Rosie Brocklehurst continues her investigation into the Horizon Post office scandal and examines how a change to the rules on the use of computer evidence in court failed one young post office counter worker from Camberwell in south London.

It is extraordinary how the repeal of a section of the law concerning computer evidence 24 years ago, weighted the scales of justice entirely in favour of prosecutors and those who ‘owned’ the computer systems. Parliamentarians did not understand what the implications might be when they passed the repeal on computer evidence into law. Subsequently, judges convicted over 700 Subpostmasters and Post Office branch staff of crimes such as theft and fraud. It is thought that 200 of these – an estimate because campaigners have been entirely reliant on the Post Office for data on the numbers of convictions – were jailed on evidence that was based on the presumption that the Fujitsu Horizon system rolled out by the Post Office was completely reliable.

Lawyers who have represented Subpostmasters, are hoping the Law Commission will look again at the repeal of section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which, in effect has put the onus on the defence to prove a computer experienced error, without benefit of disclosure of error logs or other data on bugs.

1999

In May 1999, the Department of Social Security-run Benefits Agency walked out of a joint project with the Post Office and ICL/Fujitsu – the Horizon computer project – and began to set up their own departmental in-house IT system.

A month later, on June 29^th 1999, Paul Boateng MP, freshly appointed as Minister of State at the Home Office, spoke in the House of Commons for a repeal of section 69 of part of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) which arose in proposed changes in the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Bill 1999:

“Section 69 of PACE provides that a document produced by a computer may not be adduced as evidence unless it is shown that the computer was operating properly and was not used improperly… The rapid advances in computer technology have made section 69 of PACE an increasingly difficult hurdle for the prosecution and defence to overcome. Before computer evidence can be used, the party seeking to adduce it must prove that the computer was reliable at the material time. Computer developments have made it increasingly impractical to examine all the intricacies of computer operation and certify that they comply with the requirement.”

Boateng did not know it at the time, but the implications of the Repeal of s69, was to have a profound effect on 17-year-old Tracy Felstead, who, in November of that year, had taken up her first job as counter assistant at the Crown Post Office in south London’s Camberwell Green.

Efficiency and security in complex transactions for burgeoning Post Office services were dependent on antiquated systems. It was hoped that a new system with a swipe card for benefits transactions located in the 20,000 post offices across the country that existed at the time, would eradicate inefficiencies, improve services, and make huge multi-million-pound losses, such as fraudulent order books and giro encashment, a thing of the past. But it was not to be. ICL had failed to deliver a reliable system that could transform the way welfare payments were made to millions. When the Benefits Agency decided to throw in the towel and walk away from the ICL/ Fujitsu IT project, it was a disappointment for Government. 

Tracy did not have to involve herself with work on behalf of the Benefits Agency in her new job. But a Crown Post Office does a lot more business across a range of quasi-governmental agencies and services, including DVLA documents and travel money that most sub-post offices did not offer. Services were extensive and growing, and this was quite apart from the retail groceries and newsagent goods that many Subpostmasters provided – a useful and much needed public benefit, particularly in rural communities.  

By 1999, ICL was totally owned by Fujitsu. The project that had been commissioned under John Major’s Government for both the Benefits Agency and Post Office was given the go-ahead for the Post Office in 1999. 

In Camberwell, Tracy was excited and eager to learn and was given some training on how to use the computer terminal and sell goods and services.

Celebrations

Two years previously, Tony Blair, aged 43, the youngest Prime Minister since the 42-year-old Lord Liverpool in 1812, had swept into power with an 8.8% swing, on a tide of millennial enthusiasm. Along with a commitment to ‘joined-up’ thinking across departments, ‘modernisation’ and delivery were central to Labour’s plan for government. In the first Labour administration, ‘delivery’ was the buzzword of the moment. Indeed, ‘Deliverology’ was to become a whole department within the Treasury under Michael Barber, (now Sir Michael). 

Propelled by a belief in a dynamic new dawn, New Labour wanted Britain leading the way into the new millennium with, with Britpop dominating charts around the world, dotcom startups and technological innovation reconfiguring British business, all presaged by a New Year celebration at the Dome in Greenwich with the Queen.  

Back in Camberwell, meanwhile, Tracy Felstead, settling into her new job and now aged 18, began talking with her family about how best to celebrate her parents’ 15^th wedding anniversary coming up in 2001.

“Modernisation is not the enemy of justice but its ally”

The tone of the New Labour administration was encapsulated in Tony Blair’s 1997 speech to New Labour’s Annual Conference, when he said: “Modernisation is not the enemy of justice, but its ally.”

The Post Office had been using the calculator for decades, but that was about as far as modernisation of accounts went. For well over a century, the Post Office had operated a paper-based system of double-entry bookkeeping. What could be more modern than computerisation of the traditional iconic Post Office?

Transforming the most trusted brand in Britain, the Post Office, sat well with New Labour who also aspired to be the most trusted, effective, and admired political brand.

Early Beta versions of a system developed for the purpose of the abandoned Benefits Agency task, were now reconfigured and other tasks were bolted on to the system, but few would admit the IT project like most computer systems, was likely to be full of bugs.

From 1999-2000, the £1 billion Horizon IT system was rolled out across all 20,000 post offices in the land – a computer project so large that if its code could have been stretched vertically end to end, it would have passed through the stratosphere.

Size matters in computing, but so does quality.  Decision-makers had failed to take into account that if what goes into a computer’s software is wrong, then what comes out of it will also be wrong. 

The inability to admit to flaws arose not simply because of the onward march of modernisation. It was part of the new culture of efficiency targets and delivery goals that had infected managements and public services across the land. And then there was the cost and the contracts. Money had been spent before the Benefits Agency turned tail.   There was also the potential for strains in Britain’s relationship with Japan if Britain withdrew from its multi-million-pound contract with Fujitsu. 

Presumption and Reliability

During the Repeal of section 69 at Standing Committee E at Westminster in June 1999, it was software code that was in reality presumed to be reliable when used in evidence, not hardware. But this was not made clear.

It was what Paul Boateng MP was essentially talking about when he said: “Committee members know from domestic experience that one’s eight-year-old child is the only person on whom one can absolutely rely to tell one how one’s computer works.”   This jocular remark disguised a danger. It encapsulated a wider paucity of understanding of computer hardware and software and the code that allows them to function, not least among the judiciary. That was part of the problem.

Leaving it to the ‘experts’ whether it be an eight-year-old child genius or a senior programmer within the bowels of Fujitsu, was to assume computer expertise was the preserve of undefined ‘others’ who created the system, programmed the code, and had access to error logs and fixes. But who knew? Fujitsu kept this information. Revelations of flaws had financial and other implications. The Post Office for a long time insisted they did not know if Known Error Logs (KELs) actually existed. They tended to be selective about what they wanted to believe, skewed towards those that suited their prosecutions.   

Therefore, the burden of proof about whether the computer terminal in a post office branch actually worked reliably or not, could never in reality be placed on the defendant in the absence of comprehensible data as explained by an ‘expert.’   Once the law was repealed, the legal presumption in effect meant that the burden of proof for the unreliability of computers and their workings, was placed upon a defendant in all cases that arose within the Post Office for false accounting or theft. And the accused did not have the information needed to defend themselves.

It also seemed to many, that the King’s Counsel and solicitors working for the Post Office were earning a good deal of money from the mass prosecutions that ensued between 2000 and 2015. There were and are litigators however, many of whom provided services often pro bono, against the mass onslaught of money, power and influence that the Post Office could orchestrate, and never gave up on their desperate clients, despite working without disclosure of key documentation that might have supported their clients’ innocence.

It is estimated the cost of all this and prosecutions to the public purse to date is around £1 billion since 1999, and the Post Office is wholly owned by Government who hold a share in UK Government Investments (UKGI).

S is for Shortfall

When Tracy Felstead experienced a sequence of discrepancies in the new Horizon system installed in 1999 at Camberwell Green, her boss, when offering to sort it out, managed to increase the shortfall by a few hundred pounds. She could not work it out. No Post Office bosses bothered to work it out either. And Fujitsu’s help desk was no help.

What Tracy did not realise, nor all the other Subpostmasters and counter staff who were prosecuted later, was that bugs were known to exist that had affected many more than just one or two terminals  and were creating illusory shortfalls.   Admitting to flaws could threaten the whole project and cost a fortune. It could undermine relationships with Fujitsu and Japan.

In 2001, Tracy went on a special wedding anniversary holiday with her family to the Caribbean.   Her cash tray at the counter could be used by others while she was abroad. Upon her return to work she was told that a discrepancy of over £11,000 had been found on her stock unit when another member of staff had used it in her absence.

In his book The Great Post Office Scandal published in 2022 by Bath Publishing, journalist Nick Wallis explains the significance of a Stock Unit. Stock units are usually the responsibility of individual Horizon users. So, as a counter clerk, Tracy could log in to a Horizon Terminal and assign herself or be assigned a stock unit. The stock unit will relate to an actual physical till tray containing say stamps and cash. Horizon registers electronic transactions and transfers in and out and through stock units over the course of a day.

Tracy was interrogated by two burly investigators from the Post Office who asked about where she had got the money for her holiday. She thought that as she had done nothing wrong, it would all come out in the wash. But Tracy was threatened with prosecution and told she had to pay back the money. Her family allowed investigators to see their bank accounts to show how they had paid for the holiday. They were told without Tracy’s knowledge, that if they paid £11,503.28p and gave it to the Post Office, Tracy would not be sent to jail. The Post Office took the money. But the shortfall was illusory. The Post Office made money from Tracy’s family.

Tracy was sacked at the end of 2001. She was the victim of a whispering campaign in her community.

“I was bubbly once. Enjoyed my life. Now I did not want to be seen. I was prescribed Prozac. I tried to kill myself twice with an overdose.”

She was not well, but the Post Office took her first to Guildford Magistrates court where she pleaded not guilty, and then to a three-day jury trial at Kingston Crown Court where the evidence against her relied on the presumption for her to prove the computer was at fault. On June 20th 2002, by a majority verdict, she was found guilty and sent to Holloway for six months. One day she walked into a cell and found the body of a girl who had hanged herself. Tracy was 19 years old.

Tracy had been convicted on Horizon evidence for a shortfall that was not ‘real.’ She was not told that other Post Office staff had had similar experiences. She had no evidence to give about the computer bugs, and any evidence of such bugs was either kept from her or denied.

R is for Robustness

Over twenty years denialism about computer unreliability within Post Office management became an endemic disease on display in front of Parliamentary Committees and in the 3,000 investigations and over 700 prosecutions where convictions were obtained. “The computer is robust”  became management’s mantra. It’s a word that avoids the legal understanding of ‘reliable’ but which evokes strength and sturdiness.

But Subpostmasters were not so robust. Huge numbers of SubPostmasters and prosecuted counter staff were told that they were the only ones experiencing problems. Thirty-three have died without compensation. Three have committed suicide.

Tracy said that when she entered the Crown Post Office, aged 17, enthusiastically looking forward to a new career and friendships, little did she realise she was entering a dystopian Alice in Wonderland world. It is one that she believes she may never fully recover from. Tracy, whose belief had been in justice prevailing because she knew she had done nothing wrong, was crushed. “Iwas physically and mentally scarred. It sucked happiness from my life throughout my twenties and thirties.”      

It has taken a massive fightback by Subpostmasters grouping together to bring a civil action to court (GLO 2019 at the High Court under Justice Peter Fraser). But few have had much compensation. To apply for compensation, it is necessary to have a conviction overturned. As of today, only 92 of over 700 have been overturned.

The Post Office has opposed appeals in the past and been obstructive with disclosure. Pressure from the Business and Industry Committee, lawyers, campaigners and the Public Inquiry Chair Sir Wyn Williams, however, has brought about a change.  The Post Office is now saying it will not oppose those appeals of convictions based on Horizon evidence. But the Appeals Court is still not listening in all cases and have failed to agree the overturning of convictions in at least three Subpostmasters’ cases recently referred.

The wheels of the Criminal Cases Review Commission are grinding very slowly and a further 600 or so appeals could take as long as ten years. This seems to many victims to compound injustices.

Many Subpostmasters have been so traumatised, they still don’t know if they can face being reminded of it through a long-drawn-out appeal, so could end up with no compensation at all. As it is, the recent offer of £600,000 compensation by the Department of Business and Industry only applies to the 92 out of over 700 who have had their convictions overturned and it does not cover losses from 10-20  years of broken lives, poor health, evictions, jobs lost due to criminal records, and in many cases, massive loss of earnings for up to two decades.  

Tracy’s conviction was overturned in 2021, when the Court of Appeal called her conviction an affront to the public conscience. She still awaits full compensation.   

Rosie Brocklehurst is a journalist and press officer (retired) who worked for the Labour Party, LWT, the BBC and several charities.

Image: Tracy Felstead