The Post Office expected a few hundred people to claim under the Horizon Shortfall Scheme. By the initial claim deadline, 2,417 had.
That gap appears in the latest Public Accounts Committee report on government compensation schemes. The report says the Department for Business and Trade “acknowledges that it and Post Office Limited misunderstood the scale of the Horizon IT scandal, and it was only in the months and years after launching the Horizon Shortfall Scheme that it realised how many people were affected.” The scheme was set up after the Post Office lost in the High Court in 2019. Many more claims have come in since, especially after ITV dramatised the scandal in January 2024.
What the Post Office said in public
The Post Office had long pointed to the size of the Horizon system when its reliability was questioned. In 2009, when Computer Weekly first investigated, a spokesperson said: “Horizon is an extremely robust system which operates over our entire Post Office network [12,000 branches] and successfully records millions of transactions each day.”
Alan Bates, now Sir Alan, led the Justice for Subpostmaster Alliance. Over the years more subpostmasters came forward with their own problems. A group legal action against the Post Office ended in a win for them and led to the compensation scheme.
Bates gave evidence to the committee. He told Computer Weekly: “The Post Office claimed that many thousands of people used Horizon over the years, how could they only expect a few hundred to make claims? They’ve been well aware of the numbers. It’s a total lack of joined-up thinking at Post Office, which has haunted the whole of this sorry saga. They constantly try to minimise everything and look at it from the position of protecting the Post Office.”
Ron Warmington, the Second Sight investigator who helped expose the scandal, rejected the word misunderstanding. He called it “wilful blindness”. “I’m dumbfounded by that assertion, which flies in the face of crystal-clear evidence that was available from the middle of 2014,” he said. “Even before that, the Post Office’s wilful blindness in regard to the massive impact that the Horizon problems had was obvious to us.”
Other schemes, same complaints
The committee also took evidence from claimants in the Windrush and infected blood scandals and criticised the government sharply. Most respondents to its survey said the scheme they dealt with felt unfair, and 76% called the claim process distressing or retraumatising. The report describes “a litany of unacceptable problems with how multiple schemes set up to compensate people harmed by public bodies are currently run.”
It wants a new independent body, one that “could be trusted to design and administer all government compensation schemes.”
Computer Weekly first exposed the Post Office scandal in 2009, telling the stories of seven subpostmasters hurt by problems with the Horizon accounting software. It became the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history.
Sources
- ‘Wilfully blind’ Post Office thought just a few hundred affected by Horizon errors | Computer Weekly
