#badIT: The UK Post Office Scandal, with CNN's Anna Cooban

Thousands fired from their jobs and forced into financial ruin or bankruptcy. Ostracized from their families and communities as thieves and cheats. Hundreds falsely accused, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Several died of suicide. An ordeal lasting decades.  𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮 𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙩.

The cause? The worst #badIT story you’ll ever hear.  CNN's Anna Cooban joins me on the podcast to discuss this fascinating and tragic story.

Notes:  
Anna Cooban's writing on CNN:  https://www.cnn.com/profiles/anna-cooban 
"Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office", dramatization, available in the UK on ITV
"Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office - The Real Story", documentary, ITV, available on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8-sJEzuPQI
Some video and screenshots from "Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office - The Real Story", ITV Studios, January 2024 

Transcript

David (00:08)
Hey everybody and welcome to the last IT podcast in the world where we talk about IT business and anything else we want to. As you can see, today I'm joined by Anna Cooban. Anna is the global markets writer for CNN based in London. She leads international coverage of market news out of London and reports on shifts in business and the global economy. She's also been a policy advisor for the Mayor of London, a management consultant. And she's a graduate of Oxford university. Hey, welcome to the podcast, Anna.

Anna (00:34)
Thank you for having me.

David (00:36)
I'm so excited for today. I don't know if excited is the right word, Anna, but I'm so glad to be able to bring this topic that we're about to talk about. It's kind of a tease to an American audience and I know you've been covering it. Just for the audience, I've connected with Anna because I saw her story on CNN.com entitled "Prison. Bankruptcy. Suicide. How Software Glitch and a Century's Old British Company Ruined Lives."

And as an IT practitioner, I was fascinated by that. And I've been reading about that. And the story we're going to tell today, and I think you could probably agree, our listeners may almost not believe. If this had been a movie, would you have believed it?

Anna (01:17)
Yeah, I mean, it's some.

No, and I think most people in the UK who've only really just learned about this would also say the same thing, so it's something that's very shocking to people both inside and outside of the UK.

David (01:29)
Yeah, we're going to get into it and it's going to be thick and heavy. But before we do that, we like to banter on the podcast, Anna, and we've agreed to sort of share what we like about each other's TV, media, or movies. Do you want to go first or you want me to go first?

Anna (01:42)
Um, I'll go first. I think the well, I mean, I grew up on a diet of The Simpsons and Friends. And, you know, there's a lot of amazing American film and TV I've seen. But in terms of the things I can consistently watch again and again and again, it would have to be those two.

David (02:01)

Excellent. And of the two, I would say the Simpsons is frighteningly realistic about what life in America is like. I didn't live in a big city with lots of young friends in my early... Sorry. No, it's absolutely true. That's what life is like in probably New York City in like one or three square blocks. So that's very good. Yep. And I was, we were pre-talking like I am deaf as an American. I'm definitely not a fan of aristocracy and formality.

Anna (02:04)
Oh really, not off not friends? No?

I feel the dream.

David (02:31)
And yet I watched every season and episode of Downton Abbey and loved it. I can't explain why. Likewise, my wife and I just finished the crown every episode, every season, and I loved it as well. So I, you know, maybe some fondness there in the genes that I'm not quite aware of, and then, this one's my guilty pleasure. The, the UK listeners will mock me for this one, but anytime Escape to the Country comes on, I cannot stop watching it.

Do you mind if I bet our American audience doesn't, did you want to explain what Escape to the Country is to our listeners?

Anna (03:04)
So I actually haven't really seen it. I think I know that it's about buying houses in the countryside, right?

David (03:07)
Because you're a young person, yes.

It's always about a couple kind of from a big city in London that wants to go out in the rural areas It's a real estate. It's a real estate program of shopping for homes in rural England And I think only old people watch it. So now we'll get off that topic, but good So we both appreciate things about each other's cultures and that and that's great and we'll get into the topic here now And as a lead-in and I have a recurring segment on my podcast all the hashtag Bad IT

David (03:42)
And that's where, because it drives me crazy when IT does a bad job or systems are bad. And normally these software problems that I'm probably personally having issues with are minor nuisances, like something that has made me wait in line five minutes longer than I wanted to. And today, frankly, for our listeners, I don't think there'll ever be a hashtag Worse IT topic. It's hard to imagine. Then the one we're going to talk about today. And why don't you?

Just tell us what I'm talking about. It's a scandal.

Anna (04:15)
Yeah, well, so the scandal has been going on for over 20 years. And I think that's obviously a big part of the story. In well, actually, it sort of goes back to 1660 with the establishment of the Post Office, which has always been a government sort of owned entity in the UK. And for the first few hundred years, it was, you know, Post Office workers were doing their accounts with pen and paper.

And then you fast forward to 1999, which is when the Post Office wanted to modernize, digitize, and introduced this new accounting software called Horizon. Now Horizon was developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu. And it was sort of earmarked as this huge, very modern sort of IT rollout. The Post Office was at the sort of forefront of this new digitization of accounting.

And right from the start, there were huge problems. So, many people who owned branches of the UK Post Office, they're called subpostmasters, they're essentially sort of small business owners, akin to sort of franchise franchisees in, in the States. But they're, they're the people you meet sort of on the high street. They own sort of grocery stores and they had sort of do Post Office services within their grocery stores. 

They're small business owners. And when many of them, when they started to use this Horizon software, would see shortfalls in their accounts of, in many cases, several thousands of pounds. And they couldn't explain why. They were sort of doing all of their sums. They were accounting just as they had before, but the system was showing them that they were in debt by thousands of pounds. And so the scandal really starts when

these issues were raised to the Post Office. And instead of believing many of the people who were working for them, they accused them of theft, of false accounting. And we can get into all of the details, but essentially over the next 15 years, there were hundreds of prosecutions. And in many cases, people went to prison on false charges of theft and false accounting. And that has, you know, with conversations I've had from people who've been directly affected by this, has ruined many people's lives. And so, yeah, we can go into the details of it, but that's the sort of broad brush of the situation.

David (06:52)
Yes, excellent summary, Anna. And just to reiterate some of the things you said, because I have now watched multiple videos, I've watched a TV show that we'll talk about later on in the sequence of things that's connected to the scandal. And I just can't emphasize enough the points you made about how that, and you know, a franchise owner in America, you know, could already be a rich person, but these people are solidly in the merchant class and when you look at their shops, they might have a bakery and then they might have a wall, a glassed off Post Office.

a cubicle almost, a kiosk inside their bakery. And that's where they're selling stamps and shipping and all the other things that a Post Office does. Number one is just how, I would say salt of the earth, these people, they are small business owners, to your point, just emphasizing how much that comes through in all of the writing and in the videos. And then secondly, this idea of a subpostmaster, which is there's the regular employed Post Office the official Post Office or these kind of agency Post Offices and they're all using the same system I believe I think Fujitsu rolled out to 40,000 branches That's a very enormous IT project, about 20,000 of which appear to be from the numbers I've read these agency or subpostmaster so they're not employees of the Post Office They run their own business and then they do Post Office as a franchise within their business or maybe as their sole business and I think it's very important to paint that picture because this really is also very much a David and Goliath story.

Anna (08:29)
Yeah, and it sounds, you know, perhaps a bit sort of corny to say that many of these subpostmasters were what you would describe as pillars of their communities, but they really were, you know, they were both your sort of grocer, your baker and your Post Office sort of representative, they were, you know, cashing in people's pensions on a weekly basis. And so for them to sort of be tarred with the sort of the shame of an accusation of theft, alongside the financial repercussions, the legal repercussions, it was just the sense of having your reputation tarnished as well.

David (09:07)
And to your point, Anna, part of the process with the new system was this idea of balancing the books and the stock. This comes through in your writing and in videos and things like that. Every Wednesday, they would, or a day of the week, they would say, what do I have? Stamps, other supplies, what have I sold?

David (09:25)
What do I have in the till? What cash have I taken in? And they would do this balancing. And this is where some of the problems start. They would, their balances would be off. They would say, you're a thousand pounds short. You're 50 pounds short. You're 2,000 pounds short. And I think you can probably talk about the contract. And then at the end of the month, you had kind of the official one. And I think contractually, tell our audience what that means from a subpostmaster contractually.

Anna (09:50)
So it was written into the subpostmasters contracts with the Post Office that any shortfalls in their accounts, they were obliged to pay. So in many respects, it didn't matter why the shortfall was there. They were ultimately the person that needed to make up that shortfall. And so obviously that posed a huge problem when you're getting shortfalls of several thousands of pounds, it's just not possible for somebody to, a small business owner to be putting that kind of money back into the business. And it was the case that many subpostmasters for a while were taking money out of their own savings to try and make up these shortfalls, knowing that they were obliged to do so. And then in many cases, it just got to the point where they no longer had any savings left, no funds left to put into the business. And so that's when they would get sort of, they became under legal scrutiny.

David (10:50)
And how did the Post Office respond? You know, so now there's these shortfalls, the shopkeepers or the subpostmasters are starting to put in a few pounds. And in the case of one of them, you know, that amount gets up to 30,000 pounds and which is, you know, 40, $45,000 US. So how did the Post Office respond once these system shortfalls started appearing on the system?

Anna (11:18)
Well, many subpostmasters have said that they would call up this Horizon helpline and say, you know, I don't understand what's going on basically. And they were told that they were the only people experiencing the issues. I've also heard from a couple of subpostmasters who said that when the Post Office sent their investigators to their premises, they were also told by those investigators that they were the only people experiencing these problems. As we now know, actually hundreds of people were experiencing, at least were experiencing these problems. The Post Office was very, I think it's fair to say, unforgiving, as in very uncompromising when it became apparent that there were shortfalls registered on the system. They really came after many people, prosecuting them, taking them to courts, taking away their businesses.

And that went on for about 15 years.

David (12:20)
Yeah, I would, based on what I've seen and maybe, you know, some of the documentary and the dramatizations of it, I would say aggressive. They came after these subpostmasters aggressively demanded repayment, threatened with criminal action, sometimes trumping up the charge slightly, it would appear, based on some court outcomes. They would accuse them of theft, but be willing to plea bargain down. But they were very aggressive in chasing these shortfalls. And to your point about the helpline, making them feel isolated that the system was working fine and they weren't.

Anna (12:54)
And to put it in context, a lot of this was happening pre the sort of real emergence of social media. So it wasn't that all of these subpostmasters who have the same problems in the early noughties, could verify that they were the only people experiencing these problems. It was a lot harder for them to organize, basically.

David (13:16)
That is such a key point of this entire terrible story is how, you know, these, a lot of them are in the city, but some of them are in villages and they're, they're not able to sort of connect with other people. Again, the social media aspect of it, very critical. And as we'll find out later, as we discuss, that kept them isolated and feeling like they were the only ones that had these problemsfor so long. And real quickly, you can tell that there was some subpostmasters that kind of assumed it must be them. They almost did trust Horizon, the system, and they thought I must be doing something wrong. And then there are some people, especially one main character who's like, nope, I did everything right, and I don't trust the system. But the people who thought that the computers are right, I must be wrong, started just sort of going down a very terrible path for sure, and paying money into the system.

Anna (14:09)
Yeah. And then to your earlier point about the charges. So I spoke to two former subpostmasters who said that they were pressured by their lawyers to, at the time that they were sort of going through these prosecutions, to plead guilty to a lesser charge of false accounting, to get rid of the charge of theft, because the charge of theft, a conviction for theft would more likely put them in prison.

And so many of these subpostmasters pled guilty, even when they weren't, because they were faced with an impossible situation. And so they then had to carry around this criminal conviction for years and years and years until it was, you know, as recently as 2020, they were started to be sort of turned over, overturned. And so you can imagine what that does to a person when you're this sort of staple in your community, and then it's suddenly splashed across the front pages of a local newspaper that you have pleaded guilty to swindling people out of money and false accounting. So it was, yeah, the convictions as well as simple accusations are a big part of this story.

David (15:20)
I believe the number is some 730 odd convictions. About 3,500 impacted, we'll talk about what that means when we talk about Alan Bates a little bit later. Impacted but not convicted is almost just as bad as being convicted. But to your point, and I can't emphasize it enough, you're the trusted advisor in your town. It's a bakery, you're almost like the town counselor, the bartender of your town because people interact with you so often, and then you're accused of being a thief.

Anna (15:23)
Yes, around 700.

David (15:50)
And then you plead guilty maybe to a lesser charge because you're afraid of going to prison even though you know you didn't take money. And there's examples of those subpostmasters' children being bullied at school. There are examples of car windows being smashed or people spitting on the ground or verbal harassment. Towards salt of the earth people who know in their heart of hearts they haven't stolen any money but they don't know what to do. It's such a heartbreaking chapter in the story for sure.

Anna (16:22)
And you make a good reference to the family of people who were accused and convicted, because this obviously, you know, we can talk about 700 convictions and thousands of people implicated, but you've got to multiply that by, you know, several times over to get the real human cost. Because, you know, I spoke to one former subpostmaster who said that she was a Post Office manager in a small town, and then she had all these problems with being accused of theft. And then her son started a new job at a local engineering firm, and he got bullied and ostracized by the people at that firm, which then birthed a series of mental health challenges over the next few years, which made it impossible for him to work for a very long time. So the repercussions are, you know, it's been decades and it's affected everybody who's been, you know, close to a subpostmaster.

David (17:20)
Yeah, we'll cover this when we get towards the end of the podcast and the epilogue segment, but it's now 25 years since Horizon was rolled out and we won't jump to that too far, but it is not over. There have been some victories recently, but it's been a multi-decade ordeal for these people, which adds to the compounding part of the scandal is how long it's taken them to get any justice for this. And I just want to, I'm going to go through some of the, this is all caused by bad software.

And also some bad things that ride along with bad software like bad support. But I've read a lot of articles somewhere on the technical side and I'm not going to get technical here, but I'm just going to like, people are probably wondering at now like, what was this software doing? How could it be this bad? And just quickly, the problems ranged from just hardware problems. Like there was a faulty pin pad that people used at essentially Horizon was a point of sale system where you would ring things up and and take charges and keep track of inventory and things like that. So a pin pad could be defective and one person ended up being prosecuted because of bad hardware. Or another hardware example is I read that some subpostmasters, if they had two point of sale, two Horizon terminals in the same place, that caused system issues versus one. And I don't know why it's pretty bad. Then this idea of just generating duplicate transactions. It was

just so what we'd call it, there was no transaction integrity is what we'd call in IT. For example, one bug was when your screen would turn black or lock up or it wasn't seeming to be responding and people would hit the Enter key three, four, five times, six maybe for it to come back and then it comes back. In the background, it was rerecording that transaction just over and over and over and over and just creating which it shouldn't have in a good software design, it should have known this is the same thing or whatever.

Likewise, there wer some missing system features. The subpostmasters talk about when you do a transaction, it's just gone. They couldn't see a list of everything they had done in their branch, what I would call maybe a detailed ledger, an audit, themselves where they could see this stuff and it wasn't available on the system. That's not so much a bug, just a very much missing feature. And then there were just phantom problems. There's an example of Joe Hamilton, who's in the documentary and the TV show that...

She misbalanced one day, she called the helpline, they said do some things and refresh. She refreshed and her shortfall doubled. Nothing had changed, it just phantomly doubled. And the helpline said, well I guess that's what you owe now. So I'm not gonna go any, oh real quickly, I think there was scale and what I would call infrastructure issues. Like if you had a power problem at your branch and the power went down, apparently that caused database problems on the back end. 

You can tell as a listener, especially if you're an IT, that this runs the gamut. This is, there are many, many bad things and I'm probably only hitting the tip of the iceberg. This software was barely functional in some ways or very, very fragile, let's say, that led to all of these problems. So not just one thing, but multiple things, which led to some of the problems. And, when we come back after this short break, Anne and I will tell you about what it all meant and how, what happened next, come right back after this break.

David (20:44)
Welcome back to the podcast, everybody where I'm with Anna Cooban and we're talking about this, one of the worst scandals in British history that all revolves around terrible software and buggy software. Anna, every story has a hero or a David to stand up against the Goliath. And in this story, that person's name is Alan Bates. Tell us about Alan Bates.

Anna (21:07)
So Alan Bates is a former subpostmaster and he experienced problems with the Horizon software in the early noughties. I think it might've been actually soon after it was rolled out. So around the millennium, he experienced shortfalls appearing on his screen. He couldn't account for them. He ran the numbers again, couldn't account for them. And he basically was ordered by the Post Office,


Anna (21:36)
you know, you signed a contract, you are obliged to pay this. And he refused. He said, no, like, I know that I'm right. And I know the software is wrong. And he was resolute in that, in his conviction. And, you know, he experienced huge loss. So the Post Office had the upper hand. They took away his business. He he and his wife had plowed their life savings into buying that Post Office business. And so they were left with it without, you know,

Anna (22:05)
everything, all the time and money and energy that they poured into it, they had lost. But he was, you know, very, what's the word sort of, he was resolute, he did not give up, he wanted to seek answers and to get redress. And so over the next few years, he was trying to reach out to other subpostmassters just to find out if there had been any other problems. And so this all sort of culminated in 2009, where there was the first meeting of various former subpostmasters who had been having problems with Horizon. And it was in a little town in the middle of the UK called Fenny Compton. And I believe that this location was chosen because it was in the middle of the UK. And so it was easy for everyone to get to, easier for everyone to get to. And it was a pivotal moment because everybody was telling their story, but also saying,

we were told we were the only ones. And so it was this real turning point in the story where many subpostmasters realized that they were the victims of a big scandal and that it wasn't correct that they were the only ones who had experienced problems with Horizon. And from that point onwards is really when you can date the sort of beginnings of the justice that some subpostmasters have received. But even then, it is still a continuing battle to get convictions overturned and to get compensation paid.

David (23:40)
Yeah, I get chills literally, and when I think about Fenny Compton, because of course I've fallen down the rabbit hole and know a lot about what happened there. I believe in the first meeting there were only maybe 20 or some odd, maybe 30 postmasters that came to that first initial meeting. And to your point that, you know, if we were shaping this out as a fictional story, there's a key moment because as you said, I'm just repeating what you said, but it's so important. A bunch of people sat across from each other. And for the first time...

in 10 years, many of them having lost so much said, I have had the same problem you have and you've been told you're the only one. You felt alone and now you're not alone. And just that human moment of 20 or 30 or whatever that was. And they meet over and over at Fenney Compton and the audience grows and they reach out and it expands. But Alan Bates realizing that that's what needed to take place was a masterstroke.

And your word, resolute, for him is certainly accurate. But such a, Fenney Compton, you know, this, especially to an American ear, this funny sounding little village that's not very big, 800 or 380 souls or something in a little meeting hall became the hub of essentially a rebellion, you know, if I can use that word, or the resistance would probably be a better word. So very, very key. They're not alone. They all know that these bugs exist.

Anna (25:05)
Yeah.

David (25:09)
And so many of them have been convicted already and lost their for, you know, bankrupt and everything. So very key. I just wanted to drill in on that a little bit on that moment.

Anna (25:19)
Yeah, so, you know, Fenney Compton was a turning point in which everybody on the one hand realized we weren't the only ones, despite what we were told. And secondly, everybody was sharing their stories of just how damaging their, you know, the damage that they had experienced. You know, several people were sent to prison, lost their businesses and had huge sort of mental health challenges. So. 2009, Fenney Compton was the sort of point at which you could say that things were starting to shift.

David (25:56)
And at this point, there's no lawyers or attorneys involved. There's no MPs involved yet. I don't believe it's literally just these shopkeepers trying to figure out strategy and they've got to figure it out on their own. And how does it progress from there? What do they do?

Anna (26:13)

So it takes years of campaigning. They set up the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. They're sort of writing to their members of parliament. But then, and then there was also, the Post Office then became sort of aware of, this group of former subpostmasters who were sort of agitating and there were meetings with Post Office leaders,

there was a review that was commissioned to look into, you know, what had gone wrong. And at one point the Post Office even put forward the idea of mediation between subpostmasters who had lost their businesses and were claiming that they, you know, had wronged, those businesses had been wrongfully taken away from them. But it really wasn't until a decade later in 2019, when there really was a...

a key sort of victory. So there was a group of 555, the "Five Five Five", they call themselves, of former subpostmasters who went through a civil case to essentially prove that Horizon was a flawed system, because that's what all of these cases rested on. If you can prove that Horizon was flawed, then that then opens the door for convictions to be overturned and for compensation.

And so it was a very technical civil case, but ultimately they won it. So the judge ruled many things, but one of the key things was that Horizon contained bugs and errors. And that then laid the groundwork for various convictions to be overturned, which happened for many subpostmasters. About 93 have had their convictions overturned, and were the first happening in 2020. But as we know, over 700 people have been convicted. And so...

the what many subpostmasters are saying is that, you know, justice is maybe happening, but it's happening very, very slowly. And I've spoken to some former subpostmasters saying, you know, many of us are in our, you know, 70s and 80s. So how long do we have to wait for over to conviction or enough financial compensation? People have had years of their life completely eaten up by this and they want understandably redress very, very quickly.

David (28:42)

So, so between 2009, the Finney Compton meeting, and 2019, 10 more years. And by you said people were still being prosecuted, you know, up to about 2015. Only then do they have some governing body of the land say the subpostmasters were essentially right all along in almost every case. I guess my question, Anna, is like, was the public following along, was this a big scandal in the public, you know, from 2009 to 19, or when did the public in the UK really become aware of this, and what's their response been to it?

Anna (29:20)
The public have only really been in a big way aware of this over the past few weeks. So since, since the 1st of January, which is when the ITV, which is a channel in the UK, released a drama, a dramatization of the scandal. And it was received in a really amazing way, you know, millions of people have seen this drama,

millions of people are now aware of a story that they weren't previously aware of, despite the fact that it has been reported on for many, many years. So, you know, there have been journalists who have been, and obviously, you know, public court cases that have been sort of circulating for a number of years. But it was only in the past few weeks that there has been this sort of mass outrage within the British public for what they see as, you know, what we've been discussing, which is a

very powerful government-owned entity coming after small business owners and ruining many of their lives based on faulty information. So it's been, and I've spoken to many subpostmasters, it's been something they could never imagine would have happened. They're very glad that it's happened. But there's also an element of frustration, which is this has been public knowledge for a while.

This dramatisation, this TV drama may never have happened. And does it take a TV drama to make real change happen? Since the release of the drama and since all the public outrage, the Prime Minister has said that he will pass landmark legislation to essentially overturn more than 700 of convicted former subpostmasters. That's unprecedented in its scale of mass exoneration.


Anna (31:09)
And there's a question mark about as to whether that would have happened had the drama not come out and there been this sort of reaction from the public. Just one more thing, you know, I was speaking to a former subpostmaster who said that it's amazing the response because before January the first this year, which is when the drama came out, she could have walked into a room of 100 people and two people would have been aware of the scandal. Now she walks into a room of

100 people and nearly every person in there will be aware of it. I was speaking to another subpostmaster who said that her son had gone out for a coffee that morning, on a recent morning and was standing in the line waiting for his coffee and apparently everyone in that line that he could hear was talking about the Post Office scandal. So it's really hit a nerve with the British public, for many reasons and it's been ultimately a very good thing for subpostmasters in trying to seek redress.

David (32:12)
Great. I think you and I, when we pre-met, I think it's important for American audiences to understand prior to this, what was the reputation or the brand value of the Royal Post Office?

Anna (32:25)
It's been a very, has an amazing brand prior to this. It's, and it's also, it's not necessarily, that it has an amazing brand. It's just a part, a staple of British life. It's this sort of comforting, almost like comforting cuddly institution. It's the people who post letters through your door. It's seen as being fundamentally overall very reliable.

And I don't think anybody would have thought that, you know, you would expect this kind of behaviour of a massive private corporation. You wouldn't expect this kind of behaviour from a government-owned institution like the Post Office. And that was something that the subpostmasters have told me, which is, you know, if the if the Post Office can do this kind of thing to you, you know, God knows what a huge company might do to you. So, yeah, it's the sort of the reputational damage the Post Office has been enormous.

David (33:24)
Yeah. As we, as we begin to close up and think about the epilogue, obviously you've addressed some of that about what's happening in Parliament and, and how, how this TV show, which by the way is called Mr. Bates versus the Post Office on ITV. I recommend if you're in the United States, getting a VPN and watching that on ITV I have it's four very, very tight 40 or 50 minute episodes. It's excellent. There's also, I'll post this link. There's a YouTube video that's the documentary version of that. It's also about 47 minutes long. 

It's called "Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office - The Real Story", with the real characters. It's not the dramatization, but it gives a very good overview. I'll make sure that I post that link when I post the podcast as well, so that you can see that, but highly recommend doing all those things. But, but as we wrap up, I do want to talk about what some of the things I see or maybe see as an IT practitioner, but before we do that, let's, let's resummarize. 730 some odd prosecuted and convicted..

subpostmasters all because of software bug and bugs a system and the response to those, you know and the institutional response to that 200 some odd actually imprisoned of those 735 when they talk about 3,500 being impacted that would be the Alan Bates story. Alan Bates was never convicted or Prosecuted but he lost his life savings, he lost his profession He had to start over and things like that.

And we'll talk more about that. But before we get to that, I've got a couple of prompts for you. Just as an IT practitioner, again, this is not documented anywhere. This is just things that I sort of almost smell when I read a story like this, because it's my area of expertise. But this goes to topics like, how does a company or a large corporation select a software and a vendor who's going to support that system? 

And I don't know what that process was in this. I couldn't speak to that, but it doesn't feel like it was great. It doesn't feel like they picked the right combination of service provider and vendor. I don't know what their process was, but it didn't work. Related to that is what I would call vendor management. If you do outsource a large chunk of a key function of your business to a third party, like the Post Office did to Fujitsu, how do you manage them? How do you keep them accountable? How do you make sure their service levels and responses and fixes and patches are...

are on top of things. Again, I don't know, but it feels like that was a gap. We don't know the details of what the inner workings are, but it doesn't feel great that they were managing the vendor. And then just good old classic helpline support, such a key part of IT. That is how you can take the pulse of what's going on in your user community. And it doesn't seem like it was a great experience for people and there was maybe not good communication internally. And then finally, you know,

I get this feel for what I'm labeling like "hyper outsourcing", like, hey, Fujitsu's got this system and they're running Horizon. Nobody said this. I'm just sort of reading tea leaves more than anything. Was it like, hey, they're running that and that's their problem or was it a tight relationship back to vendor management? But so many sort of more philosophical and organizational things must have gone wrong to keep buggy software from...

to be buggy for so long and for these things to not trickle up to leadership that I think are more in, in how you manage technology than they are the technology themselves.

David (36:58)
So as scandals go in British history, how is this being sort of ranked, if that's even a thing? By the way, in America, when we have a scandal, we always tack the word "gate" onto the end of it because of Watergate. So this would have been Horizon Gate in America, but you guys call it, I think, the Post Office Scandal. So how does it rank? I know it's brand new, really, because of the TV show this month, but how does it sort of compare?

Anna (37:25)

Well, the Prime Minister has come out and said that this is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history. And just in terms of its obvious scope and scale and injustice, you know, the government is labeling it as such. I think it's pretty, you know, in terms of what from what I can, I'm aware of, it's pretty rare that a TV show will have this sort of

David (37:35)
Goodness.

Anna (37:54)
impact on the real life trajectory of what is now a legal case. And so in many ways, it's been completely unprecedented, both in terms of its obvious scope, in terms of the government's very quick response to the public outrage, and exonerating over 700 former subpostmasters. And in terms of the fact that a TV drama could instigate such a response from the public.

David (38:37)
Yeah, I agree. You know, when you look at the, how little the victims are, and by "little" I don't mean that as a perjorative, I mean as just ordinary folk, shopkeepers, their size, versus the Goliath of the government, essentially, and then you take the trusted brand part of it, or the cuddly, "they're the Post Office", being so heartless. And then when you look at the outcomes on people's lives, you can certainly understand why there's the reaction in the UK to that story, there's so many variables that go in there. 

David (38:58)

As we close out and, Anna I just really appreciate your reporting on this and, and your, your willingness to come on the podcast. It's a fascinating story. It's just now making it over to the U S and so I wanted to make sure I got someone with your credentials and experience to help share the story with an American audience. So thank you so much for that. As, as we wrap up, I think, you know, we talked about to rehumanize it, to bring, you know, bad software and bugs and all those things we've talked about.

I think we've both come up with a person, even if we don't name them, it doesn't matter, that sort of humanizes it. Who has really struck you in your reporting as someone who is deeply impacted by this?

Anna (39:40)
Mm-hmm. Well, I spoke to the wife of a former subpostmaster who was convicted of theft, I believe, in 2004. And the reason I spoke to her and not him is because while he wants his story to be told, he finds it too difficult to talk to the media about it because he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he's gone through. And that's why

essentially involved being firstly accused of having, you know, stolen thousands of pounds because of what Horizon said incorrectly, what Horizon incorrectly thrown up onto his screen. He was then, as we've discussed, sort of pressured by lawyers to plead guilty to something that he hadn't done. He then went to a court hearing in early 2004 and expected

get severe consequences for that guilty plea, but didn't expect to immediately be taken to prison. And so both him and his wife were left completely, sort of like the rug had been pulled from under their feet. He immediately went to prison where he spent the next few months. And then he spent the next sort of five months outside of prison with an electronic tag around his ankle, which authorities used to monitor his whereabouts. 

That experience of being in prison and then being monitored for the next however many months, alongside the financial consequences of losing your business, alongside the feelings of shame from having a conviction of theft, it has had a huge impact on the family. His wife told me that the family, them and their children all need therapy.

They're in group family therapy and individual therapy as well. And despite the fact that his conviction was overturned in 2020, they're still living with those mental health challenges and also practical challenges. So they tried to go on holiday to the US recently. And despite the fact that his conviction was overturned, still somewhere on some immigration system, it came up that he had a previous conviction.

David (41:47)
Mm-hmm.

Anna (42:01)
And so he was initially denied a visa and it took them a lot of time and energy and emotional, you know, input to go to the embassy and try to get, you know, and he did eventually get a visa, but it was just an ordeal that he's still having to deal with, you know, decades after his experience. So I would, yeah, I would call out that example, but there are so many more that I could go into.

David (42:24)
Yeah, that's so compelling. The person that struck me as I was reading and watching videos was a woman named Jess Uppal, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. She was a subpostmaster in West Midlands. And again, her till came up short. I think the amount was 5,000 pounds. She was prosecuted. For some reason, the trial just dragged on or just the justice dragged on slowly. So it took three years to get to trial. So all during that three years, you know, she was...

as to her earlier point being harassed in her community because people treated her like a thief. The whole time she blamed this faulty pin pad. She knew it was the pin pad. No one would listen to her. And finally, after three years at a trial, she was found, and she was found innocent. So this is not even a conviction. This is one of the 3,500, not the 700, because when they got to trial...

it turned out the pin pad was out for repair and couldn't be admitted into evidence. And the fact that it was being repaired was enough for the judge to say, well, it's being repaired because it must be faulty. Well, that sounds like a good outcome, except the stress was so extreme on her and day and night thinking about that her community was viewing her as a thief that she attempted suicide. She attempted, she attempted to take her own life. As a result of that, she was admitted into a mental institution

to help her with severe depression in the mental institution, mental health institution. She tried again to take her life a second time. She was just at her wits end literally and you just feel for it. But that's not the, it's almost not the worst part. She was, to help her there, they submitted her to electroconvulsive therapy, shock therapy, where they shock the brain to try to address..

depression and I don't know the medical benefits or not of that treatment, but the result was she was submitted to that 14 times and it has essentially erased a great deal of her memory. So to this day she claims she can't, she doesn't have any childhood memories anymore after going through that experience. And so when we talk about impacts on people, sure we think about financial and bankruptcy and

and things like that, but the not being able to travel or just being labeled or carrying an ankle bracelet, the impacts on this injustice are literally almost impossible to fathom and when we tell stories like these. A great injustice caused by technology which could have been better and could have been addressed sooner and could have been believed and didn't need to impact all these people so greatly. So.

It deserves the word scandal. And I really hope that everything you've said about what parliament is doing to, to more rapidly because of a TV show is it is a sad state that it takes that, but good on the people who made that TV show on the response to it. I hope this, um, these people get true justice, although they'll never get the decades back in some cases, but at least their future will be a just one.

Anna (45:39)
I think it's important to say that the Post Office now is, you know, it's, it's apologised, it's very much admitted to its role in all of this. Fujitsu as well has also apologised. And there are now three schemes that, you know, thousands of subpostmasters are going through to apply for and get financial compensation. And that's alongside the mass exoneration of convicted subpostmasters. But...

you know, while that is happening, many subpostmasters say that, you know, it should not have taken this long, should never happen in the first place, but it shouldn't have taken this long. Um, and that the process of getting compensation itself is, is a very long process and that many are just asking, you know, we've been wronged. We want redress ASAP.

David (46:26)
Yeah, that's a great wrap up. And I really do appreciate that, you know, that they have finally accepted responsibility and now people are starting to move to do what they can at this late date to make things as right as possible. An incredible story. One that if I, like I said, Anna, if they'd shown me this in movie theaters, an IT professional, I would have said, that there's no way this is, you know, true, but clearly it is and it's impacting thousands of people. I really appreciate your reporting on it.

and coming on and joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much.

Anna (46:58)
Great, thank you for having me.