'National spotlight firmly on the Post Office'

FOR 20 years sub-postmasters who were wrongly accused of financial impropriety in their places of work battled against all the odds to clear their names.

Every time they believed they were finally making progress, something else happened to block their paths. It amounted to setback after setback.

The toll of their campaign against the Post Office, was too much for some of them and they lost their lives. Among them was 59-year-old father-of-two Martin Griffiths who ran the Post Office in Hope Farm, Great Sutton. He ended up taking his own life. The misery inflicted on Martin – in his case for four years – and on so many other sub-postmasters up and down the land was just too much for him to bear.

The struggles of the postmasters to highlight the injustices inflicted upon them have been a regular feature of Parliamentary debate with a small number of MPs doggedly fighting for justice. The issue has very much come into the mainstream now courtesy of a four-part ITV drama ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’, the contents of which have truly sickened the nation. The programme centres on the work of Alan Bates who had his contract as a sub-postmaster terminated by the Post Office in 2003 after he refused to accept liability for £1,200 of losses in his branch in Llandudno. He contended the money never existed and was due to a software glitch courtesy of the Post Office’s defective Horizon IT system. He and his partner kept the shop, but the termination of the Post Office contract meant they lost an investment of about £60,000.

Alan Bates never flinched in his determination to fight for justice for hundreds of wrongly accused sub-postmasters. Some of them ended up in jail, some felt pressured to plead guilty to offences they did not believe they had committed, some were made bankrupt.

As the true scale of the scandal became apparent (which had been deliberately concealed by Post Office management) arrangements to adequately compensate the postmasters for the hardship afflicted on them over decades have been agreed by Parliament although compensation has yet to reach all of the victims and as a result of the publicity, many more are now coming forward. We are pushing for this to be done as quickly as possible as well as asking the Government to find the right mechanism to ensure that all those who have been wrongly convicted are now exonerated.

Having been disgusted by all of the many facets revealed in ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’, more than a million people have signed a petition calling on Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive and ex-Anglican priest, to be stripped of the CBE she was awarded for ‘Services to the Post Office’. She has so far refused to do so. If the only consequence for her is that she loses her honour then she will count herself lucky. There is an ongoing inquiry where it is hoped the truth will be uncovered and more individuals can be held to account but even as late as last year it was apparent that the Post Office was paying its executives extra bonuses on the basis it had co-operated with the inquiry but the Inquiry Chair had to take the extraordinary step of making a statement challenging that assertion- that, and many other testimonies give at the time led me to comment in Parliament at the time that these “are not the behaviours of an organisation that recognises that it needs to change”. It is to be hoped that with the national spotlight firmly on the Post Office now that they will change, that the individuals responsible will for this will be held properly to account and that the postmasters and their families will now finally receive swift and full justice.