Post Office report to lay out devastating impact of Horizon scandal

The first tranche of the long-awaited final report from an inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal is set to be published.

More than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 in what has been dubbed as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Many were wrongly convicted of crimes such as theft and false accounting after faulty Horizon software made it look as though money was missing from their accounts.

Subpostmasters’ lives were destroyed – with some bankrupted by legal action and sent to prison.

On Tuesday, the first volume of the Horizon IT inquiry’s final report will be published – covering the devastating impact on the lives of the scandal’s victims and the compensation process.

‘If no one is held accountable, what’s it for?’

Ravinder Naga took the blame for the alleged theft of £35,000 from the Post Office to protect his mother when the money went missing.

He was ordered to complete 300 hours of community service and pay compensation in 2010 after offering a false confession to stealing money from the Post Office where his mother worked in Greenock, Inverclyde.

His conviction was overturned in August 2024.

“If someone comes and falsely charges you, rips your whole world apart, sends you to prison, convinces everybody you’re a thief, and then it gets proved that they’ve lied and they’ve destroyed your life for profit , what’s the justice system going to do for you?” he told STV News.

“What’s the government going to do for you?

“That’s what this is about. If there’s no one held accountable, the answer is zero, they’re going to do nothing for you.”

The issue of financial redress has frequently been flagged as an issue by subpostmasters – with many still awaiting full compensation.

The various compensation schemes have been criticised by victims as unfair and difficult to navigate – processes which lead campaigner Sir Alan Bates has previously described as “quasi-kangaroo courts”.

Retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, the chairman of the probe, will make a public statement following the report’s publication.

In an interim report published in July 2023, Sir Wyn described legislative changes made to resolve issues with the redress schemes as “a patchwork quilt of compensation schemes… with some holes in it”.

The inquiry was established in 2020, with a number of witnesses giving evidence on the use of Fujitsu’s Horizon system, Post Office governance and the legal action taken against subpostmasters.

In a previous statement addressing the compensation schemes, the Department for Business and Trade said: “This Government has quadrupled the total amount paid to affected postmasters to provide them with full and fair redress, with more than £1 billion having now been paid to over 7,300 claimants.”