The Great Post Office Scandal

This is the extraordinary story behind the major ITV drama series recounting how hundreds of innocent subpostmasters fought back to clear their names after they had been prosecuted using evidence from a faulty software system, a fight dragged out by the Post Office’s refusal to accept responsibility for its failings.

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

It tells of 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 recounts 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 series 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 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.