Victims of second Post Office IT scandal fear ‘cruel’ wait for justice

“Every day you’re re-living the nightmare. My wife still wakes up in the night thinking about the Post Office and can’t get back to sleep.”

For former sub-postmasters like Steve Marston, there is only one forward.

The Post Office needs to admit that it made a mistake prosecuting people like him in a second scandal that pre-dates Horizon and “draw a line under it” as soon as possible.

Mr Marston, 68, was convicted of offences including theft and false accounting in 1998 when auditors claimed around £79,000 was missing from his branch in Heap Bridge, Greater Manchester.

Despite insisting he never stolen a “penny”, he claims he was pressured into pleading guilty in order to avoid a prison sentence, a tactic which the Post Office has admitted was used widely by its investigators to secure Horizon convictions.

Mr Marston believes the unexplained shortfalls he experienced occurred because of Capture, a type of software rolled out to Post Offices in the 90s.

This week, chief executive Nick Read publicly acknowledged for the first time that the Post Office could face further claims relating to wrongful convictions as a result of Capture.

It follows weeks of reporting by i on claims from former sub-postmasters that they were pursued for money, sacked and in some cases prosecuted before the Horizon scandal began in 1999.

Speaking to MPs, Mr Read said early investigations suggest at least one thousand sub-postmasters used the Capture system.

The Government has indicated Capture victims will be able to access compensation via existing Horizon schemes which have a budget of at least £1bn.

However, Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake would not commit to including Capture cases in legislation for overturning criminal convictions expected to be brought forward next month.

“I think it’s important we have the right body of evidence,” Mr Hollinrake said, telling campaigning MP Kevan Jones that he is “keen to work with him to make sure that we have [it]”.

For Mr Marston there’s already a “mountain of proof” which shows Capture was “never fit for purpose”.

Documents shared with i show the Post Office sent out frequent staff bulletins between 1992 and 1997 detailing potential bugs and faults with Capture and how it could lead to “corrupted” data.

“There’s no material difference between the two [Capture and Horizon cases], it’s about faulty software, leading to wrongful suspensions, convictions and so on, it’s the same outcome,” said Mr Marston.

“You hear about the massive amount [the Post Office and the Government] are spending on legal fees, surely there’s a responsibility to cut the expenditure and try and wrap it up?”

At the Business and Trade Committee this week, Simon Recaldin, the senior manager leading efforts to redress sub-postmasters, told MPs the Post Office has asked its lawyers to start retrieving evidence on Capture cases, including Mr Marston’s.

But he also warned: “This is stuff that happened 30 years ago, and the records are very, very, very thin.”

And campaigners believe there continues to be a “toxic” culture at the Post Office in which a significant number of individuals still do not believe sub-postmasters are innocent.

They point to a letter sent by the Post Office’s law firm, Peters and Peters, in January which raised concerns about the prospect of the Government overturning hundreds of Horizon convictions en masse, claiming that many of the sub-postmasters are “guilty as charged”.

“I’m very aware of the fact that, the Post Office, the people that caused the issue in the first place, are still the ones in charge of investigating and deciding who gets redress,” Mr Marston added.

“They’ve shown they are incapabale or unwilling to carry out a fair inquiry, the investigation needs to be carried out by an independent body, but it needs to be done quickly.

“After 30 years, more of us are sadly passing away without justice.

“The process needs to be accelerated, will we have to wait another five years like the Horizon cases?

“It would be extremely cruel to have to go through that process.”

In January, Chris Roberts told i how his mother Liz served 13 months in prison after being convicted of theft charges when Post Office auditors claimed more than £46,000 was missing from her branch in Liscard on the Wirral.

The case pre-dates Horizon and reports from the trial at Liverpool Crown Court in 1999 suggest Mrs Roberts said she had been left in a “dreadful mess” by a new computer system.

Her family believe she was another Capture victim and want to see her name cleared.

Sadly, Mrs Roberts, who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s diseease, died a few weeks after i published her story.

Her conviction is one of four that the Post Office is investigating and lawyers for the Roberts family have started the process of asking for disclosure of evidence.

Horizon convictions will be overturned because of the precedent set by the case of Jo Hamilton, the former sub-postmistress prosecuted for theft whose case was depicted in the ITV1 drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

The conviction was deemed unsafe and overturned in a landmark judgement by the Court of Appeal in April 2021.

No Capture convictions have yet been tested at the Court of Appeal to date, however.

The question remains whether, given the similarities between Horizon and Capture cases, they could be quashed under the Government’s new legisation.

“It’s tricky, I’m a great believer in due process but … personally I believe it’s just a matter of time until there is a Capture precedent,” said Chris Roberts.

“We can’t just waive a magic wand, however it would be nice … and things weren’t done properly in the first place, that’s what happened to my mum and the justice system was rubbish.

“It’s about the time scale, with the Horizon cases your dealing with people prosecuted less than ten years ago, with Capture it’s more than 30 years ago.

“When this started my mum was still with us. That needs to be taken into account, the fact people are running out of time, people who deserve to see justice.

“If they’re saying Capture cases can be included in the compensation schemes then why can’t the convictions be exonerated?

“There needs to be an end point to all of this. There needs to be a point where we can say the Post Office is in order and this will never happen again.

“And exonerating people like my mum needs to be a part of that.”

Given the passage of time, it is likely many former sub-postmasters affected by Capture may never come forward.

Kevan Jones, the Labour MP who has campaigned on Horizon for years, has been in touch with at least 12 cases to date.

They include others who have not yet gone public but describe have similarly tragic stories to Mr Marston and Mrs Roberts.

One says they suffered unexplained shortfalls between 1996 and 1998 and went bankrupt, another was prosecuted in 1995 and says they served eight months in prison.

“Those wrongfully pursued or prosecuted by the Post Office due to faulty Capture software should not have to wait any longer for justice,” Mr Jones told i.

“Many of these experiences are a mirror image of what happened with Horizon victims.

“Capture was introduced over 30 years ago and many of those affected are now elderly or have already sadly passed away.

“Time is of the essence to overturn unjust convictions and provide financial redress.”

Steve Lewis, a former sub-postmaster in Ebbw Vale, Blaenau Gwent, is another who shared his story with i for the first time after carrying the weight of an alleged injustice on his shoulders for 24 years.

He says he was sacked after repeatedly raising concerns that Capture was responsible for unexplained shortfalls at his branch which totalled more than £40,000 over several years.

Mr Lewis, who had worked as an auditor, believes Post Office chose not to pursue a criminal prosecution because they feared he would be able to expose the truth.

He says speaking publicly about what happened has brought him “relief” and caused many people in his local community to contact him and apologise.

“I’ve had people coming to me saying ‘I’m awfully sorry Steve, I didn’t realise you’d been through all that’,” Mr Lewis added.

“It’s been difficult having to discuss it all again with my family, my son Alex is 26 now, we sheltered him at the time but now he wants to know everything.

“It was the first time he’d seen me cry.

“I’ve been healing.”

Mr Lewis has received contact from the Post Office and has been told that he can submit a claim for compensation from the historical shortfall scheme, of which more than 2,500 former sub-postmasters have already received a settlement.

But he says it is far more important that the Post Office admits it made a mistake.

“I lost my commercial business, I had to sell my home, my car, I lost my salary, I lost my pension fund, my life insurance. And I lost my status in the community,” said Mr Lewis.

“It’s been 24 years, I’ll never be able to get that quality of life back.

“The next step for me is to have some form of acknowledgement, something to say my suspension was the consequence of an unjustice decision.

“My biggest fear is, because I never had a conviction I haven’t got one to be overturned. I just want some sort of apology.”

A Post Office spokesperson said: “We take very seriously any concerns raised about cases from before the Horizon system was first rolled out in 1999. Our current understanding is that Capture does not appear to have been ‘networked’, but the software was used by some Postmasters, alongside manual processes, for simplifying accounts before they were manually submitted.

“We are particularly concerned about allegations of prosecutions, and we are looking into this along with all available facts about Capture, including whether shortfalls could have been caused by faults in this software, and the potential impacts if so.

“Given the passage of time, around 30 years ago, and changes to data storage systems since the split from Royal Mail, we do not yet have a complete picture of Capture but are looking into the issue given the concerns raised.”