Law firms have taken hundreds of millions in taxpayer cash to carry out work for the Post Office in relation to the scandal it caused, while the national police investigation into it is being left short of funds.
Legal firm Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) has earned more than £200m of taxpayer funds for work related to representing the Post Office in relation to the Post Office scandal, while the national police investigation into it feeds on scraps.
Operation Olympos, as the investigation is named, has so far received £6m from the Home Office to cover the period between 2023 and 2027, despite requiring £19m from the government on top of existing funding from police forces.
The cost of Operation Olympos is expected to be around £10m per year until its completion in 2030, taking it over £50m, according to a freedom of information (FOI) request response last year.
But the government has signed more than £330m in payments to law firms working for the Post Office in relation to the scandal, with Herbert Smith Freehills the biggest winner with its commissions topping £200m in value.
The overall figure is in relation to the Post Office’s external legal costs for engagement on the 2018/19 group litigation launched by subpostmasters, administering the compensation schemes that followed it, legal advice relating to compliance with the group litigation’s Horizon Issues Judgment, representation at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and legal costs associated with defending any claims against Post Office.
In September last year, Computer Weekly revealed that taxpayers paid HSF double the amount in fees to represent the Post Office in the Horizon scandal statutory public inquiry than they paid for the actual inquiry.
The latest figures were revealed in an FOI request by campaigner Stuart Goodwillie.
In contrast, the national police investigation into the potential criminality behind the scandal received just £3.2m for 2023 to 2025, with a further £2.8m allocated for 2026 to 2027.
Accountability gap
Lee Castleton, former subpostmaster and campaigner for justice, said the £19m being demanded by the police is a “drop in the ocean” compared to the sums raked in by legal firms.
He called on prime minister Andy Burnham to put in place the monetary regulations to properly fund the investigation: “There is no point seeing how bad people’s actions are if they are not going to be held accountable for them.”
Sir Alan Bates, who led the subpostmasters’ fight against the Post Office, said: “It has always been a priority for us to expose the truth and who was responsible. Which is why, if the Metropolitan Police hadn’t moved ahead, we’d have gone out and looked for funding to take forward a private case on all of this.”
He said the inequality of financial resources could prevent the real truth coming out, adding: “The best way to keep a lid on things is to hold back the police investigation.”
Former Hull based subpostmaster, Janet Skinner, who was wrongly convicted of false accounting, lost her home and livelihood and spent time in prison separated from her two children, asked: “Why start an investigation and agree to an investigation if they’re not going fund that investigation? To get to the truth, they’ve got to pay – and if they can afford to pay that amount of money to law firms, why can’t they pay to actually get to the truth, [to] get it all out in the open?”
National investigation
Operation Olympos was set up in May 2024, following the broadcast of the Post Office scandal-based drama Mr Bates versus the Post Office, which triggered public anger.
In May, commander Stephen Clayman, who is leading Operation Olympos, said: “We recently received a Home Office Special Grant of £2.8m, which goes some way to supporting our costs, but the reality is that we urgently need additional and sustained funding to meet our projected budget of up to £19.3m for 2026/27 and beyond.”
The Home Office said that it is considering requests for further funding.
In total, five law firms have received more from taxpayers than the Met Police had for Operation Olympos.
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).
