UKH

I don't know if anyone has been following this story, but for many years the Post Office covered up computer system problems, leading to unfair prison sentences and suicides among sub postmasters.  

Panorama is on tonight (it was delayed from a few weeks ago due to Covid) 

730 tonight on BBC 1

This is an issue which affected my extended family, thankfully not as badly as some.  

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/post-office-it-scandal-hor...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j

Worth a listen for anyone who wants a primer. Is the Private Eye coverage online as that's far and away the best journalism on the subject.

some of the private eye coverage can be found in PDF linked to here:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post

Thanks.  

Cheers! I was looking for the backissue to find the title rather than just googling...

It is absolutely appalling.

Hopefully the CPS will take action against some of the witnesses after reading the file the judge sent them.

I hope so.  

Great, thank you.  

Agreed, the PO has behaved disgracefully and people need to be imprisoned for it. It seems that much has to do with the PO being at arms length from government with the government /civil service deciding to completely ignore their supervisory duty and just let them get on with it. 

Been listening to this on 10 part series about this on R4, gave my rage gland a real work out.

It's staggering how badly these people were treated and how the post office lied to them and sent some of them to prison.  I really don't think the money they paid in compensation (58 million) was sufficient given that legal fees swallowed up a lot of that.

Had heard about this in the past, but watched the panorama tonight and it is just shocking how they were treated and how little accountability there had been. 

I hope it doesn't end here, those postmasters that were affected deserve more than a non-apology and some (insufficient, as JasonC points out) proportion of that 58 million.

Also seems clear that there should be criminal consequences for senior managers in the post office who either turned a blind eye or deliberately lied, resulting in courts being misled and immeasurable suffering for their victims.

And to think the ex chief exec is now a director of an NHS Trust, among other roles! Time after time directors like this demonstrate incompetence or sheer bad character only to get a nice big payoff and a new directorship somewhere else. 

Well the government has kicked off a review. Hopefully some of the mps will add some more pressure to try and get some proper redress.

The private eye podcast had an episode on it earlier in the year.

It's astonishing and shocking, I agree!

I was following this story over the last few years and I think it is hard not to believe there has been a perversion of the course of justice by the management and individuals who were involved in the persecution of these sub-postmasters.  For that, it seems that jail would be a suitable punishment and definitely to highlight the consequences of being either a manager or an employee involved in meting out such clear and apparent injustice.

In my professional life I had to spend a lot of time designing database procedures to avoid the possibility of information going missing in such a haphazard way - from the computer science A level project I did in evening classes and forever onwards it was always in my mind to visualise everything that might go wrong and take measures to design it out.   For not seeing that and enforcing such design and testing to detect and correct failure the PO management should be in the stocks at least and those who pursued the postmasters as criminals should be in gaol

I was following this story over the last few years and I think it is hard not to believe there has been a perversion of the course of justice by the management and individuals who were involved in the persecution of these sub-postmasters.  For that, it seems that jail would be a suitable punishment and definitely to highlight the consequences of being either a manager or an employee involved in meting out such clear and apparent injustice.

In my professional life I had to spend a lot of time designing database procedures to avoid the possibility of information going missing in such a haphazard way - from the computer science A level project I did in evening classes and forever onwards it was always in my mind to visualise everything that might go wrong and take measures to design it out.   For not seeing that and enforcing such design and testing to detect and correct failure the PO management should be in the stocks at least and those who pursued the postmasters as criminals should be in gaol

I can't add anything else really.