSPCA to bring their own prosecutions is and has been there for good reason.
No, it's been there for historic reasons.
We manage well enough without it in Scotland where the Procurator Fiscal decides if there is a case. Yes, some still got through but by having someone objectively review each case before it went to court many more unsound cases were thrown out.
I don’t know if I agree. The ability for organisations like the PO, RSPCA to bring their own prosecutions is and has been there for good reason.
Yes. I think it makes sense to retain them but it definitely needs review, as a parliament committee did a couple of years back.
That there is no central tracking or quality monitoring seems a major issue. Without that the only people who really know how many cases are being done by someone is them which removes the ability to go "hmmmm,how many of your staff are criminals?. Have you thought about reviewing your hiring rules?"
They made some recommendations but they have been ignored to date.
Of course a large part of the reason that they’re having to think about legislating to sort this problem is that the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system during their time in power.
We manage well enough without it in Scotland where the Procurator Fiscal decides if there is a case. Yes, some still got through but by having someone objectively review each case before it went to court many more unsound cases were thrown out.
How has been been proved? The case which seems to be referenced is one in 2013 where the proverbial was starting to hit the fan and it was beyond clear Horizon was fatally compromised.
Its not helped by Scotland lagging behind in reviewing the cases but this computer weekly article (who being the first to start reporting tend to have a good grasp of it) reckon the number of cases, proportionally, are about the same.
"The Scottish Post Office network is about 10% of the size of the network in England and Wales, and the number of prosecutions is similar proportionally."
Yes. I think it makes sense to retain them but it definitely needs review, as a parliament committee did a couple of years back.<br /><br />
HMRC lost its prosecutions office capability to CPS due to ineptitude and failure, didn’t have a massive effect on the business.
I see various lawyers are sucking air through their teeth about MPs voting to take short-cuts, mis out the legal route to correct itself (after years of mostly inaction) and essentially over-turning convictions on their say-so.
Let's hope that their efforts to put right this horrible mis-carriage doesn't result in some unintended consequences down the line, for the sake of political expediency, after all that's never happened before...
Couple of questions/points:
Those prosecutions were brought on the strength of investigations carried out by ex posties/post masters that had been on a three week training course and were rewarded on the numbers of prosecutions brought. Is that right? Keeping the power is one thing, using it wisely is another... (with great power brings great responsibility etc ©Spiderman).
If we were talking about the US and their equivelant of Parliament/The Lords overturning some of the actions against Trump, we'd be up in arms. There's a very good reason the Judiciary is separated from Government and the proposed route whilst expedient is also a terrible precedent to set...
ex posties/post masters that had been on a three week training course and were rewarded on the numbers of prosecutions brought.
I was under the impression that the Post Office Investigations Branch, or whatever it's called now, was the kind of place that former coppers etc landed after they left the force. I'm not sure that ex posties etc have the kind of refined skillset needed to mount a sustained harassment and intimidation campaign against innocent people.
There certainly seemed to be a 'Met in the glory days of the 80s and 90s' vibe to it.
There is absolutely no reason for the PO to retain its prosecutorial powers after such a record of abuse. In a perfect world, the whole organisation would be taken back into public control and stripped back to the core, as it's clear from their evasive behaviour even today that a rotten culture still persists.
I was under the impression that the Post Office Investigations Branch, or whatever it’s called now, was the kind of place that former coppers etc landed after they left the force. I
Thats one of the odd things which has come out of the trials. Most of them seem to be lifetime PO staff switching from counter/post delivery staff to being investigators at random.
Maybe the three weeks training was from the Met and concentrated on "culture".
In a perfect world, the whole organisation would be taken back into public control and stripped back to the core, as it’s clear from their evasive behaviour even today that a rotten culture still persists.<br /><br />
it IS in public control - it is 100% owned by HM Gov. I think the Gov quite enjoy the ambiguity created by selling off the Royal Mail (the delivery part) so much of the public think this is a symptom of private enterprise gone bad… it is not, it’s a symptom of public sector cover ups gone bad.
I see various lawyers are sucking air through their teeth about MPs voting to take short-cuts, mis out the legal route to correct itself (after years of mostly inaction) and essentially over-turning convictions on their say-so.
What could possibly go wrong? A couple of decades of studied disinterest 'corrected' in 48 hours of frenzied activity by a bunch of inept and corrupt shysters, literally sketching out changes to our legal system on the back of a fag packet?
If you missed Ian Hislop on Peston absolutely tearing Jake Berry and his newly-discovered concern a new one, its a thing of beauty. He sums it up absolutely perfectly and theres nobody more qualified to do so as Private Eye has been exposing this for years...
https://twitter.com/scottygb/status/1745246158031552635?s=20
"You can’t just talk nonsense and not be interrupted!"
"Why didn't you act sooner? You kept saying 'this is too difficult'. Suddenly you can do it all in one day."”
Indeed!
Why I'm not sure -
Is removing the PO power to prosecute just for the PO, or other similar organisations too? eg: RSPCA? Is it to punish 'The PO' by removing the powers, or after 20 odd years is it a significant warning to put things right so this never happens again. If it's a policy that organisations should not have prosecution powers, do we also remove from all the others and if so do they keep investigatorial powers still but CPS finally decides. The CPS can't keep up with their workload already, how quickly would we expect them to step into a breech?
If they lose investigatorial powers and that has to go to police forces, does that really advance things - the types of 'crime' being accused of are specialist in nature, do the police have time, expertise, do we trust them any more than the companies really.....
It's a can of worms and while the impulse is to strip them, I'm not convinced that the result is progress.
Other matters; heartbreaking story on R4 this morning, a SPM who was accused and the case was thrown out in court, but in the meantime lost her business and all she'd invested in it, and life savings making up the false discrepancies. She has been living hand to mouth now for 15 years, but because she wasn't convicted, her offer is £75K now. As she said she is now 60 and is not future proofed, no pension or savings to speak of, etc., £75K is a lot of money if it's cash in hand but goes nowhere near to putting her back where she would have been if she'd been allowed to run a successful PO and Village shop throughout.
it IS in public control – it is 100% owned by HM Gov.
You're right, it's in a kind of arms-length limbo. It needs to be taken fully into public control.
As for whether to strip them of their prosecutorial power and send that workload back to the police/CPS, I don't think you can justify them keeping it with their record. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the workload will drastically reduce as soon as someone independent of the PO is scrutinising it, as when PO employees are not being incentivised to convict people.
Fraud in any other walk of public life is investigated by the police. I'm sure a lot of it is complex in nature, and the police have specialist teams to help them pick through it. Still an imperfect system, but I'd rather fraud was missed than invented on an industrial scale.
Thats one of the odd things which has come out of the trials. Most of them seem to be lifetime PO staff switching from counter/post delivery staff to being investigators at random.
Yeah, I may well be mistaken on that one.
I’m not convinced that the result is progress.
I think POL has burned to the ground any defence they may have had that they should be allowed to keep these sorts of powers. It may not be progress, but frankly, who'd trust any prosecution bought solely by POL? Up until the point that MPS intervened to overturn these convictions, POL lawyers were still contesting every single compensation tribunal even after the group action decided in the Postmasters favour, they've demonstrated more than comprehensively that even if you could make a case for them retaining those sorts of powers, you'd have to put in place so many safeguards and oversights so to make the point moot anyway.
Let’s hope that their efforts to put right this horrible mis-carriage doesn’t result in some unintended consequences down the line, for the sake of political expediency, after all that’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; color: #000000; font-family: Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, 'Noto Sans', sans-serif, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', 'Apple Color Emoji', 'Segoe UI Emoji', 'Segoe UI Symbol', 'Noto Color Emoji';">never happened before…
Political Pardon's will be (another) consequence of these, as it's basically the Govt overriding the Courts decisions rather than bothering changing the laws that Courts are judging folk against - if Lady Mone is ever prosecuted & found guilty, they could just 'pardon' her.
A couple of decades of studied disinterest ‘corrected’ in 48 hours of frenzied activity by a bunch of inept and corrupt shysters, literally sketching out changes to our legal system on the back of a fag packet?
It's a nightmare. What choice have they got though? They've broken our court system, and if they don't bypass it to sort this high profile story, people might start to ask what happened to make the courts so slow and unable to deliver justice for ordinary people.
Is removing the PO power to prosecute just for the PO, or other similar organisations too? eg: RSPCA? Is it to punish ‘The PO’ by removing the powers, or after 20 odd years is it a significant warning to put things right so this never happens again. If it’s a policy that organisations should not have prosecution powers, do we also remove from all the others and if so do they keep investigatorial powers still but CPS finally decides.
I can’t see any reason why for a criminal prosecution there is any need for someone other than “the crown” to prosecute? Can anyone explain why we want RSPCA, or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, or Big Bank Plc to lead prosecutions potentially resulting in prison sentences?
Investigational powers is a different question. If I was on the POL board I would be recommending that the PO Investigation Branch be moved to a separate arms length body, reporting to the minister not to the PO Board. If I was the minister, I would create their terms of reference to include misconduct by the Board!
Fraud in any other walk of public life is investigated by the police.
it’s not always. Benefit Fraud, and Tax Fraud are investigated by the gov depts. Bank Fraud, I believe, is mainly investigated by internal teams but with close liaison with the police.
What's the betting that any substantial compensation sum will not be tax free? Also the legal bill for righting this wrong is it obscene.
Political Pardon’s will be (another) consequence of these, as it’s basically the Govt overriding the Courts decisions rather than bothering changing the laws that Courts are judging folk against – if Lady Mone is ever prosecuted & found guilty, they could just ‘pardon’ her.
pardons are not new - gov has used them before (Scotland has pardoned those involved in miners strikes, illegal homosexuality etc). But that is not what the SPM want - a pardon is basically saying, “what you did at the time was illegal, but with the benefit of hindsight society now thinks you did nothing wrong”. Overturning a conviction is saying, “you did nothing wrong” (or at least we cannot prove you did). That is what the SPM, quite rightly, want.
I am not that comfortable with Parliament simply creating a new law to fix this and miss judges out the process. It would perhaps have been better to create a new “Postmasters appeal tribunal” which had powers to quickly review and overturn relevant convictions. The danger there for gov would be it would need to be independent and there is no way for them to instruct the judge what to do.
Ian Hislop on Peston absolutely tearing Jake Berry and his newly-discovered concern a new one
Came here to post that- feel sorry for his constituents! 😉
I can’t see any reason why for a criminal prosecution there is any need for someone other than “the crown” to prosecute? Can anyone explain why we want RSPCA, or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, or Big Bank Plc to lead prosecutions potentially resulting in prison sentences?
It's not the ability to prosecute that's the issue, it's the misuse of that power. As noted, creating independence between the sections that do it and the 'commercial/operational' arms might be a step.
It's a weird one (to a non-lawyer at least) - part of me feels anyone should be able to bring a case against others if they so wish, and then for the courts to weigh up the evidence and decide. But it can't be without 'cost' to the accuser, you can't have spurious and made up vindictive cases being brought and then the accuser walking away - defending against accusations (from crown or civil type) is a lengthy, damaging and expensive process even if you eventually win.
That is what's happening here - there are no merits to the PO cases, anyone reviewing ALL the evidence should have killed them at the start - but the evidence was withheld, prosecutors were incentivised to prosecute, etc. A really shitty story.
it’s not always. Benefit Fraud, and Tax Fraud are investigated by the gov depts.
True, it's more a question of lack of oversight and independence. POL could investigate, interview, make a charging decision and carry on through the court process with zero oversight. I don't think there's a future for such special arrangements.
The CPS is an imperfect but important backstop against abuse, whether it's by the police or any other investigatory force. If it wasn't already hideously overstretched due to lack of funding, there wouldn't be much argument against handing them oversight of the PO's activities.
an Hislop on Peston absolutely tearing Jake Berry and his newly-discovered concern a new one
That's SIR Jake Berry to you.
Unfortunately there are multiple examples of the pointlessness of the honours system floating around at the moment.
Fraud in any other walk of public life is investigated by the police<br /><br />
Serious Fraud Office (bit of a clue in the name)
FCA
Benefits Agency
HMRC
NCA
that’s six agencies who investigate fraud who are not police forces off the top of my head.<br /><br />
the police have specialist teams to help them pick through it.
That made me laugh, thanks for brightening my morning up.
“The most robust figures currently available from the Crime Survey of England and Wales reveal there were 3.7 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in the year ending December 2022 (ONS). 86% of fraud instances are estimated to go underreported. This means that the scale of fraud is very significant, but that under-reporting also hampers our understanding of the threat.” <br /><br />
The threat from fraud isn’t even understood.
That made me laugh, thanks for brightening my morning up.
Yeah, had another coffee now and thought about that for a minute... 🙂
I guess it's just frustration at the lack of scrutiny that could be applied to POL investigations.
Theres a po investigator giving evidence at the moment that all the statements he gave to a criminal court were in fact not his statements and were in fact statements written by someone else and handed to him to sign, and then put forward as his own statements.
'I was just following orders Guv'
if Lady Mone is ever prosecuted & found guilty, they could just ‘pardon’ her.
It's not a pardon, iirc. A pardon meams your conviction still stands, you are just excused the punishment. They need to have the convictions overturned, per an appeal.
You could, I'm sure, draft a law specifically quashing convictions for the offences where Horizon was the only evidence. I wouldn't trustbthe current legislature to leave something vague for future wiggle room/abuse. Such as getting Lady Mone off the hook
£75K is a lot of money if it’s cash in hand but goes nowhere near to putting her back where she would have been if she’d been allowed to run a successful PO and Village shop throughout.
This is where it becomes a little tricky, I run a 'successful village shop and postoffice, but it's definitely not a money maker - no pension, savings have gone into the shop in the last 12 months due to inflation etc. many village shops have shut or become 'community shops' in the last 15 years. It's a I dieing trade.
They really need to prosecute the grunts like that PO investigator above as well. The 'following orders' defence is nonsense - anyone knows signing something you didn't write and is patently untrue in an audit situation is illegal and they should face the consequences no matter how low down the food chain they were. Otherwise people in similar situations in the future will just do it again and not push back. Sure take down the big guys but take them all - they knew what they were doing was wrong.
The more people at every level that understand actions have consequences the better.
Also the legal bill for righting this wrong is it obscene.
That's one thing that shocked me, the 555 were awarded some £58m but £46m was apparently swallowed up by legal fees 😯
The more people at every level that understand actions have consequences the better.
Sadly people are motivated by money I turned down the position of technical director in my previous employment because I didn't trust the owner would have been very lucrative if I'd taken it as they got bought out not long after.
Is anyone actually listening to Stephen Bradshaw, the senior Post Office investigator being questioned by the inquiry?
Its truly staggering. He sounds like an absolute buffoon! Nick Wallis, who wrote the book on the scandal, just described him on five live as 'the most incompetent investigator on the planet'
He still seems to have no more concept of what the actual problem is then he did ten years ago and zero grasp of how the Horizon system actually works. It appears he was just signing stuff off willy-nilly that he obviously had no understanding of, most of which appears to have been total bollocks!
If this is the standard of the people making decisions then it's no wonder its such an almighty cluster****!
That’s one thing that shocked me, the 555 were awarded some £58m but £46m was apparently swallowed up by legal fees
That was because it was paid for by a litigation fund.
So it was the legal fees + the return for those fund investors (which tends to be high since they also need to cover the legal fees for the cases they lose).
Is anyone actually listening to Stephen Bradshaw, the senior Post Office investigator being questioned?
The Fujitsu bod hasnt turned up again?
If this is the standard of the people making decisions then no wonder its such an almighty cluster****!
That seems to be a trend with them. Reading the writeups from last year and skimming the recordings does show some incredible incompetence.
I am not sure how the inquiries counsel hadnt ended up with an indented forehead from facepalming.
