For victims of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, this week is an important one. Paula Vennells, former chief executive of the Post Office, is set to face three days of tough questioning when she gives evidence to the inquiry into the scandal. Vennell’s highly anticipated appearance on Wednesday follows critical developments north of the border where, last week, the Scottish government announced it will push ahead with its own compensation scheme for subpostmasters. And, in an underreported but highly significant move, Scotland’s Crown Office stripped the Post Office of its status as a specialist reporting agency. In the process, it inadvertently refocused attention back to Scotland’s rather unusual system — and how its unique ‘safety net’ set-up still failed dozens of hard-working employees.
On the south bank of Glasgow’s River Clyde in one of the city’s most notorious, and poorest, suburbs, the Gorbals Post Office can be found tucked amongst the area’s crumbling tenement flats and soulless high-rises. From 2006 to 2012, the old post office branch was run by sisters Jacquie El Kasaby and Rose Stewart. When her workplace’s Horizon IT system began to show deficits in the accounts, Stewart tried to disguise the problem at first. She hoped that whatever was going wrong would ‘sort itself out’ and the £34,000 that the Horizon system was showing as missing would show up.
So insistent was Stewart that everything would work out fine, she didn’t even tell her sister what was going on. But when the Post Office’s auditors turned up in November 2012, she had to face the seriousness of their situation. The pair were immediately suspended and the Post Office opened an investigation. Eventually, in 2014, the sisters handed over £10,000 to their former employer to settle their case. Thanks to a stellar BBC Disclosure documentary, the sisters’ story of injustice has been brought to the public’s attention, alongside many other Scottish cases.
Whereas in England and Wales, the Post Office is able to prosecute people directly, there is an additional ‘safety net’ in Scotland in the form of the Crown Office
Whereas in England and Wales, the Post Office – the oldest prosecuting body in the UK – is able to prosecute people directly, there is an additional ‘safety net’ in Scotland in the form of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS). The Crown Office is the sole prosecutor in Scotland, and it relies on hundreds of specialised reporting agencies to help it do its job. These include Police Scotland, HMRC, the Department for Work and Pensions and, until just days ago, the Post Office.
When it pursued the Gorbals sisters, the Post Office presented the Crown Office with a report of the evidence the institution had gathered which, in this case as in many others, leaned heavily on Fujitsu’s Horizon IT system introduced at the turn of the century. The Post Office had continued to rely on the IT evidence despite its former auditors, Second Sight, publishing an interim report on Horizon in 2013 which found ‘two incidents where defects or “bugs” in the Horizon software gave rise to 76 branches being affected by incorrect balances or transactions’. The ongoing public inquiry into the scandal has also revealed that, at the time, one Second Sight forensic investigator found that Post Office execs were ‘incredibly defensive’, and that nobody was ‘ready to give an inch’. Second Sight’s unpalatable findings concerned both the Scottish Crown Office and the institution’s comms team, and in 2013 a meeting was set up between the Post Office and the COPFS. The Post Office representatives persuaded the COPFS that there was nothing wrong with their IT system and the Crown Office decided to continue prosecuting Post Office cases.
And yet some of the actions the COPFS subsequently took suggest it hadn’t been 100 per cent convinced by the spinners. It wanted to see further expert opinion on the reliability of the Horizon IT system, which it was promised, and it also issued guidance to its prosecutors in the meantime to ‘carefully consider’ cases where Horizon was a factor. In 2014 one of its prosecutors, Angus Crawford, did exactly that. When the case of Stewart and El Kasaby crossed his desk, Crawford wasn’t convinced by the Horizon evidence, eventually concluding it was simply too weak to stand up in court. This should have marked the end of the Post Office’s hounding of the Gorbals sisters. But instead of telling the pair about Crawford’s judgement, the Post Office threatened their former employees – one of whom had sold her house while the other plunged her life savings into the branch to try and make up for the ‘missing’ funds – with debt collectors. The sisters eventually paid their old company a further £10,000.
Even after Crawford had raised concerns that the Horizon evidence simply wasn’t strong enough to take the Gorbals sisters to court, the Crown Office continued to prosecute Post Office workers — resulting in as many as four convictions after this time. It was only in 2015, when the Post Office failed to stay true to its promise that it would provide expert advice on the reliability of its IT system, that the Crown Office stopped prosecuting these cases. Yet during the period that followed, the Crown Office didn’t once attempt to re-examine cases or reach out to those who’d been convicted. Although Computer Weekly had broken the first story on the scandal in 2009, it was a decade later that Alan Bates’ now infamous legal victory against his former employer drew widespread media attention to the scandal and prompted calls for a public inquiry — five years after the Post Office’s attempt to prosecute the Gorbals sisters was blocked by the Crown Office. But Angus Crawford’s approach wasn’t shared by every Crown Office prosecutor. Scotland’s supposed ‘safety net’ failed in an extraordinary number of cases.
Why was the Angus Crawford scenario, amongst others, not heeded as a warning?
Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC, the most senior law officer in the land, appeared in Holyrood on Thursday for the second time this year. Taking questions, she told politicians that ‘work has been under way in Scotland to address [miscarriages of justice] since 2020’, adding that so far ‘six convictions have been quashed by the appeal court, two appeals are currently before the court and 10 cases are being reviewed by the [Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission]’. Although she expressed regret at what had happened, Bain’s storyline is simple: the Crown Office put its faith in the ‘most trusted brand in Britain’, and the Post Office didn’t keep that trust.
It has now emerged that there were 11 cases where prosecutors decided not to proceed on the basis of the Horizon evidence. ‘At no time did the Post Office disclose to the Crown the true nature and extent of the issues with its Horizon system,’ Bain told parliament. Yet politicians and campaigners alike have voiced the obvious follow-up: if there were any doubts at all about the reliability of the Horizon evidence, even in just one case, why didn’t the Crown Office sit up, take note and figure out the implications of this for all the other Post Office prosecutions it had overseen. Why was the Angus Crawford scenario, amongst others, not heeded as a warning?
Had the Crown Office taken stock at this point, in 2014, after at least one of its prosecutors flagged concerns with the Horizon evidence, not only could further wrongful convictions in Scotland have been prevented, but pressure would likely have piled on the Post Office in England and Wales to examine its actions there. This could have been a real turning point in the story – and in no small part thanks to the differences in Scotland’s justice system.
Yet during a time when the Scottish government was particularly keen to show how its country could work better than the rest of the UK, the benefits of Scotland’s unique set-up were left untapped. The safety net could have brought attention to the Post Office scandal as soon as 2014 (or even earlier, had the Crown Office trusted its own instincts over the words of the Post Office during that 2013 meeting) and prevented many more innocent workers having their lives torn apart by miscarriages of justice. Scotland had an opportunity to be on the front foot with an unfolding scandal – but it wasn’t.
Now, the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences (Scotland) Bill is being pushed through the Scottish parliament to compensate the affected subpostmasters in Scotland, but getting to this point wasn’t straightforward either. Contrary to their stance on almost any other piece of legislation, SNP politicians pleaded with the UK government that its compensation bill for England and Wales include Scotland. The Scottish government’s justice secretary Angela Constance said that extending the legislation would be ‘the best way to achieve parity’. But the Westminster government wasn’t having it, pointing out that due to the differences in the Scottish system ‘it is therefore right that overturning convictions in Scotland is determined, delivered and scrutinised by the Scottish government’ – a long way of saying ‘no’.
So what happens now? The decision to strip the Post Office of its specialist reporting status marks a ‘pivotal moment’, Scottish Labour’s shadow justice minister Pauline McNeill admitted, but the focus on the Crown Office isn’t dissipating quite yet. Bain has made her second statement to Holyrood this year, but now Scottish Conservatives are urging her predecessor and Lord Advocate between 2011 and 2016, high court judge Frank Mulholland, to appear before parliament – although behind closed doors, they’re not convinced he’ll face MSPs. And the compensation process may still drag on yet. The Scottish government is insistent that it has to wait until the UK government has passed its legislation in order to enact its own – although some opposition politicians are sceptical. ‘There is this idea, again, from the nationalists who are all about self-determination and doing their own thing,’ said one Scottish Tory insider. ‘Well, just get on with it. Shut up and make the Scottish bill. Pass it. Lead the way.’
Scotland’s Crown Office could have played a crucial part in unearthing the Post Office scandal years before Alan Bates won his court case, but it missed that chance. Now the Scottish parliament is being presented with an opportunity to pave the way with its own separate bill on victim compensation. If the SNP government wants to prove that devolved powers can work for good, another opportunity is presenting itself now. Scotland should be careful it’s not too slow to act a second time.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Mohamad Elmasry
Belen Fernandez
Brahma Chellaney
Petra Lesjak Tušek
Tarik Cyril Amar
Cheryl Levi
visit website
