Who’s really to blame for the Post Office scandal?

The alleged frauds for which the Post Office prosecuted no fewer than 736 of its sub-postmasters has turned out in almost all cases to be the result of faults in a computer system called Horizon which Post Office managers and the system’s supplier, Fujitsu of Japan, were reluctant to acknowledge. That’s the short summary of a miscarriage of justice which also looks like a case of mismanagement to the point of delusion: how could anyone believe a copy-cat crime wave on this scale was sweeping through a cohort of small businesspeople generally seen as the most upstanding of local citizens? And if that wasn’t the belief, the only other explanation is worse: cynical concealment of a 15-year IT cock-up for which no one was willing to carry the can.

Paula Vennells, the Post Office’s chief executive from 2012 to 2019, when victims of this scandal were fighting to be heard, has stepped down from all her public roles and directorships, even from her Church of England curacy, to avoid becoming a ‘distraction’ — a gesture of atonement which should not be taken as anything like a complete answer to the question of who’s to blame. A whole generation of Post Office executives, board members and the ministers to whom they were accountable have their fingerprints on the file.

Most importantly, Fujitsu has so far failed to give a proper account of itself. Vennells says she was consistently assured ‘from the highest levels of the company’ that Horizon, though ‘not perfect’ was ‘fundamentally sound’; only this month, her successors awarded Fujitsu a £42 million extension to the Horizon contract. Yet Mr Justice Fraser — in a 2019 High Court ruling in the sub-postmasters’ favour which preceded last week’s quashing of 39 convictions by the Court of Appeal — referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions on the basis of his ‘very grave concerns regarding veracity of evidence given by Fujitsu employees… about the known existence of bugs, errors and defects’ in Horizon.