The Great Post Office Scandal: The Story of the Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound IT Disaster Which Put Innocent [Audiobook]

On April 23, 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Sub-Postmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. For some, it was the end of a 20-year battle for justice—and tragically, three of them did not live long enough to see their reputations restored. It is a scandal that has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK legal history. The 39 were just a few of the 736 people who, between 2000 and 2013, had been prosecuted by the Post Office for theft, false accounting, and fraud.

The prosecutions were based largely on evidence drawn from Horizon, the Post Office’s deeply flawed software system use that threw up duplicate entries, lost transactions, and made erroneous calculations. If these errors resulted in apparent losses, Sub-Postmasters were forced to settle the discrepancies from their own pockets, sometimes for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Those who could not pay were sacked and taken to court. Proud pillars of their communities were stripped of their jobs and livelihoods. Many were forced into bankruptcy and or borrowed from friends and family to give the Post Office thousands they did not owe. The really unlucky ones were sent to prison.