A damning report into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal has concluded Post Office bosses knew the Horizon IT system had widespread faults, but had “maintained the fiction” it was accurate for years.
The report, issued as part of the long-running inquiry into the faulty Horizon IT system used in Post Office branches, also described the impact on subpostmasters as “disastrous”.
Approximately 1,000 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 after the faulty Legacy Horizon software made it look as though money was missing from their accounts.
Tuesday’s 162-page report, written by inquiry chair Sir Wyn Williams, said: “Although many of the individuals who gave evidence before me were very reluctant to accept it I am satisfied from the evidence that I have heard that a number of senior, or not so senior employees, of the Post Office knew or at the very least should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error.
“Yet, for all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate”.
The report also found the Legacy Horizon system’s 2010 replacement – known as Horizon Online – was also “afflicted by bugs” and that employees of Fujitsu and the Post Office “knew that this was so”.
It emphasised the human cost of the scandal and criticised the failure to provide adequate redress, following years of ambiguous and inconsistent financial compensation offers from the Post Office.
The report described the attitude of the organisation and its advisors in making offers to victims as “unnecessarily adversarial.”
Sir Wyn added that this has had “the effect of depressing the level of which settlements have been achieved”.
The inquiry estimates that as many as 10,000 people may have been affected by the Horizon scandal, including both convicted subpostmasters and those who experienced financial or reputational damage as a result of the system’s failures.
The report continued by examining the insufficiencies of the government’s four compensation schemes: the Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS), the Group Litigation Order (GLO) Scheme, the Overturned Convictions (OC) scheme, and the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme (HCRS).
“In my view, the Post Office, the Department and Ministers simply failed to grasp how difficult it would be to provide financial redress in a timely fashion to all those who were or would very likely become eligible,” he wrote.
He singled out the government’s refusal to provide funded legal advice under the HSS scheme – despite it being available under all other compensation routes.
“The department continues to resist this as if its life depended on it…in my view, the department’s stance on this issue is indefensible,” he wrote.
The number of claimants in the HSS scheme is said to be more than the aggregate number of claimants in all of the other three schemes.
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