The government must finally take decisive action on the Post Office scandal

Editorial: Although the initial failures did not happen on the Sunak government’s watch, and concerns were first raised in 2009 when Labour was in power, it falls to today’s ministers to speedily put right the mistakes of their predecessors

‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’ tells the story of one of the biggest scandals in British history (ITV)

It should not have taken the powerful, moving ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, to shame our politicians into giving their attention, long deserved, to the Horizon IT scandal, in which hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting. It has rightly been called “the most widespread miscarriage of justice” in British history.

More than 700 subpostmasters were convicted before the Post Office stopped taking action against them in 2019, some 10 years after the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance began its campaign. Many were jailed, made bankrupt, lost their homes and shamed in their local communities. At least four died by suicide and about 60 others died while awaiting compensation.

Vested interests in the Post Office management and Fujitsu, the Japanese computer firm that built, installed and ran the faulty Horizon system, did their level best to obfuscate and deny justice at every turn, forcing more than 500 subpostmasters to take High Court action after a mediation scheme collapsed. Although they won their legal battle in 2019, many received only £8,000; these payments should now be enhanced, and people who were bullied into paying money to the Post Office that they did not owe should be recompensed.