The new British TV series “Mr Bates vs the post office” looks set to lead to the end of a long-running legal scandal in the UK.
Between 1999 and 2015, over 900 UK postmasters were wrongly convicted of embezzlement, accounting offenses and theft, among other things.
Even more were falsely accused and had their contracts torn up, went bankrupt and lost their homes and livelihoods.
– It is about many lives that have been destroyed, and a lot of money that has been wrongly claimed. It is about many politicians and civil servants who in one way or another tried to sweep this under the carpet, says James Savage, editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper The Local.
System error in Horizon
At the center is the software Horizon, which began to be used by the state postal company Post Office in the late 1990s. Almost immediately it became clear that the system was showing incorrect deficits.
However, the postal company denied the shortcomings – and took hundreds of postmasters, often small business owners and small franchisees, to court. They also demanded the money back.
Hundreds of victims have tried for almost 20 years to get redress. Only in 2019 did a judge rule that Horizon contained defects, and the Post Office reached a £58m settlement with 555 former postmasters.
Judgments must be torn up
Since then, 93 people have had their convictions overturned, but most have still not been cleared or compensated.
However, only a week after the drama series premiered, and the pressure from the public became increasingly fierce, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that all the sentences should be overturned.
The bill, which has broad political support, means in practice that the normal legal process is circumvented.
– It’s very unusual, and maybe not everyone fundamentally thinks it’s a good approach, but most agree that the injustice has to be solved somehow and it has to be done quickly, says James Savage.