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Review: The post-mortem into Britain’s Post Office scandal still has a long way to go
Reading time: 3 minutes
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The Post Office Horizon IT scandal has generated enormous news coverage across newspapers, television, and social media particularly since the ITV series appeared on television screens in January 2024. The court case itself, which gave rise to the TV series, had begun to generate wider interest, especially following the comprehensive victories enjoyed by the claimant sub-postmasters in court judgments issued in 2019. Long before this, however, a small number of journalists and members of Parliament had been working steadily to uncover the miscarriages of justice suffered by hundreds of sub-postmasters prosecuted on the strength of evidence from the Horizon IT system.
One such journalist was Richard Brooks, who has worked on the story for Private Eye since 2011. His book now revisits the history of the scandal with the benefit of the huge volume of evidence generated by the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. For those not already steeped in the story from the court judgments of Mr Justice Fraser or Nick Wallis’s earlier book “The Great Post Office Scandal”, Brooks provides a very readable and relatively succinct account.
He begins with the background to the problems arising during the procurement and development of the Horizon system exacerbated by government pressure to support investment in innovative technology for public sector bodies. The resultant flawed system quickly led to errors, which were laid at the door of the sub-postmasters as a consequence of poor technical support, unwillingness on the part of the Post Office to interrogate the possibility of system error and a contractual relationship between the Post Office and sub-postmasters which was totally one-sided.
The book goes on to describe the appalling investigative methods employed in the prosecutions and the persistent misleading information provided both to the courts and to parliamentarians about the so-called robustness of the IT. The lawyers who acted for and advised the Post Office through the prosecutions and Bates v Post Office do not escape notice.
The text is well supported throughout by references to the evidence from the inquiry and other sources. It has, though, to be regarded as a “story so far”. Matters are far from concluded with the second part of the Inquiry report expected in mid-2026, the unfinished tale of the schemes set up to compensate the victims, and potential prosecutions of Post Office and Fujitsu staff and others for perverting the course of justice.
Evidence continues to emerge demonstrating just how much was known by both the Post Office and Fujitsu of the extent of errors in the Horizon system and the steps taken to keep these under wraps while simultaneously criminal prosecution of and civil recovery from sub-postmasters was being pursued. If the book is intended to be a post mortem, the entrails are still being examined and further editions can be expected.
Post Mortem by Richard Brooks. Published by Private Eye, 240pp, £10.99.
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