📚 Finished reading The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis.
If you’re one of the millions of people who previous watched the famous documentary “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” then you’ll know this story. I covered it here so won’t go into detail. But in summary, the Post Office introduced a new computer system to their post offices that had bugs resulting in it showing perceived discrepancies between the amount of stock and money a post office should in theory have in hand vs how much it actually did.
Some of these discrepancies constituted huge losses which, despite the protestations of their workers, some of whom had diligently called the IT helpline hundreds of times to report the system error, the Post Office typically assumed was the result of theft by the staff who worked there rather than take the time to actually investigate what had happened - or even let the accused investigate properly.
Said staff were thus prosecuted. Some were thrown into jail. The people concerned lost their business, their livelihood, sometimes their family, their mental and physical health or even, in the most extreme cases, their lives when they simply couldn’t cope with the shame, destitution and other consequences that such unfair prosecutions brought upon them.
It of course turned out that the computer system did have bugs, several of which the Post Office high-ups explicitly knew about. They deliberately covered it up, lying to the people accused and the courts that they were prosecuted in. And this, after several years of becoming an ever larger travesty of justice, was finally proved via the extremely hard work of the people accused along with a few allies, turning these events into possibly one of the biggest scandals in the UK’s recent history.
Nick Wallis, the author of this book, was one of the few journalists who’d taken an interest in this story several years before it came to a head. This book - subtitled “The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail” - presents an extremely detailed retelling of the story and the campaign to do what was possible to give at least some justice to the people that suffered from the Post Office’s incompetence and deception. Over 500 pages long, so perhaps only for the fairly committed - but these people undoubtedly deserve to heard their stories told in full.
