A government investigation into pre-Horizon systems used in Post Office branches will come too late for inclusion in a former subpostmaster’s appeal against a conviction based on one of the systems in the spotlight.
The Department for Business and Trade recently announced its planned investigation into systems used by subpostmasters before the controversial Horizon software at the centre of the Post Office scandal.
The government is yet to appoint a company to carry out the investigation and will not report until spring next year. But the appeal against the conviction of former subpostmaster Gareth Snow, in January, which Post Office is contesting, will cover the reliability of the Automated Payments Service (APS) and Automated Payment Terminal (APT) system. It has been confirmed that APT/APS are “among the systems the department intends the investigation to cover, alongside ECCO+, ALPS and ESNS”.
Cart before the horse
The subpostmaster’s legal team is seeking more information. Solicitor Neil Hudgell at Hudgell Solicitors, which represents Snow, said: “We welcome the review, but need to know more before we determine to what extent it impacts the progression of Mr Snow’s appeal.”
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which referred the appeal, has already said that the system which Snow used in his branch in Denbighshire “could cause accounting errors”.
Computer Weekly put to the government that the APT/APS appeal comes before the investigation and a spokesperson replied: “We are committed to getting to the truth about the impact of systems used before Horizon and continue to make progress towards appointing an independent investigator. We expect to confirm further details shortly.”
APT/APS is lesser known that Horizon and Capture, but was used by thousands of branches. In a 1994 news article in the Barry and District News, Richard Dykes, then managing director at Post Office Counters, was quoted as saying the APT/APS system was already installed in 3,000 Post Office branches, with the aim of reaching 6,000 over the following 12 months. It included an electronic terminal connected to telephone lines and was used to carry out transactions such as rent, rates and utility payments.
If Snow’s appeal is heard prior to the investigation report, it will not be based on a full picture, according to investigative scientist Ian Ross, a listed expert for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
“Deciding an appeal weeks before a major state report on the exact same software is a psychological trap for the court,” he said. “Without the complete findings on APS/APT, judges are left anchoring their decisions to incomplete data – risking a verdict shaped by what is missing rather than what is true.”
Pre-Horizon problems
There are currently four former subpostmasters with appeals, due to be heard in the Court of Appeal, which blame systems that came before Fujitsu’s Horizon system for the unexplained losses they were blamed for.
The other three were Capture users, a pre-Horizon system that has already been investigated and found there was a “reasonable likelihood” it caused accounting losses. The Post Office is also contesting these.
Read Computer Weekly’s investigation of bug from 2015: Post Office IT support email reveals known Horizon flaw.
Snow’s appeal is due to be heard alongside the posthumous appeal former Capture user Patricia Owen, who died in 2003; and Steve Marston, a who ran a Post Office branch in Bury, Lancashire, which also used Capture.
The focus on systems used before Horizon has become necessary due to a huge body of evidence highlighting the Post Office’s treatment of unexplained shortfalls as the fuel behind the scandal. The arm’s length government body made subpostmasters take responsibility for unexplained shortfalls and kept quiet about its knowledge of bugs in the system that could cause discrepancies.
During a select committee hearing in January, the CCRC told MPs that there are 35 applications of interest, which it refers to as “pre-Horizon”. It said that any of these systems could be linked to miscarriages of justice, and it is not a giant leap to suggest that pre-Horizon software also caused unexplained shortfalls that subpostmasters were forced to cover.
There are 12 pre-Horizon cases currently being reviewed by the CCRC. A total of 40 pre-Horizon applications have been received in total, with 21 not referred to appeal, two withdrawn and four have already been referred. There was also a case that turned out to be related to Horizon and so was covered by legislation to overturn convictions.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
