There may be compensation, but I'm pretty sure there'll be no justice; not a single person/company/organisation will be held to account!

That is the way of modern corporate culture; I doubt that even those proved to be complicit will face a hint of justice. You only have to read Private Eye's extensive coverage of this travesty to see the way this is going.

It also proves that widespread corruption in this country is very much legal.

None of the three symbol agencies who job is to look into these things are interested in looking into it and yet they keep charging tax payer money becoming essentially fraudsters themselves.

Shirley that can't be right. We are England (opps, UK, sorry). We are a proud nation and don't do corruption. That's for lesser countries such as those EU ones. They are all corrupt. Not us. Our political system is hundreds of years old and has evolved to be the perfect system it is.

We are Ingerland (opps, got that wrong again). And to be clear, this is not a Mone.

Yours,

Little Englander

Unfortunately, it's the smug management types who do parodies of "Little Englanders" who are at the heart of this. It's the people who bemoan the state of this country whilst racking up consultancy fees. It's Civil Servants and MPs on both sides of the house. It's people who'd rather defer to authority than push through change when it is needed.

The last person involved is white van man with some (apparently) misplaced desire to be proud of his country - it's the people who are happy to talk about "professional standards" and "public duty" whilst quietly looking the other way when their own reputation might be damaged.

Looks like Vennells is going to lose her gong though:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/08/post-office-horizon-scandal-petition-cbe-paula-vennells

The petition to strip her of her CBE "For services to the Post Office" has hit a miilion signatories (incl me) so the Government are legally bound to respond in some way.

If they come up with some excuse not to throw her under the bus as she richly deserves* then they may as well stay at home for the next election.

* I followed the court case that found Horizon faulty and have been reading the transcripts of the ongoing Inquiry under Sir Wyn Williams daily since last year so I know of which I speak.

That petition: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/strip-paula-vennells-of-her-cbe

What is a little surprising, is that whilst every news outlet is reporting on the petition, none of them are providing a link to it.

Whilst it can be found by a Google search, I suggest as there seems to be relatively few links to it,and there has been no links in my feeds, that gaining over 1M signatures is highly significant.

Fingers cross she is stripped of her CBE, obviously, for justice to be done, she and other senior managers at the PO should also made to repay their bonuses + inflation…

The petitions have a role of sort of safety valve, where angry public can put a signature under one and that helps release tension.

It gives sense of achievement and "doing something".

But petitions rarely have led to any meaningful action.

Most likely it will get a canned response that government is aware blah blah and is taking steps blah blah and it will help the victims blah blah

Actually the petition to remove Paula Vennells' CBE has already reached over one Million signatures:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/08/post-office-horizon-scandal-petition-cbe-paula-vennells

Feel free to add your 'signature'.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has promised

It means it's going to be kicked into the long grass.

It's funny though how UK justice system is ITV drama driven now.

Seems like next time you have a burglary, borrow a phone from your neighbour and film a short TV series about it. Then once ITV airs it, maybe, just maybe, a PM busy doing nothing will come out to say some platitudes and police will start "investigating".

They have delayed until it was impossible to continue to ignore it. Similar is happening with other scandals eg the Windrush people who were wrongly detained, deported, ... Will it take another TV drama for Sunak to suddenly become aware of this and expedite compensation ?

Don't hold your breath.

How long has it been since Hillsborough? Successive governments have failed to deliver justice for the families of the 97. They've had reports done, public "apologies" from people now in office but not from those who actually did the crimes of covering it all up and molesting post mortem records. Remember the youngest victim was 10 years old and supposed to have had elevated levels of alcohol in his system when a police officer heard him cry out for his mother in the make shift morgue at the ground. They've had various reports etc, and towards the end of last year made some changes but failed to make the biggest change of all that would've gone some way to stop this sort of cover up happening again.

This is an election year. That glorified Toby jug is going to latch on to anything in the zeitgeist to help keep them in power for another 5 years. And that wet weekend in the "opposition" won't do much either if they find themselves in power.

Don't rely on the British justice system to deliver any sort of justice to people actually affected by something.

yep not one person has served time for Hillsborough and Horizon will be the same I fear

Yes indeed and you can also add to the list the scandal surrounding the NHS and those unfortunate to suffer from haemophilia whom decades later are still awaiting meaningful compensation (a significant number having died from HIV)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_blood_scandal_in_the_United_Kingdom

I generally agree with your points but the police are already investigating the PO (for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice I think it is). Something like that, check the news.

It's reported they interviewed two people under caution just this week.

At the same time plenty of independent lawyers have been saying the Inquiry has already thrown up prima facie evidence for charges to be laid without it even finishing yet.

So to some extent part of what Sunak's promised is already in motion.

I think this is different from Grenfell and Hillsborough because there's reams of hard documentary evidence as to who did and said what and when (despite the PO being somewhat ... lacksadaisical ... with discovery).

It's also important to note that it's a *judicial* inquiry - that means witnesses are issued with the civil equivalent of a subpoena (Section 20 Notice I think), are sworn in under oath and can be locked up for perjury if they tell porkies.

Sir Wyn (a retired High Court judge) has already put the PO on notice he'll consider sanctions if they mess him around any more with discovery.

Police won't even bother with murder now, as I discovered last year. Weeks after the event it turned out they weren't investigating, though they didn't actually bother to tell me that. Scene was photographed, forensics did their stuff, CID came round, I handed them evidence and gave them a very long and detailed statement; and then, bugger all. I had to really pester them to find out what was happening and found out they'd decided it wasn't a crime. On the basis that I have a different opinion and think that murder is actually quite serious I complained to them, as directed by my MP, eventually got an acknowledgement and "we'll get back to you". That was a couple of months ago and nothing since.

I'm not sure what it is they actually do nowadays, but it does seem very apparent that the UK doesn't "do" justice any more. I suppose I shouldn't expect any better since our gropey MPs have been clearly breaking all public standards, engaging in "conflicts of interest" which look a lot like fraud and repeatedly committing perjury, evidently with zero risk to themselves.

Any news on Fujitsu being held to account seeing as it was their software at the heart of all this?

The vendor of a faulty product is only liable up to a point.

When the user carries on using it after learning it's faulty, dangerous and a potential killer the blame moves up the chain.

The PO is in fact owned by the Government trade and industry department. That's right, it's owned by the Government.

When the PO sacked the external forensic auditor - put there in the first place by a parliamentary committee - then the minister would have been informed.

He would then have told his boss of the potential shitshow - and they all looked the other way.

It's one thing to have bugs in your software - there are always bugs. It's another thing entirely to testify in court that it doesn't when you know that it does, which it appears some Fujitsu engineers did. Some court cases involved Fujitsu engineers as witnesses long after they must/should have known about the issues. If no one from the post office executive team and no one from Fujitsu does time in prison over this then justice has failed miserably.

Was there ever no due diligence performed? Running a test system against the same test environment of their live system? Their old live system did have a test system, did it?

How the hell did such an egregious system manage to go live?

Justice should include prosecutions - not of the victims, but of the people involved in this scandal, who willingly allowed people's lives to be destroyed to protect their professional reputations.

Senior management of the Post Office have suffered no consequences for apparently deliberately and knowingly allowing this to occur, and then perverting the course of justice when it threatened to come to light.

Senior management at Fujitsu have similarly suffered no consequence (indeed, have continued to profit) from supplying a known defective system that should be held to the highest financial compliance possible given the nature of its use.

A long roster of MPs and Civil Servants have been directly responsible for addressing this case - many of whom are still in service - and yet allowed it to drag on for decades. Indeed, Ed Davey was directly involved and is currently managing to be both leader of the Lib Dems, and completely invisible in the debate.

Above all, this is not just a clear breach of trust and contract for all of the above, but it should be a national disgrace that the problems have been known for well over a decade, yet it has taken a TV show to actually move on the (piss poor) attempts at delivering justice. How anyone overseeing this case can justify sitting on their well paid backsides for years whilst people's lives have been in ruins is beyond me. In this case justice should not only be sure, it should be swift.

to protect their professional reputations.

I can't see how this protects anybody reputation, but for sure it has protected millions worth of contracts, salaries and dividends.

If it was about reputation, they would have investigated the system there and then.

No. They were protecting themselves having laid their reputations on this software. They would not admit that it may have been a massively expensive failure on their watch. They'd rather wreck the lives of hundreds of loyal and honest postmasters and postmistresses. They'd rather lie and deceive than accept responsibility.

Note: The victims were told that They were the only one this has happened to, so it couldn't possibly have been the software.

> They were the only one this has happened to, so it couldn't possibly have been the software.

What gets me is why only a “few” postmasters seem to have suffered from this system error. What were the ones “in the clear” doing differently?

The technical details I've seen point to synchronisation problems between HQ and branch computers.

All sorts of ways the link to HQ can differ between branches, but very few of them would be within the sub-postmaster's control.

Oh, and at least some of the ones "in the clear" were keeping parallel paper records. It seems attempts to prosecute them evaporated once they made that known....

The decision by the CPS to go ahead with the prosecutions needs also to be investigated. Basically the Post Office and Fujitsu went after the sub-postmasters, rather than admit there were problems with the software. Are they going to also call Fujitsu software developers to give evidence.

CPS weren't involved in the prosecutions. The Post Office used their own powers of prosecution to bring the cases to court.

Yes, this is a big part of the scandal. The Post Office were/are allowed to investigate and prosecute their own cases. Police force, "expert witnesses" (with the aid of totally independent (!) Fujitsu ) and prosecutor.

The Post Office is its own prosecuting authority so the CPS did not have a say in the matter. This power needs to be stripped from the PO as it has been shown now that they cannot be trusted with it.

Even with the little faith I have in the CPS I don't think they would have kept prosecuting these cases.

His promises are worth as much as his future in British Politics.

The cry out against the Post Office is loud and valid, what is terrible is the feeling that Fujitsu has only been named in passing when they are a central player. In my experience user don't understand the power of the sysadmin to access systems and over ride restrictions. That is why there needs to be audit trails so that "back door" access is at least logged. Management in the Post Office should have asked questions why the number of fraud detection increased so much once Horizon was deployed. The post office should have asked who had access though I suspect from experience if you tell management that you don't have access they tend to believe you. A person with sysadmin experience would ask what do I need to do to have access and how is it logged. Fujitsu should be front and centre here, and liable to compensate just as much as the Post Office is.

Failed to edit in time -- did Fujitsu inform the PO that only the sub-post master had access i.e. PO management and employees didn't but not say that Fujitsu super users did because that was not what they were being asked. I saw that Fujitsu engineers are being investigated for perjury did they also mislead / lie to the PO as well. This is not an excuse for the PO as they should have realised that there was a change in the patterns of fraud and levels were not "normal". Odd behaviour is a sign that something is going on. The PO IT staff should have the awareness of opsec realities even if the board didn't and asked the relevant questions.

Fujitsu should be front and centre here, and liable to compensate just as much as the Post Office is.

I'm not so sure. Not that Fujitsu aren't culpable, my understanding is that they backed the Post Office and possibly committed perjury to support it and cover themselves, but that the PO is guilty of so much here. They were the prosecuting authority and used essentially unaccountable power to persecute (sic) post masters. Early on they should have (as you said) been suspicious about the apparent increase in fraud, later on there was reason to believe the system couldn't be trusted AND THEY KEPT ON PROSECUTING. Why didn't they attempt to properly audit these cases and instead kept relying on horizon data? One angle I've never seen properly looked at is that their conduct also surely amounted to extortion; there is at least one well documented case of a post master paying in money from the rest of their business to cover the "debt" the horizon system falsely said they owed. With prosecution threatened if that money isn't paid what else would you call it?

And despite this being public knowledge and in the press for years, it takes a TV drama to actually get something done?

"Why didn't they attempt to properly audit these cases "

What I do not understand through all this is why transaction logs were not requested by defence in these prosecutions.

One example was a supposed 40K plus deficit in one day. Surely this would have shown up on a transaction logs for a sub post office.

Every system of any size I have worked on has transaction logs of some kind.

Maybe it was the transaction logs that were faulty and were causing the discrepancies?

I expect the logs for some strange reason would have "gone missing"! don't forget the uttery housery these see you next tuesdays are capable off, including the sigining in book at fushitsu's office going "missing" and the fact they tried to get the judge in the case of Bates and others v's PO replaced by saying he was bias!

Having worked with POCL/RM as a sub-contractor around the Horizon implementation era (on a vastly different system, to be clear), the project managers didn't have a modicum of technical knowledge to ask the right questions, so they were never going to understand what capabilities sysadmins had.

However, it's emerged in the last couple of days that a pre-implementation report stated that Horizon was "not fit for purpose", a report presented to the IT strategy board, yet the go-live was issued regardless.

One potential measure for holding people's feet to the fire is the surcharge, which was levied against 'Dame' Shirrley Porter for her part in the Westminster Council gerrymandering scandal. This could usefully be applied to Paula Vennells, who doesn't have the option of buggering off to Israel to escape justice.

I suggest you watch the TV program which will explain a lot of the details.

Fujitsu had remote access that they used to "fix" the data on Postmaster's terminals, and a team within the company that did this on a daily basis for hundreds of terminals. Both Fujitsu and the Post Office denied that any such access existed or that records were being altered - despite clear evidence that it was happening from the Postmasters themselves, and it proven that both the Post Office and Fujitsu shared knowledge about these incidents.

Fujitsu overrode any audit trails, and the both they and the post office subsequently chose to delete documents where they conflicted with the version of events being used to prosecute individuals.

Further, the Post Office chose to prosecute individuals even when they knew internally that there was no evidence of wrong doing. There is even some suggestion that particular Postmasters were targeted to discourage any more protests.

Remember, the Post Office (for historical reasons) can prosecute and jail someone themselves, without reference to the Police or the normal judicial process. They actively pursued hundreds of Postmasters "just because" - this was a scandal that BOTH they and Fujitsu manufactured, and BOTH they and Fujitsu chose to lie about when challenged.

why these utter shisters at fushitsu are still allowed to bid for government contracts God only knows(Tory funders I suspect). If you haven't watched the ITV program than do so, it is shameful what went on. And there must be some fushitsu staff on here that worked on horizon it would be interesting to know what REALLY went on, its bound to be worse than what was portrayed on the telly. How those degenerates in senior positions at the Post office and fushitsu haven't served time is another is a disgrace. Still there is a real groundswell of opinion mounting and I believe the police are investigating possible criminal charges, but I expect it'll be another Hillsborough where no one is actually punished.

And a question for the Rev Vennells, what would Jesus have done?!

That's a well trodden path. The road to success in UK government contracts seems to be fail spectacularly, walk away with billions of public cash, and then do it again. And again.

This applies corporately and individually or any combination..

This wasn't just one scandal, it was a whole stack:

1. The initial PO/RM prosecutions. I don't know if the problems were known from the start but it's clear that prosecutions continued when it was known.

2. That PO/RM didn't. of their own initiative, promptly seek to get the early convictions quashed as unsafe, once they became aware of Horizon's errors, including those where there were guilty pleas and drop all pending cases.

3. That when Fujitsu realised that there were problems and that PO/RM were conducting cases on faulty evidence they didn't alert defendants and make defence witnesses available.

4. That PO/RM didn't, on their own initiative, promptly seek to compensate those convicted, awaiting trial and who had paid to settle without prosecution.

5. That, when it became publicly known that Horizon was in error and that PO/RM had been carrying out prosecutions knowing that, the Ministry of Justice or any other official body didn't step in to get the convictions quahed as unsafe.

6, That, when it became publicly known that Horizon was in error and that PO/RM had been carrying out prosecutions knowing that, no official body stepped in to insist that PO/RM compensate those convicted, awaiting trial and who had paid to settle without prosecution.

7. That, when it became clear that PO/RM had been prosecuting cases knowing that their evidence was faulty, that prima facie cases of false prosecution and/or perjury were not investigated with dispatch and, where appropriate, prosecuted, possibly related to ...

8. That in place of 7 the government's attitude seems to have been that it preferred a public enquiry with not powers to prosecute

9. That, as those who have followed the saga of the public enquiry elsewhere will be aware, the enquiry has been appallingly dragged out by delays in making evidence available.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

All of this. Any time I talk to people about it their focus often seems to be on Horizon itself, some computer issue that lead to all this. But, while the particular events arose from issues with Horizon, the real issues and guilt are institutional ones. Look at that list: right from the start, "prosecutions continued when it was known." Every item is something that happened at a point at which somebody knew the system was in error and chose to ignore that (or, you might suspect, in some cases took their actions precisely to avoid it becoming more widely known).

Watching the four part series, and the following documentary, as a former SysAdmin I was struck by one particular thought. The Post Office insisted that there was no remote access to the horizon terminals in each post office and sub-Post Office, but no one asked how the System Administrators, located in Bracknell (I actually used to work in the building when it Was ICL) administered the system without remote access. I have used Post Offices all over Great Britain, in Scotland, Keswick in Cumbria, Penzance in Cornwall and even in Reading, Berkshire (I know, I live an exotic life). Why did no one ask how these systems as managed for updates if not remotely? Sending an engineer to each Post Office for each update every month or so would have been horrendously expensive, not to say time consuming, and clearly is nonsense. Therefore Fujitsu must have had remote access.

Another thing that worried me was the apparent complete ignorance by the judiciary and lawyers of IT Security Standards such as ISO 27001, Check and Crest technical security assessments (AKA Penetration Testing) and standards for the admissibility of computer evidence in court none of which seem to have been met by the Post Office prosecution teams. Personally had I been ware of these prosecutions when they were happening I do hope I would have had the courage to inform the relevant defendants and judges of these essential things.

Appalling ignorance by the judges, and even worse vindictiveness by the PO.