The Post Office Horizon scandal is the greatest miscarriage of justice of our time, and I am deeply sorry for the families who have had their lives ruined by it. As one of the ministers over the 20 years of this scandal, including my time as minister responsible for postal affairs, I’m sorry I did not see through the Post Office’s lies – and that it took me five months to meet Alan Bates, the man who has done so much to uncover it.
The Post Office is owned by the government but not run by it, so the official advice I was given when I first became a minister in May 2010 was not to meet Bates. He wrote again urging me to reconsider, and I did then meet him that October. But he shouldn’t have had to wait. When Bates told me his concerns about Horizon, I took them extremely seriously and put them to the Post Office. What I got back were categorical assurances – the same lies we now know they were telling the subpostmasters, journalists, parliament and the courts.
Since then, the innocence of the subpostmasters has been proven. The extent and nature of their appalling suffering has rightly taken centre stage and has certainly caused me to reflect on whether and how things could have been different. Indeed, the Horizon scandal has shaken me to my core – and I’m sure former ministers from all parties feel the same. It’s been heartbreaking to hear how so many subpostmasters’ lives have been wrecked by the actions of the Post Office and Fujitsu.
We can now see how the Post Office tricked and bullied men and women into giving false confessions. So many served prison time, lost their businesses and their homes, for something they didn’t do. They’ve spent years waiting for justice, and some have died waiting. It is a black stain on our nation, on our government and most of all on the Post Office.
So how did we get here? It’s hard not to conclude that this was a conspiracy on a grand scale, and it was only exposed when a brave whistleblower came forward from inside Fujitsu itself in 2015. But thanks to that whistleblower, the high court could finally rule in 2019 that the Post Office had lied when saying there was no remote access to a subpostmaster’s local Horizon system, and lied about how robust the Horizon system was. I and other ministers from all three parties may have had concerns, may have spoken to brave people like Bates and James Arbuthnot, but without a whistleblower we never had the proof from inside to tear down the Post Office’s wall of lies.
We have a broken system. A system that puts major institutions like the Post Office at arm’s length from our elected representatives, and makes them almost a law unto themselves. Close enough for rubber stamping, yet out of reach of proper scrutiny.
It may shock you that, even though the Post Office is owned by the government, there aren’t any MPs or ministers on its board. Instead, a single civil servant sits on the board. Lord Forsyth, a lifelong Conservative, was right last month to argue that the problem is a system in which ministers who are theoretically accountable for arm’s-length bodies “are unable to execute responsibility”.
That’s a big part of how the Post Office could get away with it for so long. How they could keep the flaws with Horizon hidden for years. How they could prosecute hundreds of innocent subpostmasters. How they could threaten the BBC’s Panorama programme in an attempt to delay the whistleblower’s testimony. How they could keep lying to the high court as late as 2019.
We owe it to the victims of this appalling scandal not just to overturn their convictions and pay fair compensation – though we must do that – but also to prevent anything like it from ever happening again. That should be the government’s focus now. But as with so many other scandals – from Windrush to Hillsborough and multiple health scandals like Primodos and contaminated blood products – governments have done the bare minimum, leaving victims to fight for years for compensation and failing to ever grapple with the big systemic changes these scandals demand.
I fear the opportunity to make big systemic changes as a result of the Post Office Horizon scandal will also be missed. There’s already a sense that some in the Conservative party are seeking to exploit this human tragedy for their own narrow interests in this election year by using their power and friends in the media to deflect criticism from themselves on to political rivals – and by using this scandal as part of their attempt to hold on to power.
Over the past decade we have seen this form of politics gaining momentum. The Trumpification on the right of the Conservative party. The mindless attacks from some dutiful Tory columnists. The paid ads spreading disinformation and fake news.
The subpostmasters deserve far better. That starts with overturning their convictions now – more than four years after the high court exonerated them – and properly compensating them quickly – not leaving it to the Post Office’s complicated, slow and inadequate schemes.
Over the coming weeks and months, I will be travelling the country. If you want to talk about the Post Office scandal or the multitude of other failures and crises we are facing – from the NHS to the cost of living – I will be ready to listen. Together we will change the system.
Ed Davey is the leader of the Liberal Democrats and MP for Kingston and Surbiton
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