It was not a terror attack or an earthquake but something more mundane – a faulty computer system and a rigid bureaucracy – yet it devastated hundreds of ordinary lives. Over two decades, Britain’s Post Office prosecuted its own subpostmasters for crimes they had not committed, based on the say-so of a computer system called Horizon. The software, developed by Fujitsu, and rolled out from the late 1990s onwards, was riddled with faults. But these were not treated as glitches. They were treated as evidence of dishonesty.
The public inquiry into the Post Office IT Horizon scandal, seen as one of the worst miscarriages of justice, began in 2021. In a searing 162-page first volume its chair – the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams – laid bare the human toll, and the often sluggish, inadequate attempts to put things right. Between 1999 and 2015, nearly 1,000 people were prosecuted – and convicted – using data from the flawed Horizon system. Some were jailed. At least 13 may have killed themselves. Many more were ruined – wrongly imprisoned and bankrupted with their health and reputation shredded. The report makes clear: this was not a technical slip. It was a systemic failure that destroyed lives – and one that the Post Office let happen.
