A full timeline of the Post Office Scandal | Stories of Our Times
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- Опубліковано 10 січ 2024
- The Prime Minister has announced new legislation to quash the convictions of wrongly accused subpostmasters. It comes after a groundswell of interest - and outrage - in the story after an ITV drama was broadcast last week. How did a TV show achieve what years of journalism and a public inquiry had failed to? And what next for the convicted subpostmasters?
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It should not take over a decade and a tv drama to force the authorities to address this appalling miscarriage of justice.
It seems to me that the investigation and inquiry is really only scratching the surface of this appalling scandal.
I agree with the sub postmasters that heads need to roll. Criminal prosecutions need to be handed out to all those involved - the leaders and staff at the post office and at Fujitsu. It’s disgusting Fujitsu has been awarded so many government contracts. They should never be given any contracts.
I love the fact that the middletons and the cambridges stood by thier local postmaster who was wrongly convicted for fraud and embellzment . They invited said postmaster to thier 2011 wedding . William & Catherine and Middletons stood by the guys family and that meant so much to him and his family cuz nobody else stood by them when he was falsley accused of these crimes 🥺❤️🥺
Oh I’m glad! Where did you hear that?
Here is the thing, apart from all the other aspects of this affair the role of Lord Neuberger in the Recusal seems to have escaped attention.
I have therefore pasted the following ‘The role of Lord Neuberger in the recusal fiasco (Justice Fraser) should be investigated’ on as many UA-cam articles as I could, about ten, but when I checked to see if there was any response I discovered they had all been taken down.
This Kafkaesque episode staggers one at every turn, even when Big brother has been outed he seems to be still working away!
I really want to know why Lord Neuberger interfered , if the recusal had succeeded the whole noble attempt at taking on the stinking system would have failed.@@travelwell6049
Quality ❤
What about the guilty paying their fraudulent bonuses? Why is that not suggested?
why doesn't ITV put the series on the internet, that would log millions of "confirmed" viewers, adding more weight
ITVX has the series and documentares
Yeah, how do I watch from overseas? I listened to the BBC podcast about it last year but want to see this series.
but ITVX is blocked for overseas viewers has some bizarre licensing excuse @@c-9233
I can't help but think.. Maybe... Every user of these terminals had problems, but we're only hearing about the worst cases and larger sums of money and... Maybe... The vast silent majority balanced the books with small sums but not dating to rock the boat... Or worse, end up in court
So, instead of counting inventories, stamps, envelopes ect they just put money in....i lose one dollar, i turn the house upside down....these people just did what the computer told them, there's way more to this story.
I agree totally. This pathetic system was used by every post office (all 14000 at one point). So how come only 736 were convicted??? Maybe the shortfalls were too insignificant to be noticed. But the Horizon system was still defective for EVERYONE.
The silence of British IT staff is deafening. They alone know the glitches in Horizon, what errors it could cause, and crucially, what was done by Fujitsu to rectify it, and who ordered this fix. Software gets updated over time and the history of Horizon updates 2009-2015 will reveal what they knew about the glitches, when they knew it and who knew. This is not rocket science.
How much did the victims have to find to be able to bring this to court £££££
Is Justice only for the wealthy in UK
WHO WILL BE NEXT REGARDING SEEMINGLY APPALING PRACTICES AND BEHAVIOUR - HMRC?
The BBC and TV licensing prosecutions will be next . ( Check out the Blackbelt Barrister for his prediction. )
Reimbursement plus interest from PO and compensation from Fujitsu
A new piece of news is that there are probably 100's more post masters who made up shortfalls caused by Horizon WithOut calling the helpline or raising the issue. In due course I hope All the stats and metrics will be in the public domain so folks can see for themselves how bad the PO malpractice has been.
This is an absolute joke. The Times has cheerled the mindset that enabled this every step of the way.
Chilling that Lord Arbuthnot admits that Alan Bates suceeded where he failed, that a hard working MP (one of many) cant be heard by his collegues & civil servants.
Questions the relevance of the Parliment system in the UK
Shocking
For all of my adult life, The Gov has been eroding the freedom of the press. Today we finally have a situation where a TV SHOW does YOUR JOB FOR YOU. YOU, the 4th estate could have blown this up 20 years ago, but you didnt. That's because you are nothing but stenographers for The Party Line. So I love the fact that YOU, the Main Stream Media are reporting on this like you're so wonderful, oblivious to that fact that you are obsolete. Everybody else knows what you are and you are incapable of self-reflection.
My father, a retired accountant in the American post office, and I were just saying this. We are just watching the series now in the States. Last night’s episode bothered him so much he had to turn it off.
Why wouldn’t people demand that a newspaper or other media source cover this? Are there no entities that would have looked into this scandal, like the Guardian?? Anyone at all? 😢
@@patclaus8510 In the UK there have been so many times the population have demanded The Press or at least Local News papers report things like we see it. Best examples are: Iraq war, anything to do with palestine, Grenfell Tower Disaster - basically anything to do with state and local government.
By state, I mean national in the UK's case. Even Julian Assange is still being victimised for performing real journalism. We dont have a 1st amendment in the UK and our constitution is arguably not written down.
Now 20 years after the Iraq war, a whole new generation of 'journalists' have come out of university having been taught some very narrow parameters and no sense of freedom or autonomy and the corresponding news customers dont expect it.
This might be slightly reversing imo since the latest horrifying events in the middle east. You may structure society out of its morality but the basic human compass is good and many journalists and state workers have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable of late.
Once the People Who Make The Rules are re-exchanged to people with a healthy Moral Compass, the system might become healthy. I see a glimmer of that but not in the next 30 years.
Did nobody actually look into detail on what has happened? Being at -30/40/100% of ypur income per day or week is something that can be easily checked with forensic accounting. Really? Nobody actually checked?
This tv drama will be shown on Australian tv free to air next week. It’s not been a news item here at all.
I'm Australian. I'm only just hearing about this matter for the first time now. I have to ask didn't anyone notice that after horizon was introduced, crooked postmasters suddenly emerged all over the place? Presumably there weren't hundreds of postmasters dipping their hands in the till before Horizon, so why didnt anyone in the Post Office's audit function notice? its one of the principles of auditing that any time there's a large and sudden change in behaviour that indicates something the auditor should take a look at. Another interesting question is in the practice of accounting, there is usually a plus column and a minus column for most things. So if postmaster had to cough up out of their own pockets for any shortfalls, were they allowed to pocket any of the opposite errors? And WERE there any overs in the Horizon system or did it always claim there was a shortfall? If so, that's another red flag for the Auditing people. I suspect if they found overs (the opposite of the shortfalls) i bet they just kept schtum about them so it didnt detract from their cases against the postmasters.
Good questions - and perhaps I'm missing something basic, but I still don't understand where the 'missing' money went - were there internal hackers in Fujitsu/ Horizon/ the Post Office, or was it targeted by external hackers? Or the IT system was so bad that it somehow managed to lose track of money streams completely? - something which should be impossible for an accounting system.
@@tantotonto For it to be so one-sided there are only two alternatives - a person was pocketing the missing money, or it wasn't a properly written double-entry accounting system. In a proper accounting system, for every debit there must be an equal credit somewhere. That is what ensures the books won't balance unless all the figures are correct. (or at least equally wrong)
Have the victims considered a class action suit against Fujitsu and the post office?
PO kept tell the "you are the only one" story to victims would say to me PO knew this was a lie & Management & Vennels knew that Horizon was not trustworthy.
Those politicians involved with the P.O.scandals are claiming they've not done anything wrong( they didn't do anything right) are trying to distance themselves from their time in the job and politicians that should have done something but didn't are now falling over them to finally put a great wrong right.
It was a great drama however why on earth did it take that to get justice
Question why would a uk branch of government get computer technolgy from a foriegn government like Japan ? The united states post office is a part of american government no american government will allow another government to have that kind of acess to a branch of our government
Because the people who run the GB Government are lazy and incompetent
Fujitsu is multinational plc
What has amazed me since reading the stoty in Computer Weekly and following on and off since as it appeared in the news is how many of these people are unfamiliar with computer software and hardware bugs. I can only assume they've never been regular users of computer systems that have monthly bug fix updates.
A Fijutsu IT engineer said that they NEVER discussed the Computer Weekly article in the office !
Other than that he seemed to answer honestly .
@@A2Z1Two3 Don't believe that for one minute
Fantastic analysis
Yes the ITV broadcast did put the rocket boosters on the scandal
I wouldn't be sure it’s the "greatest miscarriage of justice"? It's one of a shameful sequence of disgraceful episodes which eventually have come to light, and probably plenty more which have been buried. "British Justice" is now just another way of saying "injustice", and that"s how people around the word are going to use the expression.
It might be the biggest scandal ( for now) , but a prominent lawyer online has predicted that the NEXT big scandal will be the BBC and TV licensing prosecutions 😮.
Another of the principles of installing new systems is to run the new system in parallel with the old system. If you dont get the same answer from both, you cant implement the new system in full until you sort out why the differences. I spent the first 5 years of my career doing that kind of work. We never accepted that the new system was giving the right answers until we had another independent (usually manual) way to work out the figures, so we could prove the new system was giving the right answers. Usually that meant muggins (me) sitting at a desk for days and days with an adding machine and a big pile of invoices adding up the totals to see if they matched what the new system said it should be. Obviously no one did an adequate job of that before giving the Horizon system the "ok to roll out" release.
Mine should be quite easy once the perjurers are held to account from the 3 tribunal hearings and embarrassed post office counsel ian Groom has his evidence heard by a competent court as opposed to a complicit police force,
Murdoch intentionally contributes so much to society's breakdown.
Butter would not melt.
I will never go into a post office ever again
The strength of the drama & arts would answer why Ricky wants to reduce support for the arts
At the end of the day, the real issue stems from the Post Office management (mismanagement). They oversaw the installation of the software, based on information that they provided to Fujitsu. Clearly due diligence was not carried out. That gels well with my experience of working for the Post Office throughout the 1980s. That was in Brighton. The managers were incompetent loons as the management structure was based entirely on length of service and seniority, not on ability. Is it any wonder that the entire back office functions were relocated to Hastings in 1990 and Brighton Head Post Office was empty offices for years before being turned into a restaurant! I expect that managerial posts within the Post Office are still highly paid sinecures. The structure of the Post Office needs to be totally overhauled and that dinosaur totally privatised.
They can't be arsed asking anyone for anything. Why should they. Your forgiveness is irrelevant and apologies are impertinent. Cash them up and leave them alone.
As an American computer programmer, I would very much like to know WHAT were the errors in Horizon software? Improper calculation of pounds/shillings, etc. (your crazy English money perhaps not understood by Japanese programmers accustomed to base 10 increments), accounting errors, lack of independent testing and verification, or something more sinister?
The pound chanfed to a decimal system in 1971, so that could not have been the problem.
@@ingridschack4806- But did ALL the programmers at Fujitsu KNOW that? Maybe some did, some did NOT. That could cause MAJOR problems!
What an asinine comment. So Fujitsu UK employees all spoke Japanese and only ate sushi and took the bullet train home from London to Tokyo each night?! Also "crazy English money". what an obnoxious thing to say.
There is a long document online called the "Horizon Issues Judgement" in Bates v Post Office, which has a technical appendix you may be interested in.
As an Australian small business owner i want to know, did no one physically count every envelope, stamp, satchel, package sent, package received, how many stamps, envelopes ect received when ordered, how many physically still in the office...ect..post offices sell services, if money went missing, it would've shown in the number of stamps on hand...did no one do this, physically
If Ryan Reynolds played in a Wrexham match and refereed at the same time, him blowing the whistle everytime the team he owns and make money from lose possession would not be a "miscarriage of justice".
How many CBE:s will be revoked? (Just kidding, of course...)