To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government.
The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable.
If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706
They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!
Not sure how the legal authorities work in the UK but people have to be held accountable, regardless of political party. One would think the government's legal authorities have to act on behalf of the citizens not just in holding persons criminally responsible but also compensating victims.
https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/tory-donor-fujitsu-p...
Most people from the USA are probably familiar with the term “knighthood” or “being knighted” from the UK which is referring to the same award process but higher ranking. The two titles above CBE apparently are what knighthood refers to, known as KBE/DBE (Knight/Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire) and GBE (Knight/Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, the highest honor). So CBE is essentially the third highest honor that can be granted in this fashion.
Related to the story, it seems like the CEO in question was forced to give up the CBE title two days ago in relation to this scandal
The Order of St Michael & St George is also famous because it's how the "Yes, Minister" joke works: CMG stands for "Call Me God". And KCMG for "Kindly Call Me God" / What does GCMG stand for? / "God Calls Me God".
She was not yet "forced" to give it up, although that is likely the end result. These honours are notionally bestowed by the Monarch (so these days, Charlie) under advice, so a committee will decide that yup, Paula clearly shouldn't have this honour, take it away, and Charlie will sign the appropriate paperwork. What she's done so far is write asking that it be taken away, which is almost nothing.
I take this opportunity to reinforce the association of her name with the scandal in future web searches.
She didn't say she would give back the associated money she got.
"Ordener hænger man paa Idioter,
Stjærner og Baand man kun Adelen gier,
men om de Mallinger, Suhmer og Rother,
man ej et Ord i Aviserne ser.
Dog, har man Hjærne,
kan man jo gjærne
undvære Orden og Stjærne."
It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.
I, for one, don't believe her.
I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.
Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem.
So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.
It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974
This a pattern we've seen before
1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate"
2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet"
3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along".
People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality.
For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
A UK tradition!
> In 2009, the government came under fire when ACMD [Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs] chair David Nutt of Imperial College London was sacked for questioning government drug policy in public
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/little-has-changed-in-uk...
From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!
No one should share the role of prosecutor, jury and judge.
There were a (relatively) small number of prosecutions from the CPS as well, which suffered from the same problem: the Post Office investigators gave the same bad evidence, which they used to convince a jury to convict.
I don't see how separation of powers helps here. I'm sure if I looked, I'd find cases in the USA where the police and/or prosecutors told a pack of lies based on dodgy evidence to secure convictions of serious crimes, too.
It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors' - because fully independent prosecutors should be rejecting cases with dodgy evidence. The police can get a bit grumpy with CPS for being quite strict at times - but it holds them to work their next case properly.
The PO clearly managed to convince the CPS in a number of cases, but had they had to do that for all there would have been a lot less cases prosecuted in total, and I think there would have been questions about their system a lot sooner.
It might not have avoided the problem, but it would have been much needed additional oversight into what they were doing.
So the separation of powers isn’t a magic solution to the problem then.
The lie came from the fact they weren’t looking into their own evidence and realising something was up when they were prosecuting hundreds of sub-postmasters.
It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.
(More on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076)
Any private citizen or business in the UK has a right to prosecute crimes. It just costs a lot of money, so you can imagine how it's used (spoiler: large companies/wealthy individuals against poor people).
As I said in a related comment: if I looked hard enough, I imagine I'd also be able to find similar miscarriages of justice in the USA, too.
Whereas a generic prosecutor has a bunch of cases of reports from victims that are not related to them, and thus if a case is not sufficiently strong, they'd normally just pick another case where the evidence is strong. They also have the responsibility to independently review the evidence from victims and police. These procedural checks didn't apply in the post office cases.
The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
I know what they wrote.
> The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
I pointed out the CPS itself also prosecuted cases based on the bad evidence provided to them, so the procedural checks also did nothing.
Do note that the fact that CPS prosecuted cases does not mean the CPS didn't throw out dubious cases. We only know the ones they did prosecute, but we don't know how many (if any) they did not prosecute. As I said, this is speculation.
I also speculate that if you send hundreds of fraud cases to the CPS they might be suspicious why the rate of criminal fraud among the post office workers is so high.
I agree there's no evidence that the "private" prosecutions made things worse, but it surely didn't help, and deprived the system of an opportunity (whether it would have been taken or not) to prevent the miscarriages in the first place.
Clearly you do not, as I made no complaint; but merely pointed out how it wasn't quite the regular court process that tomalpha said it to be, and pointed out another thing that has been highlighted by the case. As it has been. A lot more people know this about Post Office Ltd than used to, and it is oft-discussed when the subject comes up.
More on which, again, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076. And more on the expected consequences of this coming to widespread public attention, and another private organization that is a prolific private prosecutor, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969548.
Historically, all prosecutions were private, and later, the police who investigated them carried them out.
Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed
by the state-owned Post Office service were accused of
fraud, theft or malicious accounting.
Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230
were jailed.
Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they
were accused of fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies,
marriage failures, substance abuse and even suicides.
There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all
of those people were innocent
Doesnt the UK have independent non-political bodies that watch the watchers? What about protections for whistleblowers who call these things out?
Frankly that sounds Banana-Republic-ish and not something you would find in a first-rate advanced economy.
[1] Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/inside-the-incr...
The royal mail had all sorts of powers, historically, as it was a royally sanctioned monopoly, with a charter. The process of privatization left some odd conventions around, such as that it was normal for Post Office Ltd to prosecute things privately, when this has been exceptional for most other entities.
The Post Office used to prosecute for television licence offences, for example, and that only went away relatively recently compared to some of its historic powers. Historically, it had a monopoly over telephones and telegraphy, and some of the powers that the Post Office had in the 19th century were things like compulsory purchase of anyone running private telephone or telegraph systems or prosecuting people for traffic offences on the highway just because there was a mail coach involved.
The Post Office Act 1953 granted the Postmaster General some very sweeping powers, and set the bar quite low for proving fraud against the Post Office: basically, the Postmaster General's say-so for some elements. The Postmaster General also had to give consent to all prosecutions of offences against the Post Office, effectively putting prosecutorial discretion in the hands of the Post Office. And the Postmaster General also had the power to collect the fines upon conviction.
And that's part of how we ended up with the situation at the start of the 21st century.
The idea that you need a license to own a television and receive broadcasts in the UK and that the government actively prosecutes people who watch TV without a license always boggled my mind. Surely there is a more economically efficient and less absurd way to fund the BBC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.
The Crown Prosecution Service can take over any prosecution at the discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, but they didn't seem to know (and/or care) what the Post Office were doing.
Isn't this very similar to how the United States Postal Inspection Service works? (although I think they don't prosecute themselves, but refer matters to the prosecution.)
I heard they are quite formidable and not to be trifled with.
The UK justice system is not fit for purpose - unless the purpose is to let the upper classes get away with (almost literal) murder.
In Law and Order: Postal Inspectors Jerry Orbach is a Postal Inspector, Sam Waterston is the Federal Attorney, and the closest boss who intersects in their respective lines of authority is literally the President of the United States.
Consider that in Scotland, private prosecutions are much rarer and are only permitted in certain circumstances. The post office could not and did not do private prosecutions in Scotland. So, as a result, do we observe lower rates of prosecutions in Scotland than in the wider UK? Nope!
In fact, in Scotland there were 100 convictions, vs 700 in the UK as a whole. The conviction rate per capita, and hence injustice rate, was actually higher in the part of the UK doing public prosecutions, than in the part of the UK doing private prosecutions. Not exactly a vote of confidence.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi...
Also some Private Eye podcast episodes:
Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L.
They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.
It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people.
Me? I'm just tired of watching it all.
Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.
From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...:
> One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it.
Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol)
I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit).
And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves...
I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST".
Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus.
Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...
>not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records
It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!