The Post Office

12:23Scott Darlington:I was kind of pleased, really, because I thought that, you know, somehow we'll get to the bottom of this. But the auditor, he asked me if I'd got the money in the branch that Horizon was saying, and I said no. And he said, oh, right, OK, so then he made a few phone calls, and they've got their own internal fraud squad at the post office, who are not the police, but they've got similar powers. And the first thing they said to me is they read me my rights, like the police do when they suspect you've committed an offence. And I said, oh, I thought you were here to help. But no, they then took me away in a car to another branch, a larger branch and upstairs there was a room set aside for tape-recorded interviews.

13:13Scott Darlington:And I was interviewed there and they were stood up, shouting down at me, where is the money, where have you put it?

13:19Nick Wallis:Scott says they wouldn't listen when he tried to explain. They just kept insisting he'd stolen the money.

13:25Scott Darlington:And I tell them, what's the point of stealing from your own business that you're responsible for? You know what I mean? It just didn't add up, but they wouldn't have it. And they came to search my house, and they could see that there was no really nice television sort of lovely car outside and things like that. So they realized there was nothing there.

13:47Nick Wallis:The investigators left. But they told Scott they were going to look at his financial records, and that he needed to give them access to his bank accounts. He was also suspended. He decided to reach out to the sub-postmasters union for help.

14:03Scott Darlington:When I rang the General Secretary, who's the top man, and told him my issue, I said, look, I've got these big discrepancies. What can you do to help me and everything? And he just said, oh, before we start, have you got any gambling problems? He said to me. This was the head man of the union. So straight away I knew whose side he was on. And I said, oh, hang on a minute, you know. I've got issues, you know, I need some help. and he's basically just dismissed me and he put the phone down literally and he knew straight away that they weren't going to help.

14:38Nick Wallis:Did you ever think for a second, maybe I am making a mistake, maybe someone is taking money, did it ever cross your mind that, okay, maybe I am doing something wrong?

14:52Scott Darlington:Yeah, it did. I mean, I had doubts. I just started thinking, what have I done? Maybe I've done this. and not in denial, but I just haven't realised or not noticed that it's been me.

15:05Nick Wallis:About two months into his suspension, Scott received a letter saying his contract had been terminated. He was charged with theft and five counts of false accounting. He says his lawyer told him there was a risk he would go to prison, but if he pled guilty to the false accounting charges, it would be less likely.

15:26Scott Darlington:So this was the first time I'd realised that there's a possibility I might be going to prison. Well, at that time, my daughter was only eight. There was no way I could be going down to prison and her dad being in prison and things like this.

15:38Nick Wallis:Scott says he refused to plead guilty to theft. And the post office ended up dropping the charge, after Scott's lawyer discovered an internal document that stated that the post office had found no evidence of theft. but Scott took his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to false accounting he says he could see how that could be true because he had covered up the discrepancies in the weekly balances

16:04Scott Darlington:and the judge decided I was guilty of false accounting and he sentenced me to two months in prison suspended for two years which means you don't actually go in but you still have the consequences of a criminal record what were you telling your family and friends yes very very difficult only the very closest people didn't realize what trouble i was in my brother my partner my daughter hadn't told her much um she knew there was something wrong but i didn't want to to know the ins and outs of all this financial dealings at only eight years old so i kept it fairly um quiet to her i didn't tell her too much about it.

16:49Scott Darlington:My friends, there was only a couple of friends earlier confiding in about it because obviously this is, it's really grim, it's really awful but after, when I'd been to court though and been found guilty, I was all over the newspapers then. I got online hates, you know from the online versions of the newspapers and it was awful because now there's me on the front of the newspaper saying I've pleaded guilty to false accounting at Old and Ledge Post Office. So I presumed, and rightly so, that everybody would think I was guilty, because I'd pleaded guilty. It was very difficult to go around and say, I wasn't guilty really, you know, there was all these issues.

17:28Scott Darlington:So it just put me in an awful situation. Now I felt like a pariah in society, you know, walking around.

17:34Nick Wallis:He says he struggled to find a new job with his criminal record.

17:38Scott Darlington:And I was 50 at the time as well. So I was freshly 50 with a nice new a criminal record looking for work, you know, this isn't easy.

17:47Nick Wallis:He became depressed and says he could barely function. At one point, he collapsed from stress and had to go to the hospital. He kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. And he kept thinking about the post office's computer system, Horizon. So one day he Googled it. And he found a website with stories just like his. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

18:22Nick Wallis:We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

18:42Nick Wallis:most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound, but they're just being babies.

18:56Scott Darlington:But switching to Geico saved me hundreds. So my bank account is safe.

18:59Nick Wallis:It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico. Whoa.

19:06Scott Darlington:Okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch.

19:11Nick Wallis:Yeah, they all do one.

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19:26Nick Wallis:Hang on, let me see that. Oh yeah, we're switching.

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19:45Nick Wallis:Savings based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 compared to average AT &T and Verizon bills. Comparison includes discounts, credits, and optional charges.

19:52Scott Darlington:$400 with new account on qualifying line, unlock device credit, ported in 90 plus days with device and carrier, entirely redemption required. Virtual MasterCard typically takes 14 weeks, no cash access, and expires in six months. Card issued by Sunrise Banks, and a member FDIC. Visit T-Mobile.com.

20:05Nick Wallis:In November 2010, a journalist named Nick Wallace was working at the BBC in Surrey. One morning, he got a message on Twitter from someone who worked at a local taxi company asking if the BBC needed drivers.

20:21Scott Darlington:If we had a taxi account, I would have just forwarded the tweet to my manager and let them deal with it. But we didn't, so I said something quite flippant, like, oh, well, that depends on whether or not your drivers will come on air and tell us some of their great stories. And I got a response back saying, oh, I've got a story to tell you all, right? And I thought, oh, that's interesting.

20:39Nick Wallis:Nick exchanged numbers with the man who ran the taxi company. His name was Devender Misra and gave him a call. And over about 40 minutes, very tearful minutes, and at times slightly rambling,

20:55Scott Darlington:he told me that his pregnant wife had been thrown in prison for a crime she didn't commit. And his pregnant wife was called Seema Misra, and she had been the sub-postmaster at West Byfleet Post Office. So Seema had been convicted of theft because she was alleged to have stolen£74 ,000 worth of money from her sub-post office and the evidence against her came from the Horizon IT system which said she had holes in her accounts She was complaining all the time that she was having problems with this computer system that she couldn't get the numbers to add up and that's when the post office had told her well if she didn't make them good she was going to lose her job as a sub-postmaster.

21:39So she covered up these discrepancies that she was getting.

21:43Scott Darlington:And the post office then decided that that was a criminal offence and they prosecuted her for false accounting and theft. Seema admitted false accounting, but she denied theft. She said, no, I have never consciously taken any money out of this system. It's just disappeared.

22:00Nick Wallis:But Seema was found guilty of both false accounting and theft and sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was eight weeks pregnant. Nick was interested in the story, and Evander Misra told him there was someone else he should talk to, another former sub-postmaster named Alan Bates.

22:22Scott Darlington:He was sacked in 2003 for refusing to accept liability for discrepancies in his account. He said, it's not me, it's not my staff, I've trained them well, It's your IT system. It's creating these discrepancies. Give me the proper tools that I need to interrogate my accounts properly. And then we will find the source of this discrepancy and we'll get it fixed. And the post office just said, no, the discrepancy is your liability. You make it good or you will get fired. And there was a standoff and Alan got fired. And he was so outraged by his treatment that he set up a website called postofficevictims.org.uk.

23:01Scott Darlington:and he asked for people who'd suffered at the post office's hands to get in touch. And by the time it got to 2009, they arranged their first meeting. And there were only about 20 sub-postmasters, former sub-postmasters, who turned up at the meeting, but it was the first time they'd all met face to face and they shared their stories. And they all realised that the post office had treated them in exactly the same way whilst telling them that they were the only people having problems with the Horizon IT system.

23:34Nick Wallis:The post office in the UK dates back to the 1660s, when it was set up by King Charles II.

23:41Scott Darlington:This was before Great Britain even existed. It's, we think, the oldest secular branch of government in existence. It was considered to be part of the fabric of the nation. It's very proudly run. It was always government owned. And it's a bit like the Pony Express in America. It has that kind of legendary status. And then in the 20th century, the image of the kindly couple running your local village post office, trustworthy, honest, center of the community, upstanding, entrepreneurial individuals who would always be looking out for people whilst providing the services that the post office did, became embedded in the national psyche as well.

24:27Scott Darlington:So you had this slightly warm, fuzzy community image.

24:32Nick Wallis:The sub-postmasters were handling things like people's pension payouts, banking deposits and withdrawals, and utility bill payments. Before 1999, it was up to the sub-postmasters to keep track of their transactions by writing everything down in a ledger.

24:50Scott Darlington:And the post office hated it. And what they didn't like was the fact that when they handed over money from cash centres to an individual post office, they lost sight of it. They were entirely reliant on the trustworthiness of the sub-postmaster and their signing of correct accounts. So when Horizon came along, it was like the Big Bang. It was going to open an electronic window on everything that was happening in a post office branch.

25:14Nick Wallis:The post office had contracted a software company called Fujitsu to develop Horizon. What they came up with was full of bugs and glitches. But Nick says the post office had already spent hundreds of millions of pounds on Horizon. So they decided to go through with the rollout.

25:34Scott Darlington:Because the post office weren't carrying the financial liability, the individual sub-postmasters were.

25:42Nick Wallis:According to their contract, sub-postmasters were responsible for any losses due to their negligence or error. and unless they could prove that any error was Horizon's fault, quote, deficiencies must be made good without delay. The sub-postmasters weren't told about the flaws in the system. Nick says the training on how to use the system was inconsistent. Some sub-postmasters received three weeks of training, but others were only given a single day. And at the time, some of the sub-postmasters weren't very familiar with computers. They were told if they had trouble with the Horizon system, there was a helpline they could call.

26:28Scott Darlington:Which colloquially quickly became named as the Horizon Hell Line, whereby sub-postmasters who, if they couldn't make their numbers add up, were supposed to call up and get some guidance. It quickly transpired that the helpline that was available to sub-postmasters was as patchy and ad hoc and sometimes downright inept as the training that they got. And they were often talking to frontline call centre workers who knew less about the system than they did, who were working to a script and who told them what to do. And if that didn't solve the problem, chances are they would be told, well, it's obviously a mistake at your end, you're going to have to make it good.

27:10Nick Wallis:Sometimes the calls to the helpline did end up being escalated enough that technicians would investigate. And sometimes they remotely implemented fixes.

27:20Scott Darlington:But of course, the post office had a vested interest in not telling its sub-postmasters about any errors in Horizon because it didn't want word getting out that it might be operating a substandard IT system. It was paranoid about protecting the reputation of this system because they'd bet the farm on it. So protecting the mothership became this prime directive of the post office. They could not countenance any criticism made privately by sub-postmasters and certainly not publicly because the whole edifice would come crashing down.

27:53Nick Wallis:Nick says the post office also told individual sub-postmasters who reported issues that they were the only ones having problems and that it couldn't be Horizon.

28:05Scott Darlington:and so they were told specifically by the post office that it couldn't be the it system because it was a computer system it's like a glorified calculator in it and it works brilliantly and no one has uh has has ever had a problem that like the one that they're describing so they were very very much on their own and it had an appalling effect on them because not only did they have to keep shoveling money into this system in order to get the books passed but these were competent often very skilled business people who started doubting their own sanity because they could not understand how money was falling through their fingers and yet didn't know what they were doing wrong and of course it led to all sorts of paranoid issues they would sack innocent staff because they assumed that they had to be the problem in fact they were often advised by their unions that they had to watch their staff like hawks the post office sometimes said well who else works behind the counter well if it's your wife have you looked at what your wife's doing You know, it broke up families.

29:03Nick Wallis:Several former sub-postmasters say that they became so overwhelmed with stress that they had a heart attack. By 2011, dozens of former sub-postmasters, including Scott Darlington, who had bought the post office in Alderley Edge, had joined Alan Bates' group, Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance. Scott remembers the first time he went to a meeting, people took turns telling their stories.

29:32Scott Darlington:And once you heard other people's stories, it was like a sense of relief that you knew for sure then that this wasn't you. But there's a long road ahead. I mean, even Alan said that, you know, we know there's some problem, but getting something done about it, there's another, you know, kettle of fish and it could take years, if at all.

29:53Nick Wallis:By this time, Nick Wallace had begun reporting on the story. But he says it wasn't really picked up by the national media. But one member of Parliament did hear about it. And in 2012, he and other members of Parliament pressured the post office into starting an external investigation into the problem. The external investigators struggled to get the post office to cooperate. They said requests for documents were often delayed or ignored. One of the lead investigators, a forensic accountant named Ian Henderson, said that when they finally received everything, it didn't take long to realize that, quote, we may be looking at a significant number of miscarriages of justice.

30:41Nick Wallis:Within a year, the investigators released a report. It revealed that there were flaws. in the Horizon system.

30:51Scott Darlington:And the post office was so appalled by this report that although it was forced to make the first iteration of this report public, it then engaged basically a black ops team to start undermining the credibility of this independent team and besmirching all their future work, literally issuing rebuttal documents to their own independent investigators over the course of the next two years that they were working for them. And so the post office knew it was sitting on a very, very serious problem. So we had the scandal of the prosecutions of these poor people being sent to prison despite not having committed a crime.

31:30Scott Darlington:And then from 2013 onwards, the post office knew it had a problem. And it did everything possible to stop that problem from becoming public.

31:42Nick Wallis:We'll be right back.

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33:29Nick Wallis:Ian Henderson, the forensic accountant investigating the post office, said that he, quote, felt we were dealing with a cover-up, and possibly a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, more and more former sub-postmasters had joined Alan Bates' group. In 2016, they filed a legal claim that became a class-action lawsuit the following year. The case was called Bates v. Post Office, and it included hundreds of former sub-postmasters.

34:02Scott Darlington:The number of postmasters, like myself, had grown to 555, which became, we were known as the 555.

34:09Nick Wallis:The judge assigned to the case decided to break proceedings up into separate trials. The first would focus on the contract the sub-postmasters had signed with the post office. It began in November 2018, and many of the sub-postmasters travelled to London from all over the country to attend. A lawyer representing them argued that the post office held too much power over the sub-postmasters, partly because the contract itself was unfair, and partly because many of the sub-postmasters had never even seen the whole contract. Alan Bates testified that he'd only been sent three short documents, and that he'd had no idea the full contract was 114 pages long.

35:01Nick Wallis:Another former sub-postmaster testified that she'd taken over the job from her husband after he died. She said she'd never seen any contract and had never heard her husband mention it. And it turned out the post office had no record that he had ever signed a contract. The judge hadn't ruled on the first trial yet when the second trial began three months later in March 2019. This trial would be investigating the Horizon system itself. A former employee from Fujitsu, the company that created the Horizon system, testified.

35:42Scott Darlington:Richard Roll worked at Fujitsu between 2001 and 2004, and he was hired to work in a team of 30 in the secure unit at the Fujitsu headquarters in Berkshire in the UK. fixing problems with Horizon. They would deal with support tickets that came through that pointed to faults with hardware, software, communications, whatever. And he described the system as very, very shaky. In fact, he used a particular word, which is quite rude to describe how bad the system was.

36:17Nick Wallis:What word did he use?

36:19Scott Darlington:He said it was a pile of shit.

36:22Nick Wallis:Richard Roll also spoke about the work he'd done at Fujitsu and about doing something that the post office had said was not possible, remotely accessing the sub-Postmasters Horizon terminals.

36:34Scott Darlington:He said he and his colleagues went into the terminals that were sitting remotely on Postmasters branch counters and fixed problems in them overnight. They even had the power to download everything that was in a Postmasters branch, branch, look at all the code, alter it, including the numbers in the branch account, and then re-download it.

36:59Nick Wallis:And it was important because before, you know, it was the post office saying, well, only the sub-postmasters have access to the system, so they're the ones making the mistakes. No one else could be making a mistake.

37:12Scott Darlington:Exactly that. the post office flatly denied that it or Fujitsu had any way of altering the branch accounts of a sub-postmaster. And they had to deny it because they prosecuted these people on the basis that they were the only ones who had control of their accounts. Now, if remote access was not just possible, but people like Richard Roll had been doing it on a regular basis, then there was no way these prosecutions could be safe.

37:44Nick Wallis:And then, in the middle of the second trial, the judge issued his ruling on the first trial. The judge wrote that parts of the sub-postmaster's contract were, quote, oppressive, and that at times the post office acted as though it is answerable only to itself. He also wrote that during the trial, one senior post office official had tried to mislead him and, quote, paint the post office in the most favourable light possible, regardless of the facts.

38:17Scott Darlington:And it was damning of the post office, to the extent that the post office applied to have the judge booted off the case.

38:25Nick Wallis:The post office claimed that the judge was biased. The judge refused to remove himself, so the post office went to the Court of Appeal. But the Court of Appeal ruled that the post office's attempt to remove the judge was, quote, absurd. When the second trial finally resumed, independent IT experts testified that they'd found dozens of bugs with the Horizon system and that they'd uncovered a report from 2001 that explicitly stated there was a bug with Alan Bates' Horizon terminal. Before the judge's ruling, the post office and the sub-postmasters agreed to a settlement of£57 ,750 ,000. Nick says even though it looked like a big number, it didn't leave much for each individual sub-postmaster.

39:18Nick Wallis:When Scott Darlington heard the news, he started doing the calculations.

39:23Scott Darlington:£45 million of that was taken up in legal fees. There was only£11 million left between the£555 million. Well, unfortunately, if you do the maths on that, it's only about£20 ,000 each. and most of us had lost our homes, our livelihoods, businesses, everything, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds. This isn't going to touch the sides. So this was a bit of a, it was a great result, but a disastrous outcome financially for us all.

39:47Nick Wallis:And many of them, like Scott Darlington and Seema Misra, still had criminal convictions. The judge issued his ruling for the second trial five days after the settlement was announced. He wrote that the post office continuing to claim that Horizon was reliable was, quote, the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat. And then he said one last thing.

40:15Scott Darlington:He was so gravely concerned about some of the evidence that he had seen given in previous trials where post office and Fujitsu witnesses had essentially given false evidence that he was going to pass a file to the director of public prosecutions, which he did. And the director of public prosecutions passed that file on to the Metropolitan Police. And the Metropolitan Police started their investigation in January 2020. And it's still ongoing. It's called Operation Olympus. It's been running for five years now. And they have said on the record that they are looking to start charging some of the people responsible in 2027 or 2028.

41:03Nick Wallis:After the post office settled in late 2019, the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the UK started referring cases of convicted sub-postmasters to the Court of Appeal. In December 2020, six sub-postmaster convictions were overturned. Seema Misra and Scott Darlington were both exonerated in April of 2021. A public inquiry began formally hearing evidence in 2022 and found a, quote, disastrous human impact and that at least 13 people affected by the Horizon errors have died by suicide. When we reached out to the post office press office for comment, they directed us to a statement on their website.

41:49Nick Wallis:which reads in part,

42:00Nick Wallis:At least 900 convictions have been tied to the Horizon errors. But by May 2024, only 103 of those had been overturned. That month, in what The Guardian called an unprecedented act of Parliament, the British government passed a law overturning all the remaining convictions. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has said it's, quote, the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. Compensation plans have been set up for the sub-postmasters, affected by the Horizon errors. But many are still waiting to be paid.

42:42Scott Darlington:And there are people who've applied for compensation who are nearing the end of their lives, who still haven't yet been processed by this compensation system. So it's had to be taken off the post office. It's now in the hands of the government, which is added to the delays. And although a billion pounds in compensation has been paid out already, there are people with complicated cases who are unwell, who are desperate for money, who are potentially nearing the end of their lives, many of whom have died. I mean, we think the figures are now more than 200 people have died waiting. for their full and final compensation.

43:19Nick Wallis:Five former sub-postmasters, including Seema Misra, have received awards from the British state honouring their work campaigning for justice. Alan Bates was knighted. Scott Darlington still lives six miles outside Alderley Edge. Do you go into the post office branch to... To do things now? I mean, is it kind of bittersweet walking into the post office?

43:49Scott Darlington:I don't go in, no. I have had to go in a couple of times in the last 16 years, but as a rule, I don't go in, no.

44:04Nick Wallis:Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. This episode was mixed by Michael Rayfield. Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Nick Wallace's book is The Great Post Office Scandal, the fight to expose a multi-million pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail. You can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

44:46Nick Wallis:We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com slash criminal. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast.

45:23Nick Wallis:Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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