[TL:DR – a thorough account of how a trusted organisation prosecuted 900 of its own people for crimes they did not commit, extracted large amounts of money from them and sent a good few to prison. They then covered this up for 15 years. 10% of the revenue from sales goes to the fund to assist Sub-postmasters in their claims. Buy this book!]

This book is about the failures of the (UK) Post Office's Horizon terminal system which was rolled out to all Post Offices from October 1999. Within a very short time, discrepancies started showing up in the amounts tendered by (predominantly) Sub-postmasters and the amounts reported by the Horizon system. From the outset, the Post Office held firm to the view that the Horizon system was perfect and without fault, and so any shortfalls must be down to the Sub-postmasters themselves, either through incompetence or criminal activity. “No-one else is reporting any such problems” was their mantra when the Sub-postmasters complained that there had been discrepancies which they had variously reported. Over the next 15 years, some 900 people were prosecuted for a range of offences including false accounting, theft and embezzlement. Where the Post Office could not prove theft – which was in the vast majority of the cases – they offered a plea bargain whereby the theft charge would be dropped if the accused pleaded guilty to false accounting, a lesser charge which nonetheless resulted in a number of Sub-postmasters serving prison terms. (Oddly, this seemed more common where the sub-postmaster was of south Asian heritage. Odd, that.)

This book is the account by the investigative journalist Nick Wallis of how the scandal – for scandal it is – emerged, how he began investigating a local news story that didn't quite hold up, and how this snowballed into “a scandal so big it could be seen from space”, as one commentator put it.

(Note for non-UK readers: Post Offices in the UK are divided into two types of establishment; Crown Offices, which are usually dedicated buildings owned by the Post Office with permanent Post Office staff, often co-located with delivery offices where post is sorted for final delivery; and so-called ”Sub-Post Offices”, which are post office counters located in retail premises, run by an individual shopkeeper who buys and sells Post Office services, such as stamps, postal orders and a variety of application forms, and cashes state pensions and benefits, The shop itself in these situations may sell a range of retail goods alongside the Post Office services. The Sub-postmasters are not Post Office employees, but more akin to sub-contractors. They operate under a contract with the Post Office, but the arrangements for the administration of those contracts at the time of the scandal were distinctly lax.)

Horizon was rolled out across the entire Post Office operation. Whilst most of the 900 prosecutions were of Sub-postmasters, some Crown Office counter staff were also held accountable for cash shortfalls generated by the Horizon system, though the nature of the Crown Office organisation meant that shortfalls were intercepted earlier and discrepancies were not allowed to run so far out of hand as they were in Sub Post Offices.

I work as a software tester for a specialist company with one core product. Our product is highly mature and offers our clients a lot of functionality. We are currently engaged in a project to bring our product up to date with current architectures and methodologies. This has occupied us for a number of years, and the complexities we are finding bring home to me the amount of work any system demands to incorporate all the necessary functionality and ensure that the system delivers correctly under as many circumstances as can be anticipated, and despite everything we can imagine users doing to it.

In contrast, the book's overview sets out that the contractor, Fujitsu, allocated eight developers and gave them a year to introduce an EPoS system to over 40,000 Post Office counters, starting from a base of nothing. Of those eight, only two seemed to be at all competent. Specifications were sketchy or non-existent, and the main clients, the Post Office and the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) kept changing the specifications throughout the project - up until the point where the DWP pulled out of the project when they got first sight of what Fujitsu were proposing to deploy and realised how far short it was falling of any sort of acceptable performance.

The original proposal was that pension books and benefit Girocheques would be replaced with a swipe card for every benefit recipient to give them access to their payments. DWP's withdrawal was a problem for Fujitsu, as the original contract would have given them a payment for each DWP transaction conducted with those swipe cards through the Horizon system. With their future cash flow from the project severely impacted and the project reduced to operating on a fixed price for delivery, their impetus to put resources into the project waned.

What I'd heard about this case made me think in the first place that it holds great lessons for those of us involved in designing, building, testing and deploying IT systems. But the scale of the scandal goes beyond the IT failings; an unreliable system was backed up by a contractor who seems to have been unwilling to be open with their client over the problems they were seeing. Add to this a business that was convinced of the rightness of its position at all times, who failed to carry out any root cause analysis of reported problems, and who held their Sub-postmasters almost in contempt as “second-class employees” - though as I said above, Sub-postmasters were more akin to subcontractors – and it can be seen that there were massive cultural and moral problems in the whole organisation.

These problems were themselves the result of a collision between business systems that evolved over hundreds of years and the aim of recent Governments to deal with a clash between traditional working relationships and a stricter, more monetarist and contractual way of viewing employment. As further examples of this, understand that in the UK, Police Constables are not police employees but Officers of the Crown, and so have a different legal status to someone in an employment contract; and when I joined the Civil Service in 1980, I too was a Crown Officer and so also did not have a contract of employment. Only with the dispute over trade union membership at the Government Communications HQ during the 1980s was this put before the courts and a compromise arrived at. The same happened with PCs. And it was this legal ambiguity that fuelled attitudes towards Sub-postmasters in the Post Office.

Meanwhile, the Horizon system was not performing properly in many locations almost from Day One. Examples of the problems include:
- The only way Sub-postmasters could get a hard copy transaction statement to try to balance their accounts was to print out the day's transactions via the same 3.5" till roll printer that generated customer receipts.
- There was no regression testing - tests to show that new features haven't damaged the existing code - done for new releases, operating system upgrades, or any other operating environment changes.
- There was a lack of versioning control internally at Fujitsu, so that when bug fixes were deployed to the live Horizon system, the same fixes weren't applied to the internal development versions. So the next time Fujitsu developers were given a bug to fix, they applied the fix to an outdated version of the system, so that when the fix was deployed, old bugs reappeared.
- First-line support teams had no better knowledge of the system than the users. Access to what we would think of as tech support was only accessible via the third tier of support and had to be approved within the Post Office hierarchy at second tier support level.
- Bugs that were reported were not handled or dealt with consistently.
- One bug impacted directly on anyone trying to roll back transactions; when a transaction was rolled back, instead of subtracting the transaction value from the system, Horizon actually added it, thus doubling the discrepancy.
- Another bug meant that if a user failed to get a response out of the system and kept hitting the Return key, each keystroke repeated the transaction in the background but did not show those transactions directly to the user even when the system started responding again. If you think that many Sub-postmasters were unfamiliar with IT, you will understand the temptation to try and get the system to respond by repeating keystrokes.
- Because Fujitsu were unwilling to admit to there being bugs in the system, Post Office managers maintained that any discrepancies were down to either user error or malicious actions.

There are a whole pile of other factors at work here in terms of the business: the sub-postmasters' demographics (many were former armed forces or police personnel, and were viewed with disdain by the Post Office as amateurs, if not potential villains seeing a village sub post office as a 'soft target'); the whole vision of a sub-post office as a business (many Sub-postmasters were coping perfectly well with the old paper-based systems and were not tuned into the business expansion aspirations of the Post Office's senior management that Horizon would enable) and politics.

There are three organisations directly involved in the affair: Fujitsu as the contractor, the Post Office as the client, but who then has to manage the implementation and who also had independent prosecution powers without having to refer cases to the Crown Prosecution Service; and the National Federation of Sub Postmasters (NFSP), who started out in 1897 as the Sub-postmasters' trade union, but had undergone so much “employer capture” that by the time members started going to their NFSP representatives for assistance, they were faced with a wall of willing compliance with the Post Office's position.

In the end, the Post Office demonstrated their contempt for even paying lip service to the NFSP's role as a union, and withdrew collective bargaining rights. Eventually, in 2014, the Trades Union Certification Officer withdrew the NFSP's certification as a trade union, as a court had ruled that Sub-postmasters were not employees. The Post Office took over funding the NFSP instead of it relying on members' subscriptions. The NFSP's failure to support their members in dispute with the Post Office may certainly have contributed to the withdrawal of certification; certainly, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) would have looked very unfavourably on any organisation purporting to be a trade union but not supporting members in dispute, and would have doubtless told the Certification Officer so when asked to comment.

(This is something Wallis fails to mention in the book, though he has little good to say about the NFSP. Indeed, one of those involved in the investigation was an NFSP official who eventually resigned the NFSP and joined the Communications Workers' Union [CWU], whose remit is somewhat wider. Trade union independence is a key part of workplace relations, and the role of the NFSP should serve as a warning to anyone who feels that trade unions wield too much power in our economy. The NFSP now works with the Post Office on projects of “mutual interest” but it is not allowed to be in any way critical of any of the actions of the Post Office. But I digress.)

A further player, who has remained very tight-lipped throughout the whole affair, has been the Government. The Post Office is a Government-owned company, but it has been given day-to-day autonomy over all its decisions. The Government is represented on the Board by a senior civil servant who is supposed to report back to the Secretary of State for Business (or whatever they are called this week), and to convey messages back to the Post Office from Government. But very little has been said about how much various Governments knew about Horizon and the effort made to conceal the true state of affairs about it. When questioned directly in Parliament, Ministers have said very little. This suggests a number of possibilities:

- Ministers and senior civil servants knew what was happening but accepted the Post Office line on the cases; or
- The Post Office restricted knowledge of the true state of Horizon to a sub-set of the Board so as to conceal matters from the Government; or
- When MPs started making their own enquiries arising out of cases reported by their constituents or which they had come across in the media, Ministers instructed the Post Office to ensure that damage could be limited to a few key scapegoats, and/or that Ministers could have plausible deniability; or
- Any combination of the above.

Certainly, Government does not get off scot-free.

As I read this, almost every page was being punctuated by mental cries from me of "They did what???" So much of the way the Post Office conducted their investigations and prosecutions was contrary to natural justice and the law. Even if local audit teams reported hardware issues, hardware returned to Fujitsu was never subjected to investigation; where this became the subject of legal actions, that hardware was found to be unavailable for independent forensic investigation (in other words, evidence was tampered with or destroyed). (In a previous life as a lay trade union official, I once won a disciplinary case partially on the grounds that a laptop that could have clearly shown the actions my member took had been returned to the office laptop pool and its hard drive wiped before any investigation could be carried out.) And similarly, when one of the Sub-postmasters reached the stage of appeal, he was told that all the documentation in his case, even down to his original Sub-Postmaster's Contract, had been mysteriously "lost in a fire". This happened worryingly often.

The bulk of the book is about the business side of the scandal and the hoops the investigative journalists, legal teams and the Sub-postmasters themselves had to jump through to prove their innocence. There appears to have been a vast amount of groupthink amongst Post Office executives and a dogged determination, in the light of that groupthink, that the Sub-postmasters must have been on the take despite an almost complete lack of evidence to prove theft. Aggressive questioning by Post Office investigators, plus a failure to carry out any root cause analysis of reported cash shortfalls, seem to have been the main features of what must be considered to be major miscarriages of justice,

There are still questions over a number of things: as far as I am aware, the Director of Public Prosecutions is still considering whether individuals should be prosecuted for the crimes of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Another question arises over the way Sub-postmasters tried to fill the financial holes created by the Horizon system. Many Sub-postmasters tried desperately to backfill the shortfalls that were being reported falsely by the system and poured tens of thousands of pounds of their own money – savings, investments, revenue from non-Post Office sales, money raised through loans and re-mortgages, money lent by friends and family - into the Post Office. Others were subject to attachments of earnings or Proceeds of Crime Act orders which effectively were trying to make up for reported shortfalls which didn't exist. This money went to the Post Office, and there could be a case to answer that the Post Office itself could be guilty of false accounting. This one will run and run.

Perhaps the wider message to be taken from this is the need for there to be IT knowledge at Board level on many companies. Fujitsu delivered a flawed system but told the Post Office that it was fit for purpose. The Post Office then believed that despite continuing overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There was no-one on the Board who knew enough about IT to say "That just cannot be true - all systems have bugs". Increasingly, many companies who use IT heavily have Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) on or reporting to the Board, so you would hope that this level of blanket complacency over systems - especially systems contracted out where the company has no day-to-day presence with the contractor - will be a thing of the past.

But don't hold your breath.

This book is just the story of the Sub-postmasters' fight for justice, told from their point of view by the investigative journalist who pieced the story together. There are other stories to be told: the history of the Horizon project, from concept to commissioning, and then the internal decisions taken and the points at which different decisions could have led to different outcomes. There is also an important story to be told about Government involvement – who knew what, and when, and what (if anything) was done about it. Government silence on this is worrying. At the end of the day, Post Office Board members, senior and some middle managers in the Post Office and Fujitsu, and Government Ministers all had roles in this disaster. That story has yet to be told, and probably won't be for many years as court cases rumble on.

The book's timeline ends in August 2021. Since then, there have been Parliamentary hearings and a separate statutory enquiry is ongoing. There have been submissions to the Director of Public Prosecutions over the potential and scope for investigations into whether persons within the Post Office conspired to pervert the course of justice. The matter of compensation for those prosecuted drags on, with the Post Office still seeming to be dragging their feet and Government not helping the cause of justice by lobbing the whole issue into the long grass. How the change of Government over the past month will affect progress remains to be seen. Nick Wallis maintains a blog on the whole affair: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/

Justice deferred is justice denied, Three Sub-postmasters passed away before the Appeal Court decisions started to be handed down; and those that survive will have lasting effects on their lives for many years to come. How long will they have to wait?

And there is a lesson in this for anyone involved in commissioning, designing, building, testing and deploying systems. Our responsibilities go beyond our immediate employers and the contractual obligations we work under. There are wider duties of care that people are just not aware of. In 2018, accountants with the major accountancy firm KPMG were banned from the profession because they falsified reports to financial regulators on the failure of the contracting firm Carillion by cutting and pasting accounts of meetings retrospectively into historical minutes. Only the most junior member of the team escaped penalty, and only then because they were instructed to falsify records by their immediate managers. He was nonetheless reprimanded because he should have known that he was acting illegally: but he did not. (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/25/kpmg-partner-carillion-peter-meehan-frc )

We are told that business decisions should be taken on strict and rational financial grounds. This is not so. The evidence of the Horizon scandal and KPMG's audit of Carillion show that too many people in business have no moral direction instilled in them in their professional education, or by their companies, managers or peers. This has to stop, and Nick Wallis' book shows what happens when it does not. Wallis has written an extensive and detailed book which is nonetheless easy to read and should be read by any decision-maker with any involvement whatsoever with IT. It should be a warning to everyone. ( )

Buy this book! It is a meticulously compiled account of one of the great scandals of our age. Nick Wallis helped dozens of British sub-postmasters who had been wrongly accused of dishonesty and prosecuted by the Post Office, and consequently imprisoned. They had done no more than report errors in their accounts which had been caused by a faulty 'new' computer system.This is a gripping account of the years of expensive struggles to restore their good names. Lives had been ruined; the names of Fujitsu and the Post Office are irretrievably besmirched by their malign conspiracy; serious problems are revealed in the criminal justice system; and the fight for full and proper compensation goes on.The well produced book is embellished with colour photographs of many of the successful and brave postmasters, an index, a detailed time line, a glossary and more. ( )