David Davis: 'I don't care if it bankrupts the Post Office' don't challenge the Postmasters 

Private Eye magazine has been on it for years. Also there is a series still available on BBC sounds.

The BBC did cover it but the rest of the media did not pick up the baton. It’s a disgrace

This is the way the UK does business. Inquiry that take years to delay. Then committee set up, to decide what to do with the findings, delay. Then the 1st inquiry was done wrong, or did not have all the information, another inquiry, another committee. Not to mentions all the court cases and appeals. In the end, everyone is dead. I am sure there is a yes minister scene on this.

Bloody right , this should have been front and centre in the british media , they should have been forced into acquittals and handed out compensation long ago . The public should have been mobilised and thats what the media does or can do when it suits .

they did, "postmaster steals pensioners money" i doubt there's been a retraction!

The Post Office can pursue their own prosecutions without reference to the police. If the police had investigated they would have demanded from the Post Office that Horizon was robust and working properly. But the Post Office did their own prosecutions, so took Horizon as read, this is what happens when you let little boys do a man's job.

@@Steve14psthe only reason why they could do that, is if the government said that it was ok, and so it’s also the government who should be sued, because, nobody but the police, should be allowed to pursue a criminal case against anyone…….

@@ArghansMordonMarghek Quite right too, the police should have been involved, as I said 'little boys doing a man's job'

@@Steve14ps . If only they were little boys, because kids can make mistakes, owing to their lack of experience, and, they can be taught the error of their ways, but these are grown up arsehats, who know exactly what they were/are doing, and they are doing it on purpose, too……. Which, is why, they and the people who gave them the ability, to gaol people without a proper investigation into this matter, and that’s perverting the course of justice, which has a fairly long gaol sentence, too…..

@@ArghansMordonMarghek I 100% agree with that statement. Had the police been given the task of pursuing these cases many would have not gone to court, the post office would have had to prove that Horizon was robust, police have to be seen to be impartial, the Post Office prosecutors cannot be impartial because they have a contract of employment with the said Post Office, but the PO still has to follow rule of law. Offences committed by Post Office and its staff:- Manslaughter Perjury Presenting false evidence to a court of law Making a malicious complaint Perverting the course of justice Demanding money with menaces Bringing the name of the Post Office into disrepute Theft False accounting Failing to properly investigate a concern made by an employee Not following correct procedures in investigating a cash discrepancy

Paula Vennells was only a well paid stooge for the government. it's the people who pulled the strings that need to be exposed.

What really upsets me is that every Sunday she stands in front of a congregation and preaches about right and wrong. Despicable, evil woman.

Don’t forget Adam Crozier’s responsibility, too.

Not just get reimbursed for the non existent money they were ordered to pay back, but get compensation on top!

We still have no idea If Paula Vennells was complicit in the fiasco or just incompetent to be CEO as she lacked control over her management team Either way returning the honour was the right thing to do give her at least credit for that as for bonuses well that would depend on her contract and it wont be the first time bonuses go to CEOs while their bad management damages their company

How deep does the rabbit hole go?

@@fredfred2363 The Crown.

Why?

@@fasthracing They were accused of literally stealing from the Crown. It has been mentioned in other vids. The Post Office was originally called Royal Mail. Bear in mind the queen bailed Andy out to the tine of £11m too. No questions asked there then.

The auditors just acted on the instructions they were given. They were not the people that made the decisions that ruined people's lives, they simply reported their findings up the line.@@johngreen6191

I'd be surprised if Fujitsu's top people knew. My bet is that it was a case of incompetant programmers. I don't think this is another volkswagen emissions scandal...

of course Fujitsu knew.@@fredfred2363

@@fredfred2363 management would have been aware. It’s not just the programmers. If support staff were having to make direct interventions to correct errors, there will be support tickets in the CRM system, reports etc

Japan has a culture of covering up incompetence. Look at the medical school admissions scandal. Female applicants out performing male applicants but the numbers being rigged to prevent women getting in ahead of inferior males.

@@tuck1s exactly, where does the buck stop? If there is no one to blame at the top when it’s clearly their job and therefore complicit, then how can there be so many receiving it at the bottom of people who had nothing to do with it? Why does one get bonuses & rewards and the other jail time? What is so very wrong with this country that this can happen? Whatever it is it needs fixing.

Corruption is quick, justice takes time.

That's the shat sys in UK.

I tell you why they have paid a lot off money to people to shut things up 😂

The forner CEO, Adam Crozier, wasn't mentioned in the drama. He now works for ITV. 🤪

​@@davidhartley5558no need to pay, lots of friends in government. That's why the inquiry is only looking at those that had no authority on the prosecutions

Go to a solicitor and get your money back .

@@gerardhampson9089You seem to miss the point, no amount of compensation could recompense this person for the loss of their family, home and reputation!

They'll be some YT channel keen to hear your story, I bet

Write, or better still, go and see your MP. Give them an earache ! Good luck mate.

I hope you get the justice you deserve although any amount compensation you receive would never be enough😢

Paula Vennells went on to work for other institutions as if nothing happened. She does not see herself as guilty of anything. You may see her as "the guilty" - but is this just 'received opinion' ? - are you just repeating someone else's outrage - or reacting to something you saw on the TV ? I find the whole story baffling to be honest. It makes no sense at all.

Not really baffling at all, the Post Office introduced a computer system designed by Fujitso to sub post offices around the country. Soon after it's introduction, people started to be accused of false accounting or theft. Over 2000 and counting pleaded with Post Office to look into the software glitches that were, all of a sudden, criminalising hundreds of innocent people, even though, they were fully aware, along with Fujitso, that the software had issues they kept on prosecuting. They ignored the innocent, forced them to repay from their own pockets, money that never existed. Vennals was at the heart of it, along with government ministers and Fujitso management. The lot of them presided over the biggest miscarriage of Justice this country has possibly seen, and you can't get your head round it.

@@robertsmuggles6871 Are you her Lawyer, by any chance? You would have to be a complete idiot not to accept she is culpable and must be made to pay for it. This is no Witch hunt.

@@jeffjohnson2348 this started out as a legal football, then it became a political football and then it arrived on TV as a form of entertainment. The police have plenty of evidence to start PO people - they're doing nothing. No wonder Vennels & co. just walks on water - they are untouchable. The whole thing is a farce.

and people who believed them.

Of which the government is a major shareholder since privatisation.

Privatization of what?@@hariowen3840

Name the top men and women . they have been hiding all this time. NAME AND SHAME.

​@bigpants6121 People who believe? There's always gullible people, anti vaxxers, flat earthers, the religious, tin foil conspiracy nuts. They're not at fault for the perpetrators actions.

just reading the wikipedia page titled (British Post Office scandal) and its worse than you have highlighted...

Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

​@@Paul-ry5cx😊

During the public inquiry hearings it is repeatedly explained that the PO investigators had their witness statements edited for them by head office legal team. When questioned they say " head office told me to say that". That is their defence. So you give evidence in a trial and you are signing something written for you by someone else and claiming it is "true and fair to the best of your knowledge". None of the investigators see anything wrong with this & still do this today. You would do the same, I would do the same. The issue seems to be misplaced trust. The Post Office legal team perverted the course of justice by systematically biasing the sworn testimony of their own investigators according to their own prejudices in favour of an accountancy system. The hapless investigators were used to legitimise the injustice so it hid in plain sight for all those years of wrongful convictions. You will now see the legal team trying to deflect criticism onto Fujitsu, senior management - they've been rumbled and have nothing to lose - they will try to face down this accusation. And they still might get away with it due to public indifference.

given the testimony today in the Inquiry by the Fujitsu employee, the post office cant blame them solely, as they told the PO from the beginning that the system had bugs and errors. @@robertsmuggles6871

In a country that had a just justice system, this would happen. In this country, we have a justice system that protects money and position.

​@@007Mrkoi Regarding the justice system; the UK ranks 15th globally. Hardly something to complain about, though improvement should certainly be sought.

No - only those who were innocent. Are you stating that not one postmaster over a period of several year pocketed a single pound. Please don't be so simplistic as to use the terms ALL or NONE..... human nature is far more subtle than those two words.

simply not true@@007Mrkoi

​@@GARDENER42 Ranked. Tony Benn's Five Questions for Those in Power includes How can we get rid of you? The answer is, we can't. There's currently nothing in Statute limiting the life of an Administration. The Five Years limit was from the 1910 Parliament Act, but that was annulled by the 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which was itself voided "as if it had never been" in 2022, which however didn't explicitly reinstate the previous Laws it had deleted.

This was a TV drama - the reality is a lot of people doing fairly mundane jobs dealing with Smprs admitting to taking money and wrongful accounting in exactly the same way they did before Horizon was invented

How do you know.they were innocent? They said so themselves.

@@ayeright320 submit yourself to your own standard: how do you know Horizon was correct? My evidence: 2003 independent IT review report buried by PO ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WrbsCvilqgk.html Your evidence: .....?

We need a public enquiry into all the privatised services in the UK. They are all failing, and their awfull services are ludicrously expensive.

The pompous fools probably thought that Horizon was helping them to catch all the thieves that had been t here all along. And then they found another pompous self righteous fool (Vennells) to carry on the 'good work'.

your rightvand the police should have clocked why so many post office workers were being targeted that alone proves something wrong

And not just did convictions rise, given the fact that we now know one or more software bugs were responsible it sounds like corroborating evidence must have been very slim across the board. Did nobody wonder why non of these falsely accused fraudsters had hidden riches? Why so many of them must have had unusually clean and unremarkable records? It's one thing for somebody to come to the incorrect conclusion of fraud a few times; maybe they even believed their new system was cleverly finding well hidden frauds here and there - but as a repeated pattern over so many individuals and then ignored by so many that should have been doing due diligence it's really shocking. It's good you specifically point out the courts, because at least public defenders specifically have as a job to essentially prevent this, as do to a certain extent judges. Why didn't that happen? Was there insufficient funding, or were they convinced that innocence was out of the question somehow? What's the point of a justice system at all if we just take whatever accusations are made at face value? Frankly, I think the most serious problem is in the public defenders and judges. It may be through no fault of their own, but whatever the reason, they singularly failed at their task 700 times and seemingly didn't even realize it. It's inevitable that the CPS will sometimes be overzealous, so while that's of course a problem to be dealt with; we absolutely _must_ have safeguards to deal with cases where the prosecution is simply wrong. We clearly do not.

It wasn’t the police but the post office investigating and prosecuting

Exactly!

Can’t do the time don’t do the crime! They should also be arrested , charged and jailed for what they have done just like anyone else would be!

most would be happy to get the money back the PO stole off them!

Unfortunately, they can't give back the large chunk of their lives they ruined!@@shaun906

@@shaun906 in the interest of the public this is not enough! Due punishments need to be enacted to send a message and to prevent things like this from happening again.

Unfortunately that’s the future

Imagine a life under AI .... coming soon.

You could argue that humans were very much in the loop. Post office managers appear to have been instructing humans at Fujitsu to rob postmasters. The computers would not have chosen to do that.

I disagree. Regardless of the software its the human decision making around this issue which is at fault. The glaring issue is that we have massive numbers of people suddenly being accused of serious crime, people who have no history of criminal involvement. This goes against everything we know about criminal behaviour. The idea that you can make crazy decisions about a persons character "because the computer says so" is ridiculous. It also begs the question of where exactly did the money go? This isnt an IT issue. And just what exactly were the police doing?

Often the IT companies will tell the customer that their system is 'all singing, all dancing', even though often this isn't the case.

To do him justice, he does know that. Unlike many other MPs, he has acted on what he has taken the trouble to investigate.

Or previous governments, especially the one in power when all these prosecutions were happening.

They all looked away.@@GARDENER42

It was only the TV adaption that has made some senior people actually speak out. Private Eye has been covering this for years.@@RobertJonesWightpaint

I just dont understand why Horizon and the PO ere believed. Senior people in the media must have known something was amiss@@GARDENER42

The Royal Mail was privatised in 2014, and you can bet that the new owners were given immunity from Horizon payouts... Looks like UK taxpayer will once again foot the bill, the only people to make money will be the Legal vultures who make money whatever the outcome.

What about the Spmrs who were stealing public money. Just because they've created this massive furore doesn't mean they're innocent

Agree In the Itv programme , they are suprised at what they had left , did they not know the amount that would be left ??

They were allegedly told that the might receive nothing

The financial awards should have been paid as awarded. Then all legal costs to to be paid by the Post office over and above that!

@@gymjunke1 thats my thoughts

The post office directors must pay the money back or go to.jail

Secretary of State, asks the Monarch of the day (King Charles now of course), and they usually follow the advice and request. Just draw up a list of names, and get our Chuck to sign it off. It literally is as simple as that. Why there’s no suggestion of this, is only explainable or believable, if you are a politician hoping this will drop in the next government’s lap instead of yours. It is a bit much. This could be a long list of pardons, done in a month.

How do you expect liberty stolen to be reimbursed, with ££,??? Forget it.

exactly, why is the Post Office still hiring very expensive lawyers to challenge every penny in court?

@@johnherbert7489 The legal scam artists see it as very easy money - they'll take the Post Office for every penny it has.

Good luck with that one, they are useless 😂

@@sueburgess847 predictable but ideological tripe

@@onthenewsuk3681 So your counterargument is just insults? Why do people like you even exist?

@@onthenewsuk3681 Horizon is the outcome of the Pathway project, whose procurement process commenced in August 1994, and announced by social security minister Peter Lilley at the 1995 Conservative Party conference.

@@onthenewsuk3681 If anything is "predictable but ideological tripe", it's what you are saying. |

A bit ott

The staff are not to blame, what about their pensions and experience being lost? The board need clearing out and the rules regarding rhe post office doing it's own prosecuting without police input needs scrapping.

Most post office branches are run on a franchise basis, like the people affected in this affair.

Not just the post office !

If it affects the taxpayer then I don't agree. Shareholders should pay up and the management should be penalized.

Good to see the lawyers have been adequately compensated!

oh, you can bet they have years and years more graft ahead of them...@@jonathan-dough

I found that bit of information in the drama unbelievable!

It was no win no fee solicitors that took this so far. Telling anyone who had been sacked out of a PO they could get compensation. Loads of crooks and thiefs being encouraged to claim public money

For hundreds of prosecutions 🚩 (that didn't happen in the decades before...), 🚩 but nobody in "senior management" thought that was odd? 🚩

Someone high up in the post office saw an opportunity to make money from the situation and continually blocked any investigation into the software, backed up by the software developers. Fraudulent behaviour and someone needs to pay.

The PO must be allowed to recover compensation payments from any managers and technical staff who are responsible for perverting the course of justice.

it wont last, now its privately owned.

@@shaun906Royal Mail is in private hands not the post office.

The uniform penny post was introduced in 1840. According to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator, that one old penny is now equivalent to 84 old pennies, which is still only 34p! Try googling Bank of England Inflation Calculator to see how we're all getting ripped off. It's great fun, or depressing depending on how you look at it! My first job in 1954 was delivering evening papers six days a week for which I earned 6 shillings per week. That's now £6.80. I doubt if anyone would do it for that today. My starting wage as an engineering apprentice in 1960 was £450 per annum, I think. That's £8600 today. Not sure what an engineering apprentice starting wage is now. As a fully fledged Engineer in 1965 it was £1100 pa, or £17,700 today. Since 2010 goods and services costing £100 now cost, according to the BOE, £147. I think it's more. I could do this all day

Privatisation is the culprit.

I'm absolutely not taking sides with the PO, I am totally furious like the rest of us, but maybe they thought that with this 'robust', shiny new system in place, they were now catching more people putting their hands in their pockets? I don't know if they were lying, I believe they were, and that they knew what was going on (because of the whistleblower) but like Alan Bates and all the PO's said, they wanted the truth.

Asleep at the wheel judges, not even interested in protecting the innocent.

Because that never happened. There are thousands of PO employees the ones admitting to theft and false accounting who get prosecuted are a tiny number by comparison.

That's just a fraction of the compensation. Defamation. Loss of job and hence loss of money. Loss of investment return on that for example, pension payments. Loss of tax savings on pensions. Loss of pension contributions. Loss of income. Costs of legal help. Time served in jail. How much an hour there? Min wage on any work in prison. The forced labour exemption for the state. ....

It's never possible to find 100% of all bugs in a system - for example all OSs', with billions of installations, are updated regularly as and when new points of failure are found. A 'perfect storm' of conditions will always bring new issues to light; that said, the test regime for the Horizon software cannot have been truly comprehensive nor updated if and when new failures arose. Additionally politicians of all colours and civil servants should be held accountable, lose all their 'honours' ; It's no credit to them, or the 'system', that they won't be.

And lets not forget here the sad loss of life. If you look into this carefully four suicides have to date, been directly linked to this Post Office scandal @@adenwellsmith6908

Do you think something to do with “hackers” stealing money before arriving Post Office Headquarter?

Like the test and trace system, we paid 31 billion for from a retired jockey.

What's this got to do with privatisation?

When the Post office/mail was not privatised,all monies /transactions were recorded and checked,with no one at the top creaming off with bonuses and high wage.

@cliffordparry2862 So was Andrew Bridgen MP He brought this year's ago, but see what happened to him.

You jest! This fool was put in charge of Brexit negotiations 🙄

A lying Tory, how surprising!

​@@PaulGappyNorrisHe walked because he spoke his mind, get for facts right.

So why isn't he with Andrew Bridgen investigating excess deaths????

Yep. There is very little evidence to connect software problems with money going missing but lawyers spun this into a big scandal and made themselves a fortune

Any government connected business police their own, always, cos it'easier to rip the general public off (ie, coverups) like the government always do.

For a sudden increase in "misuse" of funds, with hundreds of prosecutions 🚩 (that didn't happen in the decades before...), 🚩 but nobody in "senior management" thought that was odd? 🚩

A new computer system, with a mysterious "glitch", yeah, right, doesn't look like that to me.🚩 Any computer code (in those days) would have had a human hand type it out. Someone knows, "move a few items occasionally", so where did the funds go?🚩 Fujitsu should tell us if there was a pattern of timings, days, hours, minutes, when these "thefts" occurred.🚩 It will all show up in the audit trail, oh wait, a lot of "paperwork" has vanished, how convenient!🚩

Several villages no longer have Post Offices, nobody wants to take the risk of violet robbery from outside, or inside, the computer.

Police not involved. The PO has its own investigators and prosecutors.

Hmm, oh, now that might be interesting!

i dont think they are comparable...but they will be able to learn from this and up their game...

It’s a typical ‘Narcisstic response’ scapegoating to avoid accountability and zero empathy conscience and remorse.The Uk is run by them.

Same old same old, not surprised, are you?🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Exactly. He has been challenged on this. He chose to believe the managers in spite of all the evidence.It would sound better if he acknowledged this

37.5 million so far (that figure doesn't include the first years work...which has apparently gone missing...)

If it wasn't for the lawyers then innocent people would still be in prison. Full compensation should be paid by the government.

MPs don't do anything. They get paid £90k plus £300k expenses every year but don't do any work. They simply vote how they are told to vote.

"Get off moi land!"

🚩

Agreed, but oh the irony. Tories having overseen the unlawful VIP lane handing out billions to mates and cronies.

This happened when the PO was a public company.

Surely it's obvious that if the PO set up a 'helpline' programmed to tell every caller that they were 'the only person in the country who has this problem' this is clear and sufficient evidence of a malicious conspiracy? Who exactly set up the so called helpline?

For a sudden increase in "misuse" of funds, with hundreds of prosecutions 🚩 (that didn't happen in the decades before...), 🚩 but nobody in "senior management" thought that was odd? 🚩

It was intentional scapegoating.