Radio review The Great Post Office scandal and the irreversible damage

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https://www.heraldscotland.com/business ... le-damage/

“THIS is the story of a national scandal.” So began The Great Post Office Trial: Nowhere Near Over on Radio 4 on Tuesday, Nick Wallis’s latest report on the scandal that has blighted thousands of lives and still is even now, long after the Post Office has accepted that it was in the wrong.

Back at the turn of the century the Post Office installed a new computer network into its 19,000 branches. The Horizon IT scheme was deeply flawed but rather than question the software, the Post Office went after its own sub-postmasters. Between 2000 and 2013 hundreds of innocent employees were prosecuted.

Wendy Buffrey was one of them. She was convicted of false accounting in October 2010. Talking to Wallis, Buffrey admitted she was so crushed by the situation that she even considered taking her own life. “And that would have been it, the pain would have been finished and done.”

But as she was preparing to do just that she got a call from another sub-postmaster who had also been convicted of false accounting. Buffrey suddenly realised that she was not alone.

“If that phone call hadn’t come,” she admitted, “I would have been another one of the statistics.”


And the stats are grim. Tragically, four of those convicted have taken their own lives. A further 60 have died before receiving compensation.

Some 86 of the convictions have now been successfully challenged. Not that that is necessarily the end of it. Two years on from her own conviction being overturned Wendy Buffrey is still waiting for compensation.

What emerged in this programme was a damning portrait of the Post Office, an organisation that is quicker to pay its bosses than those it treated so abysmally.

“The Post Office is an institution in which mendacity and lack of identifiable principle run through it like a stick of rock,” Paul Marshall, a barrister who has been representing some of the affected subpostmasters suggested.

Wallis has been impressively dogged in pursuit of this story over the years. This is what good journalism can do - stand up for the powerless.

But there are limits to what it can achieve. “Why has no one been held to account?” Wallis asked at one point.

Is it because we live in a country that protects those at the top? The families who lost loved ones at Hillsborough and the Grenfell fire might agree. And that should be a national scandal too.