It's not quite that, anybody in the UK can bring a private prosecution in the UK if the want, so the Post Office was not a special case here. It's really uncommon today, due to the cost, etc. and what often happens is that the "Crown Prosecution Service' which is the government organisation repsonsible for prosecuting crimes normally can 'take on' a prosecution and then choose discontinue it, which effectively stops it. Note that this is only the case in England/Wales, in Scotland the system is quite different. With that said, there are several organisations that do it still - the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) still regularly brings private prosectuions.

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

Thats a lot of accusations and prosecutions don't you think, for it to go unnoticed or uninvestigated for such a long duration, dont you think?

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...

It's been called out for a long time. I remember reading about this scandal at least 5 years ago, and it was old news then. It's only blown up now because of a TV show based on it, and the government finally getting off their ass to have a public inquiry about it. That's what's so frustrating about it: it should have been bloody obvious way sooner that there was an issue, it should have stopped when someone actually voiced the issue, and then it should have been put right as soon as it was obvious it was false. Instead it has taken years and years and years of fighting before anything resembling putting it right has occured.

There has already been a public inquiry, note. It started in 2020. It was set up by Boris Johnson. Yes, I know.

Lots of people have told you that anyone can bring a private prosecution. But they aren't telling the whole story. Post Office Ltd, by being a successor to the government monopoly of four centuries, is in a rather strange legal position.

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.

>prosecute for television licence offences

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...

David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.

It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.

There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy.

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.

Stephen Lawrence parents took the option of a private prosecution. Everyone must have access to justice.

Anyone can bring a private prosecution (in England and Wales, at least. Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems).

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.

It's likely they won't step in if the organisation in question has the resources to handle prosecutions at the required scale. The CPS did prosecute some cases but it's hard to blame them since they were being lied to by the Post Office investigators.

> which sounds mental to me

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.

It’s the same in the US. The US Postal Inspector is federal law enforcement within the post office.

I imagine that in the US, the actual prosecution is handled by US Attorneys though (the DOJ), and not the Post Office

Not the same at all. The Postal Inspectors are law enforcement, not attorneys. They don't do prosecutions at all, the court stuff is handled by the regular Federal Attorney's who work for the Attorney General. The Postal Inspectors are basically a specialized FBI, but like the FBI, once the cuffs are on the suspect it's out of their hands. Though they may be called to testify, prosecution decisions are made by a different group responsible to different people- literally the first point of overlap in the chain of command between a Federal Attorney and a Postal Inspector is the President of the United States (the FBI, as also part of the Department of Justice, overlaps at the Attorney General).

Wait until you hear that the overwhelming majority of civil and criminal cases are ajudged by amateurs (magistrates) without any formal law qualification, who just happen to be local "grandees" or pensioners...

The UK justice system is not fit for purpose - unless the purpose is to let the upper classes get away with (almost literal) murder.

How is this different from the US Postal Inspection Service?

PIS are investigators, police. They are not prosecutors, they bring the information they collect to a US Attorney- who works for the Attorney General in the Department of Justice, not the Post Office- who actually conducts the court cases.

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.

Although everybody keeps going on about private prosections somehow being culpable for the scandal, it doesn't seem likely.

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.