Peace of mind has a price, and the Post Office hasn’t paid it.
Possibly unlike many FT readers it’s fairly unusual for me to find serious amounts of money deposited into my bank account unexpectedly. Let’s just say I’ve bought a house for less. It’s not something I expect to happen often in the future, but after my first wave of total disbelief I thought something else: it wasn’t enough.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I was a partner in a business information company; market research, if you can separate that in your mind from someone approaching you with a clipboard in the street and asking you about nappies. Because we specialised in researching technical and IT issues, and also because we didn’t know any better at the time and thought it meant we were going places, ICL-Fujitsu became one of our clients. To be fair, we did go places. The epic time-wasting trips to New York and New England were fun, apart from the time I mixed my time-zones up and realised in a bar that I’d been looking at the wrong watch all night and now had precisely forty minutes to stop drinking, go to bed, go to sleep, get up, wash, shave and look presentable enough to meet the client to do a interview with a downtown banker about middleware. But ICL weren’t fun at all, as 800 postmasters found out when they used their Horizon accounting system and went to prison, because the company wouldn’t tell the truth about it under the guise of client confidentiality.
We already had doubts about the wisdom of taking them on because as a small research agency, cash flow was king, and while some of our nicest clients paid us within 48 hours because they valued what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, ICL demanded 90 days, not our usual 30-day terms with half on commissioning and half on completion.
Actual, verifiable lies
What we got was 90 days before the minimum of two total and utter lies about the sign-off and where the payment had got to. The record was five. Not mistakes. Actual lies, about invoices having been approved, or signed off or cheques sent.
We had more doubts when a straightforward presentation degenerated into two sides of the boardroom table hurling threats, insults and everything except chairs and laptops across it, during which we sat amazed and silent at how people who weren’t auditioning for The Sopranos actually behaved like this. But we’d been amazed earlier that day when only seven years after it had become established as a by-word for reliability one of ICL’s senior staff asked us whether we thought Linux would catch on. They weren’t joking.
Criminal fraud
When we found unarguable evidence of criminal fraud in their sales team, with a senior account manager happily billing for visits we proved never happened, to ‘regular clients’ who’d junked their ICL kit years previously, we were told we were ‘difficult to work with.’ It should have been a warning and we took it as one. After New York we didn’t pitch for any more work from ICL-Fujitsu. They clearly weren’t interested in the truth.
After we both separately became very ill indeed we wound-up the market research company. Looking for something to do I took over the Post Office in an idyllic Suffolk village, joined the Parish Council, opened a bijou little cafe-deli and looked forward to bucolic bliss at the heart of the community.
I was there when the previous Post-mistress was signed-out. Two people from the Post Office came to check the stock, the stamps, the tax discs, the money in the till and the money in the safe and to close the Horizon system down on her. They said that if the operator owed the Post Office money, it had to be paid there and then. The postmistress asked if she could check the inventory. They said yes. She asked if a cheque would be ok for the £200-odd she owed the Post Office, on the basis that Horizon said so. They said she could, and it would. She asked if that would be the full and final settlement, everything was closed, everything was accounted for, and again, they said it would be the end of it. I watched her write out the cheque, sign it and hand it over.
It doesn’t work like that
Then she reached for the roll of over a hundred tax discs and said, “So I’ll keep these, as they don’t exist.” They checked. According to Horizon, the roll of tax discs she was holding not only didn’t exist, it had never even been in the building. But the Post Office man spoke in the corporation’s true voice when he said, “Oh, I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.”
It never did. Horizon, the Post Office and ICL-Fujitsu only ever spoke with one voice – Horizon cannot be wrong. The official view seemed to be that the post-masters and mistresses up and down the country fell into two groups: the ones who’ve fiddled the till and been convicted and the ones they hadn’t caught yet. That’s how it felt at the time.
You could spend hours after closing time trying to get Horizon to match what was in the till. Some days the error was more than we’d taken in the entire day, with Horizon and therefore the Post Office adamant that you may well say you only sold £160 worth of stamps, someone bought a £20 postal order, and someone else put £100 in their bank account, but Horizon shows there should be £400 in the till. If there isn’t, you have to put money in until there is. This reconciliation happened every day, with a big weekly session on Wednesday, which was supposed to be half-day closing. Which was nice, assuming you ever got out from behind the counter before six, trying to make Horizon balance with reality.
There was a Horizon helpline, it’s true, but it closed on the stroke of 6pm. You couldn’t trial balance until the Post Office closed, so shutting the doors and turning the little sign on the door at 5:30 on the dot, you had ten minutes after you’d failed to trial balance to call them. Then you’d be told that it must be you, that nobody had ever had any issues like this ever before going back to the days of Roland Hill and that Horizon was never wrong. It couldn’t be. It was a computer system, by a British company that went back, like their attitudes, to 1919.
You’d go home wondering where you were going to find today’s shortfall but you also knew that sometimes, quite often, the system that couldn’t be altered would show a different figure in the morning. Or in two days. Or a week. Sometimes it was worse, and mine built up to well over £1,000 once, before it simply disappeared down to a couple of hundred. It was obvious someone was fiddling the figures and it certainly wasn’t me. I don’t know how to write computer code and the Horizon terminal wasn’t exactly easily accessible to input anything except money and stock in and out. I don’t know how much I put in to make up the shortfall the Post Office insisted I had when I was closed out, at the end of 2012. I don’t know how much I had put in during the time I was there. The Post Office had said I wasn’t allowed to keep my own records.
I remember clearly being thought of as a criminal liar, someone who was obviously fiddling the till every week, thinking if I kept it small and often the all-seeing Post Office wouldn’t notice. The woman who ran the Post Office in the next village tried to kill herself because of it.
Two years ago I was offered just over £2,000 as a full and final settlement. I thought it was the least they could do, so I accepted it. Six weeks ago I had an email from the Post Office. It reminded me I’d accepted a full and final settlement. As it was from the Post Office, I assumed the rest of the email was going to tell me there was a mistake, I must have made it and they wanted the money back by return, or else.
It didn’t say that. If it wasn’t a spoof or a phishing trip to get my account number out of me, the email offered me a shed-load of money as another full and final settlement, although disappointingly it didn’t say ‘and this time we really mean it, cross my heart and hope to die.’ But presumably Paula Vennells didn’t dictate this email personally.
Confused doesn’t really sum-up how I felt. I thought win some, lose some, I thought that for a stupid scam it looked more than a bit official, with five pages and a plausible email address, and for all that it looked like a scam, asking for my bank account details, it didn’t ask for the three little numbers that would allow whoever was pretending to be the Post Office to go shopping on Amazon. I signed it anyway and waited for the up to ten working days the email said it would take to see the money in my bank.
I was online sitting through the weekly work meeting while waiting for lot 374 to come up at the Monday sale at the local auction house (‘a Henry vacuum cleaner, est. £20-£40’, property formerly hopefully of the deceased owner of a weekend home here in Suffolk, who used it once a week if that) when my phone pinged. Money in. The balance of a lot of money.
Since then it became more than slightly difficult to concentrate on my work, even if I’d liked working there in the first place. I had several first thoughts. Buy a ruin in France. Buy a field in England and a shepherd’s hut. I still quite like that idea. Give a friend some money to tide her through the cashflow issue that bothers her otherwise very nice business.
“I know nothing.”
I remember when that used to be a comedy catchphrase on Fawlty Towers, but I didn’t predict a future when the CEO of a massive national organisation felt it was all she needed to say to move things along. But I had another thought too, prompted by the memory of Paula Vennell’s pathetic sobbing, presumably because those awful men at the enquiry wouldn’t just shut up and leave her alone, because for heaven’s sake she was only the CEO of the Post Office, so how could she be expected to know what had been going on for a decade there? My other thought was that the money wasn’t enough.
I like having the money in the bank. It still feels odd to think that for all the times I’ve looked at Bentleys or Porsches and thought ‘ if I had the money I’d buy that’, well, now I could. And still have change. But it isn’t enough. No amount of money would be. Because the Horizon scandal wasn’t about the money. It was about an organisation and the people who worked for it knowing what the truth was and lying about it. It was about a one-way street, where the front-line staff who had to face the public were treated as liars and their lying seniors could be seen to do no wrong. If over 800 people had to go to prison, if some had to go bankrupt, or kill themselves, or lose their families, or have their entire community thinking they were thieves, then that was simply a price the Post Office was prepared to have their Postmasters pay.
This year, Paula Vennells had her title as Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the CBE, revoked for bringing the honours system into disrepute. She resigned as chair of the Imperial College NHS Trust in 2020, and in 2021 from her non-executive directorships at Dunelm and Morrisons. She’s even stopped being a vicar, notwithstanding the Church’s long-established practice of not asking too many questions about things that might not turn out to be true.
In every email and letter I sent to the Post Office since 2012, I’ve told them they ought to be ashamed. I would be, if as a male CEO I thought I could get away with sobbing during my examination and seriously expected to get any job anywhere at all in future. In reality though, I’ve seen nothing that suggests anyone in charge at the Post Office or at ICL is, was, or will be ashamed. From where I sit looking at my shiny new bank account, it looks to me as if the only shame anyone at the top of the Post Office felt was the shame of being caught. I think I can safely assume it certainly won’t include the shame of a public criminal trial, a conviction or a prison sentence.
But there’s no danger, it’s a professional career
That’s why the money isn’t enough and why no amount of money could be. It’s impossible to compensate for a system which says that like the friends of government ministers who were gifted £4 billion of tax money to supply defective PPE, the people at ICL and the Post Office who made the decision to prosecute their staff when they knew their system was defective won’t suffer in any way. They won’t be arrested, charged or go to court. That’s not the way things work now.
What Horizon demonstrated above anything wasn’t that people lie; some people always have. It demonstrated a more abstract concept, that when they do, some people who didn’t do anything wrong will go to prison while the people who lied get to keep their pensions. I was only following orders wasn’t accepted as a defence at Nuremberg. It feels odd knowing that I live in a country where that’s a more than adequate defence now.
