The Post Office has recently explored resuming the practice of taking branch owner-operators to court, as mounting losses from shortfalls in its network of 11,500 outlets hit £12m a year.
During the Horizon IT scandal more than 900 operators were wrongly prosecuted over discrepancies caused by the faulty accounting software, many of them brought privately by the Post Office, a practice it stopped in 2015 and has promised not to restart.
