More than 100 new potential victims of the Post Office scandal have contacted lawyers after the airing of an ITV drama as the government scrambled to respond to growing public outrage.
The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, was meeting judges on Tuesday over plans to fast-track the appeals of post office operators who were convicted on the basis of a faulty IT accounting system.
Only 86 of 900 convictions made over apparent accounting “shortfalls” have been overturned so far, while over 2,500 settlements have been reached under a scheme to compensate those who have suffered personal injury, distress and inconvenience, harassment, loss of reputation and bankruptcy.
Lawyers acting for many of those accused and prosecuted said they had been contacted by 100 more people seeking legal advice after the broadcast of a four-part drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, in the first week of the new year.
These are said to include more people wrongfully prosecuted and convicted, those who were forced to pay back alleged shortfalls in branch accounts and lost their livelihoods, and a large number of relatives of former post office operators who have since died.
A long-running statutory inquiry into the scandal reopens on Thursday for its third and final year of hearings.
First to be heard will be Stephen Bradshaw, a former Post Office investigator, who was previously described by Jason Beer KC, the counsel to the inquiry, as having “heavy footprints” in the scandal.
He was part of the Post Office investigation team which led to Noel Thomas, now 77, from Anglesey, being wrongly convicted over an alleged shortfall of £48,450 in his branch accounts and sentenced to nine months in prison in 2006.
Bradshaw had been due to appear last November, but his evidence was postponed as legal teams representing the Post Office said more than 300,000 potentially relevant emails, which had previously been missing, had been discovered.
Neil Hudgell, of Hudgell Solicitors, who has helped 73 post office operators clear their names, said: “Our clients want accountability for those who took the decisions which ultimately led to them being prosecuted, to losing their homes, to losing their livelihoods, to losing their minds.
“It is about accountability, about people individually being held to their actions and to justify what they have done, and if at the end of that there are individual prosecutions or professional misconduct proceedings then so be it.
“It’s not for us to say any more about that. What we are focused on is preparing the questions, assisting counsel to the inquiry with getting to the bottom of what went on and when. There is also new information coming in to us on a daily basis which may well be of interest to the inquiry, and we are handing that over to the inquiry team as it does so.”
Hudgell said he hoped the media storm around the scandal since the airing of the ITV drama would lead to further scrutiny of the public inquiry being chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, a former high court judge.
The inquiry’s timetable slipped in 2023 and lawyers have complained that the Post Office had failed to fully disclose all relevant documents to lawyers acting for victims.
Hudgell said: “We’ve not had disclosure of all the relevant paperwork that enables us to ask all the right questions of the right witnesses, so that has been a source of frustration and it is also a source of continued mistrust for the clients, because they see it as the Post Office up to their old tricks.
“It is a hugely positive thing that this TV drama has placed the eyes of the world on the Post Office as the inquiry resumes. The importance of what this inquiry finds and concludes cannot be overstated.”
This week the inquiry will also examine disclosures by Fujitsu, which developed the Horizon system, before hearing from employees of the company next week, including software developers, leaders within the software support team and the manager of the security team for the Post Office’s account.
Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said on Monday that the government expected to take Fujitsu to court after the conclusion of the public inquiry.
He said that the Japanese technology company should be “held accountable, including making any payments” into the Post Office compensation fund.
