Toby Jones has paid tribute to the “extraordinary” people who fought for justice for subpostmasters wronged by the Horizon scandal as the actor won big at the National Television Awards.
The 58-year-old played the eponymous lead in ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office which won him ‘best drama performance’ and the show ‘best new drama’.
In picking up his NTA, Jones said: “This means an awful lot, not just to me but to the extraordinary people who inspired our show, some of whom are in the audience this evening.”
The show received recognition for getting "politicians talking and changed legislation" and was given the impact award as well, it was announced ahead of the NTA ceremony.
Former subpostmaster Jo Hamilton agreed, saying on stage alongside other scandal victims, that "nothing has changed" as she accepted the impact award.
"I went to Westminster a couple of weeks back and saw the new minister and, trust me, nothing has changed," she said.
"Almost all of these people behind me haven't been paid yet. And, out of the group of 555, more than 300 haven't been paid yet."
The subpostmasters gathered on stage in tearful scenes, giving the actors heartfelt hugs in recognition of their bravery in telling their stories.
The awards have been a quite satisfying way to wrap up the Post Office narrative.
Viewers turned to X to tweet about their thoughts.
One user said: “Mr Bates vs The Post Office really showed the Power television still has on society. When many say it has lost its purpose and Streaming is the way, a show like this really hammered home that mass audiences of TV can create a wave of power and correct a huge wrong. #NTAs”.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office really showed the Power television still has on society. When many say it has lost its purpose and Streaming is the way, a show like this really hammered home that mass audiences of TV can create a wave of power and correct a huge wrong. #NTAs pic.twitter.com/hiM5QmzUdc
— Liam Calland 🇺🇦 (@yorkshireguy) September 11, 2024
While another said: “Heart made of stone if you're not impacted by Mr Bates Vs The Post Office at the NTAs.In the week that it was announced that the British TV industry is suffering a recession, this is the shining example of the power TV has.”
Heart made of stone if you're not impacted by Mr Bates Vs The Post Office at the NTAs.
— 𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕥 ℝ𝕖𝕚𝕕 (@grantreid1) September 11, 2024
In the week that it was announced that the British TV industry is suffering a recession, this is the shining example of the power TV has.
“Mr Bates Vs The Post Office truly has shown the power of television in getting across underrepresented stories. Let's hope the medium is used even more for this power for good. #NTAs”, said another.
Mr Bates Vs The Post Office truly has shown the power of television in getting across underrepresented stories. Let's hope the medium is used even more for this power for good. #NTAs
— DawnGlen (@DawnGlen2) September 11, 2024
In 1999, the Post Office introduced a new way of cataloguing payments: the Horizon IT system. It was intended to be a way to modernise the organisation, moving it from paper-based records into the upcoming 21st century.
What unfolded instead was a disaster. The Horizon IT system was faulty, prone to glitches which incorrectly exhibited shortfalls of cash that were blamed on the sub-postmasters in charge of their branches, leading to 20 years of legal disputes, hundreds of wrongful convictions and untold lives destroyed.
The whole sorry affair was turned into an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which aired earlier this year. It's a complex and shocking story, so here’s our handy explainer.
The beginning
When Alan Bates arrived in Llandudno, in 1998, it was with the intention of making a fresh start. Together with his long-term partner Suzanne, the pair had invested their life savings into buying a Post Office branch in the sleepy village of Craig-y-Don.
In 1999 he, along with thousands of other sub-postmasters, received training in the new Horizon IT system introduced by the Post Office. It was the end result of a failed experiment – originally, Horizon was intended to be a swipe card system, designed to pay out pensions and benefits from Post Office branches. Begun in 1996, it was eventually scrapped in May 1999, and had cost roughly £700m in taxpayers’ money.
To get some use from that system, the Post Office pivoted; now, it would be used as a means of providing electronic accounting, transactions and stocktaking for all its branches.
Questions remained around Horizon’s effectiveness – as the board of directors wrote in their September minutes, “serious doubts over the reliability of the software remained” – but seemingly went disregarded. Indeed, the later public inquiry heard that Paula Vennells, who first joined the Post Office as network director in 2007, sent around a "Horizon defence piece" in 2009, where she repeatedly asserted that the system was robust.
Instead, the opposite was true. Soon after the software went live, Mr Bates started noticing issues in the system’s accounting. Sums of money started showing up as missing, to the tune of £6,000. To make matters worse, sub-postmasters who used the system were unable to accessing all the data from previous transactions they and staff had logged, making it impossible to tell where the fault was.
“I’d worked with these types of systems before we’d taken on the business with the Post Office, and although they had been far smaller systems I had enough experience to suspect the truth at a very early stage, and it didn't matter what they said: they were wrong, and I knew they were wrong,” he said.
“We were told to call the helpline, which became known as the hell line as it was so useless,” he later said. Under the terms of his contract, Mr Bates was obliged to pay back the missing money, which the Post Office immediately began chasing him for.
After some back and forth over the amount of money owed, Mr Bates eventually refused to pay the £1,600 outstanding, “until such time as I am able to access the data that I am being asked to be responsible for.” He was immediately made redundant, with three months’ notice – and lost almost £65,000 of his life savings as a result.
Mr Bates remained unbowed: he immediately set up a website calling for justice, which his partner Suzanne promoted by hanging up a banner outside the shop. However, movement on the case was slow. “I occasionally heard from the odd person, but people seemed too scared to do more,” he said.
The victims
It wasn’t just Mr Bates who had fallen foul of Horizon: hundreds of other sub-postmasters had, too – and things quickly escalated.
Thousands of pounds were incorrectly reported missing due to glitches in the system, and to plug the gaps, many sub-postmasters had to plough their life savings into making up the deficit. Jo Hamilton, a sub-postmaster from South Warnborough, remortgaged her house to pay the debts.
Martin Griffiths, the sub-postmaster at Great Sutton, paid £100,000, including some from his parents, in an attempt to reimburse the Post Office for money they said he had lost; crippled by shame, he eventually took his own life at the age of 58. His widow, Gina, later said that she was pressured into signing a gagging clause for a sum of £120,000. In total, two people took their own lives as a result of the scandal, with a third suspected suicide inconclusively attributed to it.
Once the issue of the missing funds was made public, sub-postmasters like Lee Castleton became pariahs overnight, as people accused them of stealing pension money to line their own pockets. Michael Rudkin and his wife Susan (who ran a post office in Ibstock) had to turn their house into a B&B to make ends meet, and Michael lost his job at the National Federation Union of Subpostmasters as a result.
In addition to the thousands of calls being made to the hotline, auditors were also sent around to branches to investigate the financial discrepancies. In Pam Stubbs’s case, an auditor sent to her Barkham Post Office branch saw the Horizon system glitch and lose £300 while they were there. Despite being informed that an internal investigation was taking place both with the Post Office and Fujitsu (the operators of Horizon), she was then informed that the investigation hadn’t brought up any problems with the system.
In addition to being accused of losing money, there were other serious legal repercussions as the Post Office chased their employees for the money they supposedly owed. Even after being made redundant, Ms Stubbs continued to receive bills for the outstanding money; Susan Rudkin was given a suspended sentence and ordered to do 300 hours of community service for losing £44,000.
Between 2000 and 2014, more than 736 postmasters (around one a week) were tried for legal issues related to the Horizon system; many of them served jail time as a result. In 2010, a sub-postmaster from Surrey, Seema Misra – who was pregnant – was convicted of stealing £74,000 and sentenced to a 15-month prison sentence for theft. She also had a 10-year-old son at the time; later, she said the only reason she didn't take her own life was because of her pregnancy.
Speaking to Private Eye, Nicki Arch (who managed a post office in Stroud), said Post Office investigators “stripped my life apart” when they arrived at her home to recoup her supposed debts. “I presented every single bit of financial history from the minute I left university to them. They came to my house to see what was in it. They didn’t even have a search warrant.” The same day, they sacked her.
The fight for justice
While the Post Office continued to prosecute sub-postmasters from around the country, an alliance was slowly forming. Alan Bates had been in regular contact with his MP, James Arbuthnot, about the issue and in September 2009 he helped found the JFSA, or Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, which met for the first time in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire, with about 30 attendees.
“There were a whole host of very, very sad stories,” Mr Bates later said. “The Post Office made people think they were going crazy. They didn’t just inflict financial ruin, destroying livelihoods; it also destroyed families.”
In 2012, Ms Vennells took over as CEO, having first joined the Post Office in 2007 as network director. By this point, concern about the issue had also grown to the point where an independent investigative firm called Second Sight was appointed by the Post Office to conduct an independent inquiry into the issue. Between 2013 and 2015, four reports were written, all of which raised issues with the Horizon system and marked it as “not fit for purpose”.
However, in 2015, Private Eye magazine reported that the Post Office had ordered Second Sight to end their investigation a day before the last report was due to be published and destroy any outstanding paperwork; they then published their own report, exonerating their approach. However, the unpublished report was then leaked to the BBC.
According to them, it said that the Horizon system was faulty: “investigators did not look for the root cause of the errors – and instead accused the sub-postmasters of theft or false accounting.”
The Post Office then went into mediation with some of the sub-postmasters affected, with the aim of assigning compensation, but this also drew criticism. MPs withdrew their support for the scheme, and James Arbuthnot accused the Post Office of being “duplicitous” and rejecting 90 per cent of admissions for mediation.
In 2017, Mr Bates and five others finally took the Post Office to court on behalf of 555 sub-postmasters. After a lengthy court battle, Justice Peter Fraser ruled in 2019 that computer errors were at fault for the accounting discrepancies and blamed the “institutional obstinacy” of the Post Office in pursuing the missing money without investigating where the fault lay.
That same year, the Post Office’s CEO Ms Vennells stepped down with a CBE. Over the course of her seven-year tenure at the Post Office, she had collected more than £4.5m in pay, and £2.2m in bonuses. She went onto become an advisor to the Cabinet Office, as well as a paid chairwoman of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Strikingly, she was even appointed a member of the Church of England's ethical investment committee.
The fallout
The fight for justice is still ongoing. After the ruling, a compensation scheme totalling £58m was set up by the Post Office – which, after legal costs, left the group with £12m, or £20,000 per person.
In September, the government said Post Office staff whose convictions were overturned would be offered £600,000 in compensation – but as of 2023, only 93 former sub-postmasters have had their names cleared. The Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, which oversees the scheme, recently said that until all convictions were quashed, “we cannot put the scandal behind us".
In April 2021, after the High Court quashed the convictions of 39 sub-postmasters, Ms Vennells resigned as the director of Dunelm and Morrisons, where she worked for a £140,000 salary, and in her role as an associate Church of English minister. However, she still retains her CBE. When Alan Bates was offered a CBE some years later, he rejected it: "the first thing that sprang to my mind while reading the letter was Paula Vennells still had a CBE. I felt so deeply insulted," he said.
However, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, has said that Ms Vennells should give it back. “If I was Paula Vennells, I would say, well basically, the buck stops with me and I will hand back my CBE,” he said on Times Radio after the show had aired. “I think that will be the right thing for Paula Vennells to do.”
There is also a second inquiry into the scandal currently ongoing. Many of the survivors remain traumatised and ostracised, and the vast majority still carry their convictions of crimes like fraud and theft; in addition to two suicides and one suspected suicide, 19 people died waiting for justice to be done.
“You will never be able to repay people for what they've gone through and you will never be able to give them back all those years of suffering that they've had to endure,” Mr Bates has said. “But hopefully, [the current inquiry] might alleviate some of their problems going forward.
“Another issue, and my current source of campaigning, is around the mental anguish of the families. At the moment the government hasn’t taken that on board. These families need professional mental health assessments and support, not just financially but in other ways as well.”
