British Post Office scandal
British legal and political scandal
The British Post Office scandal, also called the Horizon IT scandal, involved the Post Office's pursuit of thousands of innocent subpostmasters for apparent financial shortfalls caused by faults in Horizon, an accounting software system developed by Fujitsu. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides. In 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the scandal as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history.
Although many subpostmasters had reported problems with the new software, and Fujitsu was aware that Horizon contained software bugs as early as 1999, the Post Office insisted that Horizon was robust and failed to disclose knowledge of the faults in the system during criminal and civil cases. In 2009, Computer Weekly broke the story about problems with Horizon, and the former subpostmaster Alan Bates launched the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA). In 2012, following pressure from campaigners and Members of Parliament, the Post Office appointed forensic accountants from the firm Second Sight to conduct an investigation into Horizon. With Second Sight and the JFSA, the Post Office set up a mediation scheme for subpostmasters but terminated it after 18 months.
In 2017, 555 subpostmasters led by Bates brought a group action against the Post Office in the High Court.
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