The Great Post Office Scandal (eBook)

The Great Post Office Scandal is the extraordinary story behind the recent ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. 

This gripping page-turner recounts how thousands of subpostmasters were accused of theft and false accounting on the back of evidence from Horizon, the flawed computer system designed by Fujitsu, and how a group of them, led by Alan Bates, took their fight to the High Court. Their eventual victory in court vindicated their claims about the defects of the software and exposed the heavy handed attempts by the Post Office to suppress them. 

The book also chronicles how successive senior managers, business leaders, lawyers, civil servants and Government ministers, at best failed to expose the injustice or, even worse, sought to cover it up, resulting in one of the largest miscarriages of justice in UK history. 

The author, Nick Wallis, is a journalist and broadcaster who has been reporting on the scandal for over ten years and who acted as script consultant on Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that brought the affair into the national consciousness.

As the public inquiry reaches its climax, and senior figures such as Paula Vennells come to be questioned, The Great Post Office Scandal reveals the full scale of what happened and will leave you enraged at how so many of our trusted institutions allowed the saga to go on for nearly a quarter of a century, shattering the lives of thousands of innocent people. 

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On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. They had been prosecuted by the Post Office using IT evidence from an unreliable computer system called Horizon. When the Post Office became aware that Horizon didn't work properly, it covered it up.Nick describes how a group of Subpostmasters worked out what was going on, formed a campaign group and fought the government-owned Post Office through the courts to eventual victory.The Great Post Office Scandal has been described as "e;an extraordinary journalistic expose of a huge miscarriage of justice"e; by Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye Magazine. Dame Joan Bakewell says "e;Nick's narrative has the power of a great thriller as he lays bare the lies and deceit that has ruined so many lives."e;