The first of two posts on the UK Post Office scandal. In Part 1: how it bullied its sub-postmasters, and the worldview that drove the scandal.

At the start of January I watched the four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, about the UK Post Office scandal, which may be Britain’s largest ever single miscarriage of justice. I also watched the accompanying documentary. Credit to ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial television network, for committing the resources to give this shocking story, which has unfolded over more than two decades, the visibility it deserves. It has had a real impact.

The series is being repeated on network television in the UK next week. The trailer gives a flavour of it:

I thought I knew the story pretty well, but in truth I didn’t know the half of it. For readers overseas, it might be worth rehearsing some of the rather complex history, as simply as possible.

Big computer system has bugs

The Post Office is the part of the British postal system that runs its network of several thousand post office branches. A small number of larger post offices are operated directly, but most are “sub-post offices”, usually run by individuals on a franchise basis. Their contract states that they are responsible for any losses.

Until 1999, sub-post masters would balance their books by hand. The Post Office then introduced a computerised system, called Horizon, designed and run by the computer company Fujitsu. This was a spin-off from a larger (abandoned) government computerisation project which the Post Office had been involved in.

It was the biggest computer project in Europe, and effectively it hard-wired every sub-post office in the country to a central Fujitsu mainframe. The Horizon computer software was also riddled with bugs and errors, and the Post Office was aware of this at least from 2002. This shouldn’t have been a surprise: “big computer system has bugs” is not news. But the Post Office spent more than fifteen years insisting that the system was “robust”. 

‘Gaslit by a helpline’

From the early days of the roll-out, some postmasters discovered that the Horizon system was telling them that they had losses. This was a big deal, because they were personally liable for this. Anyone who rang the Horizon helpline was told—this was a lie—that they were the only sub-postmaster having this problem.

As one of the reviews of the drama series said,

there were many hundreds of people who found themselves being gaslit by a helpline.

And then the Post Office’s investigations division started to kick in. People had their contracts terminated; some (more than 700) were prosecuted, sometimes for false accounting, sometimes for theft or fraud. Sometimes a fraud or a theft charge was used as a shakedown to get someone to plead guilty to the more minor charge of false accounting and agree to repay the “missing” money. Some were deliberately bankrupted to discourage others from seeking justice. 

As the earlier review said,

thousands of subpostmasters were accused of financial mismanagement, hundreds were prosecuted… and countless lives were devastated.

Lying about the Horizon system

Because one of the quirks of the Post Office is that, unusually, it can bring its own prosecutions. Eventually—after years of organising by the Justice for Sub-Postmasters’ Alliance (JSA), and in the face of lies, delays, obstruction and obfuscation by the Post Office—those damaged by all of this have started to have their convictions overturned, some posthumously, and some compensation payments have started to be made, even if all of this is progressing far too slowly.

During most of this time the Post Office insisted—this was another lie—that it was impossible to access an individual sub-postmaster’s account from outside. But Fujitsu engineers were doing this all the time, as they tried to fix the endless bugs, glitches, and errors in the system. This only came out in a court case, much later.

(A malfunctioning Horizon terminal. Source: Post Office Trial blog.)

There’s a lot going on here, and it is inevitably hard to follow. The best single summary is at Computer Weekly, which was the first to report on the story in 2008. Or, if you absorb information better by video, Hudgell Solicitors, which has represented many of the sub-postmasters, has a 30-minute video. 

Feral organisation

I’m interested in a number of things here. The first is that this is a case study in what happens when a organisation goes feral. There are obvious questions about governance, incentives, management systems, and the complete lack of organisational curiosity. There’s a strategy question as well, since the Post Office is completely dependent on its sub-postmaster network. And there’s also a question of what was going on at a deeper level, since the list above is clearly a set of symptoms. I’ll come back to these in a second post. (And probably a third).

But today I’m just going to touch on how the Post Office managed to get away with gaslighting their own sub-postmasters for so long. Researchers who have been studying this had an article in The Conversation that identified four reasons, based on public transcripts and research interviews.

The first is the lie about “being the only one”, which may have been part of the Horizon helpline scripts:

(O)ne witness, Katherine McAlerney, representing the experiences of many when she said: “I was told during my interview that I was the only one who had a problem like this with the system.”

‘You are the only one’

The researchers found this repeatedly—it took years before the wronged sub-postmasters were able to turn themselves into a cohesive group:

Being told they were the only one not only discouraged victims from speaking out, it also planted a seed of self-doubt in many of their minds… This cycle of isolation and self-doubt helps explain why most did not attempt to find other possible victims or try to speak out publicly about the injustice.

The second was the anger in many of their communities in the face of the financial allegations against them and the legal action:

Our analyses of the public inquiry statements reveal the local stigmatisation and shame that many felt. There are vivid accounts of sub-postmasters being spat on, shouted at and shunned… We have also collected and analysed local news reports on the early accusations. Common themes include describing the allegations as “stealing from pensioners” or “having their hand in the till”… This sense of shame is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the negative mental health effects that sub-postmasters experienced from being wrongfully accused.

The third is that victims were unable to defend themselves. The minute that they were suspended from their role by Post Office investigators, they had no access to anything that would allow them to make a case for their innocence:

Imagine that, tomorrow morning, you walk into work and are called into your line-manager’s office. They accuse you of something and tell you to gather your personal items as you are being sacked. You try to reassure them you’ve done nothing wrong, and you know that if you can access some files on your computer, you can clear it all up. But when you go to your desk, you see that your computer is gone, along with your access to all your IT systems, emails, documents and archived electronic files.

This is, in effect is what happened to the accused sub-postmasters, and it clearly breaches a basic principle of procedural fairness.

‘The Queen’s business’

The last point is that at the time, the Post Office was one of Britain’s most trusted brands. The result of this was that sub-postmasters didn’t think they would be believed. There’s a telling quote from one of their interviews with a victim, Nicola Arch:

Working for the Post Office, it was the Queen’s business. It was very respected, very highly regarded. The Queen acknowledges the Post Office — her face is on the stamps. In that era, everyone believed that it was a very prestigious company to work for, very respected … Everyone thought the Post Office could never be wrong.

(The cast of Mr Bates vs The Post Office show solidarity. Source: ITVX)

Since the drama was screened, this story has moved on faster than I could have imagined. All the same, there’s not enough attention being paid to the corporate culture in the Post Office that led to this behaviour. (This seems to extend to the way the Post Office is currently treating the Statutory Public Inquiry. That link, by the way, takes you to an excellent review of the Post Office culture by the House of Commons Library.)

No reasonable doubt

It takes a certain type of corporate culture to keep on doing things in the face of mounting evidence that they are the wrong things to do. A corporate culture, in other words, with “no reasonable doubt”, in the memorable phrase of the management academic Charles Handy.

(Reasonable doubt. Source: Pofoshop, Etsy)

This lack of reasonable doubt seems to have come from two beliefs inside the organisation. The first is the idea of “technological infallibility”, and the second was the idea that the Post Office brand needed protecting at all costs. Combining this creates a belief system that:

(1) the losses were real, not fictional;

(2) it was bad for the Post Office’s reputation if people thought that sub-postmasters were dishonest; and

(3) they therefore needed to be prosecuted. Because the Post Office also had the right to conduct its own prosecutions, this quickly turned into a grim vicious cycle.

‘Technological infallibity‘

The idea of “technological “infallibility” comes up in the article in The Conversation that I quoted earlier. The researchers write:

This… factor is particularly pertinent for disputes around technology, in which people can easily fall prey to what researchers call “automation bias”, a psychological bias in which people readily discount information that does not conform to what technology advises or has determined.

You also see it in witness statements by accused sub-postmasters about their interaction with the Post Office auditors. Nicola Arch recalls:

(The auditor said) ‘You popped it in your purse.’ I said: ‘No, I didn’t.’ I told him the daily totals were right and I had evidence to show that, but I couldn’t access it. And he replied that he was not interested in what I said as the computer was the most hi-tech equipment you could wish for.

The notion of “protecting the brand” also ran deep through the culture. The ITV drama has a court-room scene (I’m assuming that this is from a court transcript) in which Angela van den Bogerd, in the witness box, states this as a rationale for the policy. She had at that point been with the Post Office for 30 years, she was a Director, and she had been central to the Horizon process and the investigations since 2010. The judge stops her and asks her to explain what this means.

Because at its heart, this isn’t a scandal about technology, it is a scandal about business culture. As the authors of The Conversation article say:

At the end of the day, this is not a scandal about technological failing. It is a scandal about the gross failure of management to stand up for the human beings who had dedicated so many years of their lives working for ‘the Queen’s business’.

In Part 2, I’ll look at why the management failed so badly.

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If you’re in the UK, you can still watch Mr Bates vs The Post Office on ITV’s streaming service ITVX.

A statutory public inquiry is investigating the scandal. The best day-to-day coverage of that is at the Post Office Scandal site—a blog run by Nick Wallis, a journalist who has been closely involved in the story for more than a decade now.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.