British Post Office scandal

British Post Office scandal (miscarriage of justice)
Rishi Sunak: "One of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history"

The British Post Office scandal aka Fujitsu Horizon scandal is a miscarriage of justice involving the wrongful civil and criminal prosecutions of an unknown or unpublished number of sub-postmasters (SPMs) for theft, false accounting and/or fraud. The cases constitute the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history, spanning a period of over twenty years.

Horizon

A 2020 article in Private Eye described the origins of Horizon:

Conceived in 1996 as one of the first private finance initiative (PFI) contracts, between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency on the one hand and computer company International Computers Limited (ICL) on the other, the Horizon IT system had an unpromising start. It had been set up to create a swipe card system for payment of pensions and benefits from Post Office branch counters.

When, in May 1999, the plug was finally pulled on what the Commons public accounts committee called 'one of the biggest IT failures in the public sector', taxpayers had lost around £700m.

Something had to be salvaged, however. So, against the better judgement of its IT specialists, the Post Office decided to use the system to transform its paper-based branch accounting into an electronic system covering the full range of Post Office services.

The new Horizon project became the largest non-military IT contract in Europe.

By 1999, ICL was part of Fujitsu. In 1999, the problems began with Horizon's introduction, which wrongly detected the existence of financial discrepancies at multiple post office branches. Second Sight's (forensic accountants) report of 2014 described the Horizon Computer System as not fit for purpose, whilst the Post Office stated that "there is absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system". The Post Office terminated the Initial Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme in 2015 and published a report clearing themselves of any wrongdoing.

As of 2025, the Post Office continue to use the Horizon system, though they state that there have been "several versions" of the system and that they have "continued to make improvements" to it. Despite this, some sub-postmasters still claim the system to be unreliable. The Post Office state that they "plan to move to a new system that is being developed", but that "moving to a new system is a very large exercise" with the 11,500 post office branches they handle.

Group action

The Post Office became a free-standing company with a single shareholder, the British Government. Initially, the government refused to pay any compensation; both the Post Office and government repeatedly stated that the money awarded when the SPMs sued the Post Office was a full and final settlement. After appeals by MPs in 2021, the government promised financial compensation to the victims of the scandal, as the Post Office itself did not have sufficient resources.

A group action (which is the English equivalent of a class action) was brought by 555 SPMs who successfully sued the Post Office in London's High Court. The case resulted in two important judgments in favour of the SPMs, and was widely reported (including in a series of podcasts on the BBC).

It was a condition of the original settlement agreement in this group action that the Post Office would set up a separate historic shortfall scheme, to compensate SPMs who did not take part in the group action. The Post Office did so and that scheme went on to attract more than 2,400 claims. The scheme excluded the 555 SPMs who had successfully sued the Post Office. As of February 2022, no commitment to compensate those 555 SPMs existed. On 22 March 2022, a government scheme was launched to compensate the 555 SPMs at the same level of compensation as other SPMs. However, many of them are still awaiting full compensation for what happened to them.

Public inquiry

In 2020, the government had initiated an independent inquiry, led by retired judge Wyn Williams. After two initial hearings, it was converted to a public inquiry in June 2021. In November 2021, it held a preliminary 'List of Issues Hearing' and, in February 2022, commenced a series of 'Human Impact Hearings' and is also investigating whether the Post Office and software supplier Fujitsu knew about the faults in the IT system, which led to the now-quashed criminal convictions and civil proceedings against staff. The inquiry was aimed to be completed by Autumn 2022, but was not concluded until December 2024.

The Metropolitan Police then opened an investigation into personnel from the Post Office and Fujitsu.

Courts began to quash the subpostmasters' convictions in December 2020; by February 2024, 100 had been overturned. Those wrongfully convicted became eligible for compensation, as did more than 2,750 SPMs who had been affected but not convicted. The final cost of compensation is expected to exceed £1 billion. In January 2024, ITV broadcast a television drama, "Mr Bates vs The Post Office", which made the scandal a major news story and political issue. In May 2024, the UK Parliament passed a law overturning the convictions of SPMs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while Scotland passed a similar law.

Enter Andy Burnham

In December 2023, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham flew to Tokyo. There, at Fujitsu’s Shiodome City global headquarters, he and Manchester City Council leader Bev Craig signed an “exploratory partnership agreement” with the Japanese technology giant, explicitly linked to the development of the Greater Manchester Investment Zone.

Burnham called it “a massive boost.” He posed for photographs next to the bullet train. He praised what he called Greater Manchester’s “most successful trade mission yet.”

The timing was extraordinary. The ITV drama "Mr Bates vs The Post Office" had just aired, exposing to a mass audience the scale of the Fujitsu Horizon scandal, the wrongful prosecution of over 900 sub-postmasters whose lives were destroyed by faulty Fujitsu software. Burnham had been vocal in his condemnation of that injustice, comparing the sub-postmasters’ treatment to the victims of Hillsborough and Grenfell.

He signed the deal anyway. When challenged, he said the partnership was signed “before some of the recent revelations had come through.” The statutory inquiry findings, he suggested, would inform any further decisions. No contract was signed. No public money was spent. The exploratory partnership drifted quietly into the background.

But the Fujitsu episode illuminates a consistent pattern in how Burnham approached the Investment Zone: corporate partners were welcomed, their reputations managed rather than scrutinised, their value to the zone’s narrative carefully curated. The £160 million pot was not just a subsidy programme. It was a signal, and Burnham was its most effective transmitter.

The Silence

On BBC Radio Manchester in January 2024, Burnham made a specific, public, on-the-record commitment: the fate of the Fujitsu partnership would be decided by the outcome of the Post Office public inquiry. That was not a vague aspiration. It was a conditional promise with a defined trigger.

The statutory inquiry concluded in December 2024. Its first report volume, published in July 2025, found that thirteen branch workers most probably committed suicide as a direct result of their treatment at the hands of the Post Office, a prosecution machine that ran on Fujitsu’s software, with Fujitsu’s knowledge, for years. The inquiry chair ordered Fujitsu and the government to publish a restorative justice plan by October 2025.

Burnham remained Mayor until 22 June 2026, eighteen months after the inquiry concluded. In that entire period, neither he nor the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) made any public statement about the Fujitsu partnership’s fate. No announcement of cancellation. No confirmation it had proceeded. No explanation of what the inquiry’s findings meant for Greater Manchester’s relationship with the company. The partnership signed with such fanfare in Tokyo simply vanished from the public record.

This is not administrative oversight. Press offices do not accidentally forget to close the loop on something that generated national headlines and a direct mayoral commitment on live radio. The silence is a decision.

FOI requests

Freedom of Information requests submitted to GMCA have not clarified matters, they have deepened the questions. One request concerning a reported £15m Fujitsu contract for a digital inclusion pilot within the Investment Zone received a response that conflated it with the exploratory partnership, suggesting the two may be distinct arrangements. A second request, seeking correspondence between the Mayor’s office and central government departments on the Investment Zone’s designation, was killed by a clarification trap: GMCA asked the requester to define “central government departments,” then closed the request when no response arrived within the deadline. It is a technique. It works.

What is GMCA protecting? At minimum, the paper trail between Burnham’s office and Whitehall on how the Investment Zone was negotiated and designated. At maximum, evidence that the Fujitsu relationship continued, under a different contractual form, or simply unreported, after Burnham’s public promise to review it.

The question is simple. It has been eighteen months since the inquiry concluded. Andy Burnham said its findings would decide the partnership’s fate. What was the decision?

He is now running to be Prime Minister. The public is entitled to an answer.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 6 September 2023.
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