LONDON (AP) — At least 13 people were thought to have taken their own lives as a result of Britain’s Post Office scandal, in which almost 1,000 postal employees were wrongly prosecuted or convicted of criminal wrongdoing because of a faulty computer system, a report said Tuesday.
Another 59 people contemplated suicide over the scandal, one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in U.K. history.
From around 1999 to 2015, hundreds of people who worked at Post Office branches were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on evidence from a defective information technology system. Some went to prison or were forced into bankruptcy. Others lost their homes, suffered health problems or breakdowns in their relationships or became ostracized by their communities.
Retired judge Wyn Williams, who chairs a public inquiry into the scandal, said in a report published Tuesday that 13 people killed themselves as a consequence of a faulty Post Office accounting system “showing an illusory shortfall in branch accounts,” according to their families.
The problems at the Post Office, which is state-owned but operates as a private business, were known for years. But the full scale of the injustice didn’t become widely known until last year, when a TV docudrama propelled the scandal to national headlines and galvanized support for victims.
The culprit was a piece of software called Horizon, made by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, which the Post Office introduced 25 years ago across branches to automate sales accounting. When the software showed false account shortfalls, the Post Office accused branch managers of dishonesty and obliged them to repay the money.
In all, the report said that about 1,000 people were prosecuted and convicted based on evidence from the incorrect data. The government has since introduced legislation to reverse the convictions and compensate the victims.
Williams said that some senior Post Office employees knew — or should have known — that the Horizon system was faulty. But “the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate,” he said.
Jo Hamilton, a former Post Office manager and a lead campaigner, said that the report “shows the full scale of the horror that they unleashed on us.”
In a statement, the Post Office’s chairman pledged to ensure that all victims are compensated.
The “Post Office did not listen to postmasters and, as an organization, we let them down. Postmasters and their families have suffered years of pain,” Nigel Railton said. “It has taken them too long to clear their names and, in many cases, to receive redress.”
Tuesday’s report was the first to be published from the inquiry, which was launched by the government and has the power to require evidence from all parties. It’s expected to issue a further report at a later date that will address who was at fault for overseeing the scandal and potentially attribute blame.
