The Post Office did not understand the scale of the Horizon scandal until months and years after a compensation scheme was set up following its defeat in the High Court in 2019, according to the Department of Business and Trade (DBT).
Despite the Post Office’s constant claims of the number users of Horizon and transactions completed daily, often cited when campaigners and journalists challenged the systems robustness, it only thought a few hundred people would make claims for losses.
The government claim came in the latest Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report looking at government compensation schemes.
The report stated: “DBT acknowledges that it and Post Office Limited misunderstood the scale of the Horizon IT scandal, and it was only in the months and years after launching the Horizon Shortfall Scheme that it realised how many people were affected. Post Office Limited initially expected a few hundred people would apply to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, but 2,417 people had applied by its initial claim deadline.”
Many more have claimed compensation since then, particularly after the huge publicity generated by ITV’s dramatisation of the scandal in January 2024.
In 2009, when Computer Weekly first investigated and reported on what became the Post Office scandal, a Post Office spokesperson said: “Horizon is an extremely robust system which operates over our entire Post Office network [12,000 branches] and successfully records millions of transactions each day.”
Furthermore, as the Justice for Subpostmaster Alliance, led by Alan Bates, now Sir Alan, campaigned over the years, increasing numbers of subpostmasters came forward describing their problems, culminating in group legal action against the Post Office that they won, which led to the creation of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme.
Bates, the former subpostmaster who led the fight for justice, was a witness in the PAC investigation. He told Computer Weekly: “The Post Office claimed that many thousands of people used Horizon over the years, how could they only expect a few hundred to make claims?
“They’ve been well aware of the numbers. It’s a total lack of joined up thinking at Post Office, which has haunted the whole of this sorry saga. They constantly try to minimise everything and look at it from the position of protecting the Post Office.”
Ron Warmington, the investigator at Second Sight who helped expose the scandal, said it wasn’t a misunderstanding of the numbers, but “wilful blindness” on the Post Office’s part: “I’m dumbfounded by that assertion, which flies in the face of crystal-clear evidence that was available from the middle of 2014. Even before that, The Post Office’s wilful blindness in regard to the massive impact that the Horizon problems had was obvious to us.”
As well as the Post Office scandal compensation schemes, the PAC sought evidence from Windrush and infected blood scandal claimants, and was highly critical of government.
It said: “Most respondents to our survey reported feeling the scheme they had experience of felt unfair, and 76% of people said the claim process was distressing or retraumatising … evidence reveals a litany of unacceptable problems with how multiple schemes set up to compensate people harmed by public bodies are currently run.”
The PAC called on government to “recognise that victims deserve a new independent body to be established that could be trusted to design and administer all government compensation schemes.”
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).
