The Post Office | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

I was taken to Chester Crown Court in in the UK where I had to be handcuffed and
put in this bulletproof box actually in the courthouse while uh my case was talked about. But before I'd gone in
there, um I had like a meeting with my barristister and uh he said to me, "Well, you know, because there's no
evidence to the contrary, uh you're going to have to plead guilty. If you plead not guilty, you might go to
prison." >> This is Scott Darlington. About 10 years earlier, Scott had been working as a sound engineer for concerts
and as an extra for television shows, but he was in his late 30s and had a young daughter and wanted to find
steadier work. And um I had enough money to buy some sort of a business. And then
I noticed in the local sort of um businesses for sale newspaper that uh the post office in a place called
Olderly Edge, which is only 6 milesi away from where I live, came up for sale. And I thought, h, you know, uh
what's this? In the UK, people can purchase and run their own post offices. There are more
than 11,000 of them. The people who run them sign a contract with the post office and are called
subpost masters. >> And you as a sub postmaster take over a branch and you do all the post office transactions
alongside running your own retail business. And the post office it does everything really from postage to car
tax to benefits, pensions. It's like bank accounting as well, business bank deposits, um even fishing licenses and
foreign currency. It's it's a bit of a jack of all trades. It's a lot of things. The post office branch Scott saw
in the newspaper was being sold for £154,000. He says it was a little more than he'd
expected to spend, but he decided to visit Olderly Edge to see it. Anyway, >> lots of famous footballers and people
from stage and screen used to live around there. It's all very large houses and it's uh it's very up market. Um the
whole the main street is just lined with upmarket restaurants, bars and things like this. And there in the middle was
the village post office, you know, which was run down, you know, it was actually
in a poor condition when I looked to take it over. So, I thought there was an opportunity of bringing it up to date
and making it suit the village and everything and uh we decided it was a bit of a go. So, I went ahead with it.
To make it work, Scott and his partner took a loan out against their house and Scott's brother agreed to co-sign the
lease on the property. Then, Scott put in an offer for the business. It was accepted on condition
that he also passed the post office's screening process. You have to go through incredible
identification check. They check into all your financial history. Um, and it has to be whiter than white. You can't
have any blemishes anywhere. Um, things like that, enhanced um, criminal records
checks and things like this. >> Scott says the whole process took nearly a year. So, they're really they're
really looking to make sure you're a good person before they give you this role.
>> Uh, well, they were very trusted. You know, the people in the post office, postmasters were very trusted and uh
they you were kind of like a doctor. You were in that category, you know, the the
local doctor and everything or policemen and stuff like that, people did actually
hold postmasters in high esteem. >> After Scott passed the post office's background check, the next step was
attending two weeks of training. He says it was mostly helping fake customers in a dummy branch.
He was also taught how to use something called Horizon, the computer system that
the post office had adopted in all of its branches in 1999. >> It was a very large system. At the time,
it was the largest IT system in Europe, but when we started using it in training, it was very very
old-fashioned. Um, I mean, it was literally running on Windows NT, which was discontinued, if I've got this
right, in about 1996, and this was 2005 now. So, it was an old, clunky system, but it did seem to
just about work. After he finished his training, Scott signed a contract with the post office,
and then the branch was his to run. Scott had inherited three staff members from the previous owners, including a
man named Jack, who was 78 years old and had spent decades running his own post office.
He told Scott to make sure to always keep the greeting cards well stocked. He said they sold really well. It's
somebody's birthday every day. And and what about just the job? But I mean, was it fun to be interacting with
customers and selling things? >> Yeah, it was once once everything had calmed down and knew what I was doing,
which did take quite a long time. And I'd refurbished the shop and we got all new products in and everything. Um, it
was nice then and uh I had music on. Um, it was good fun. Everyone was encouraged
to have a good laugh with the customers and so it was fun. >> Scott got to know most of his customers.
Aldderly Edge is small, only about 5,000 people. The soccer player Ronaldo lived
there for a few years when he played for Manchester United, and once he came into
the shop to pay taxes on his sports car. Scott says he often had around £80,000 in cash on hand at the post office for
things like pension payments. Once a week, a secure van would stop by to drop off stock or pick up cash. And
that was always a slightly dangerous time because that's the most likely time where you could have, you know, somebody
could attack the post office because of money going over the counter like that. So, it was always a bit worrying, but
you got used to it. >> Scott says one of the most tedious parts of the job was doing something called
the office balance every week. And and when you came to do the balance, everything that you had in the office
had to correspond with what the computer system also said. So if there's anything
wrong, for instance, if I'd got 10,000 stamps and when I came to count them, I'd only got 9,998,
then I'd have to alter the system to reflect what was in the shop. And that would make a little discrepancy in the
cash amount then. So there's always slight discrepancies just from human error, maybe giving somebody the wrong
change, a pound different or giving someone some first class stamps when it should have been secondass stamps and
things like that. And every week you had when you did the balance, you alter the
system to suit what you've got in and then it' give you the figure that it was out and it was usually four or five six
pounds or something like that. And as long as the discrepancies are only small like that, nobody really thought too
much about it, you know, because there's always going to be a tiny bit of human error.
>> Scott would stay after work on Wednesdays to do the weekly balance on the horizon system. He says at first it
would take hours and then one day, 3 years into the job, there was a discrepancy that was a lot
bigger than usual. And uh the system is telling me I was £1,700 down in cash. The system thought I had
£1,700 of stamps more in the branch than I actually had. Well, we we all make slight mistakes, but there's no way any
of the staff made a mistake with £1,700 of the stamps, you know? That's like it's like a suitcase full, if you what I
mean. It's just ridiculous. So, we knew that it wasn't us. Um but we tried to we
got we we recounted everything double recounted treble recounted and was still saying that we got this discrepancy
>> in training. Scott had been instructed to call a helpline if he ever had any trouble with the horizon system.
>> So I rang the help line and said there's something wrong. Um it's thinks it thinks I've got all these stamps I
haven't got. And they basically said well how are you going to pay? You know you're responsible.
>> Scott says he didn't want to risk violating his contract, so he paid. Did you ask your your employees about it?
Did you say, "What's going on?" >> Well, yeah, cuz we were all shocked, you know, and everyone's dreading the next
balance then to see what happens then. >> Did it happen again? >> Well, it did. I mean, I think the
following few balances were within a few pounds again. And then all of a sudden,
another big discrepancy. This time, I think it was for I I can't quite remember fully. It was either £4,000 or
£6,000. And this is where the trouble started because I didn't tell them because I
knew their reaction would be, "Well, how are you going to pay?" And I wouldn't be
able to stand 6,000 just coming out like that. You know, there would be no help from them. So, I thought, I've got to
try and get to the bottom of it myself. So we used to stay till midnight sometimes reprinting out everything
we've done going through everything we've done to see if there's any transaction that pops out where
someone's made a a big error or anything like that. There was nothing, you know,
everything was just normal and uh we're all scratching our heads. We just couldn't understand this.
>> And the total amount of money the system said was missing just kept growing week
after week. How bad did it get? Well, over the next few months, it had got to £44,000.
>> This must have been stressful, >> terrible. I mean, now I'm dreading every balance and it's going worse and it's
going worse. Uh, the financial crash happened in 2008 and N. We're invol middle of that and it was just getting
all out of hand and I was so stressed I couldn't sleep. Um, I was losing weight.
Um it wasn't much fun to be doing this anymore by you know at all. >> For about 5 months Scott was able to
operate without the post office knowing about the discrepancies. But then in February of 2009 Scott got a
notification from Horizon that he had too much surplus cash at his branch and it told him to send in £50,000.
But Scott didn't have that money. So I ignored that request and two days later a uh one of the post office auditors
turned up on the doorstep and uh closed the branch for an audit. >> What did you think when they showed up?
>> I was kind of pleased really because I thought that uh you know somehow we'll
get to the bottom of this. Uh but the auditor he asked me if I'd got the money in the branch that Horizon was saying
and I said no. and uh he said, "Oh, right. Okay." So, then he made a few phone calls and they're they've got
their own internal fraud squad uh at the post office uh who are not the police, but they've got similar powers. And um
the first thing they said to me is they read me my rights like the police do when uh when they suspect you of
committing an offense. And I said, "Oh, I thought you were here to help." But no, they then took me away in a car
to another branch um a larger branch and upstairs there was a a room set aside with tape for for tape recorded
interviews and I was interviewed there and they were stood up shouting down at me, "Where is the money? Where have you
put it?" >> Scott says they wouldn't listen when he tried to explain. They just kept
insisting he'd stolen the money. >> And I told them, "What's the point of stealing from your own business that
you're responsible for?" you know what I mean? So, it just didn't add up. But, uh
they they wouldn't have it and um they came to look to search my house and they could see that there was no
all really nice television sort of lovely car outside and things like that. So, they realized there was nothing
there. >> The investigators left, but they told Scott they were going to look at his
financial records and that he needed to give them access to his bank accounts. He was also suspended.
he decided to reach out to the subpostmasters union for help >> when I rang the general secretary who's
the top man um and told him my issue I said look I've got these big discrepancies
what can you do to help me and everything and he just said um oh before we start have you have you got any
gambling problems he said to me this was the headman of the union so straight away I knew whose side he was on and I
said oh hang on a minute you know um I've got issues you know, need some help. And uh he's basically just
dismissed me and he put the phone down literally and I knew straight away that they they weren't going to help. Did you
ever think for a second I maybe I am making a mistake? Maybe someone is taking money you know that
did it ever cross your mind that okay maybe I am doing something wrong. >> Yeah, it did. I mean I had doubts. I
just I started thinking what have I done? Maybe I've done this. And uh not in denial, but I just haven't realized
or not noticed that it's been me. >> About two months into his suspension, Scott received a letter saying his
contract had been terminated. He was charged with theft and five counts of false accounting.
He says his lawyer told him there was a risk he would go to prison, but if he plead guilty to the false accounting
charges, it would be less likely. So this was the first time I'd realized that there's a possibility I might be
going to prison. Well, at that time I got my daughter was only eight. There's no way I could be going down to prison
and her dad being in prison and things like this. >> Scott says he refused to plead guilty to
theft and the post office ended up dropping the charge after Scott's lawyer discovered an internal document that
stated that the post office had found no evidence of theft. But Scott took his lawyer's advice and
pleaded guilty to false accounting. He says he could see how that could be true because he had covered up the
discrepancies in the weekly balances. >> And he the judge decided I was guilty of
funk accounting and um he sentenced me to 2 months in prison suspended for 2 years which means you don't
actually go in but you still have the consequences of a criminal record. What were you telling your family and
friends? >> Yeah, it's very very difficult. Only the very closest people realized what
trouble I was in. My brother, my partner, my daughter hadn't told her much. Um, she knew there was something
wrong, but I didn't want to know the ins and outs of all this financial dealings
at only 8 years old. So, I kept it fairly um quiet to her. I didn't tell her too much about it. Um my friends,
there was only a couple of friends earlier confiding in about it because obviously this is it's really grim. It's
really awful. But after when I've been to court though and been found guilty, I was all over the newspapers then. Um I
got online hates, you know, from the online versions of the newspapers. Uh and it was awful because now there's me
on the front of the newspaper saying I've pleaded guilty to false accounting at Olden Ledge Post Office. But I
presumed and rightly so that everybody would think I was guilty cuz I'd pleaded guilty. It was very difficult to go
around and say I wasn't guilty really. You know, there was all this these issues. Um so it it just put me in an
awful situation. Now I felt like a pariah in society, you know, walking around. >> He says he struggled to find a new job
with his criminal record. >> And I was 50 at the time as well. So I was freshly 50 with a nice new criminal
record looking for work. you know, this isn't uh easy. >> He became depressed and says he could
barely function. At one point, he collapsed from stress and had to go to the hospital.
He kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong, and he kept thinking about the post office's computer system,
Horizon. So, one day he Googled it, and he found a website with stories just like his.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.
In November 2010, a journalist named Nick Wallace was working at the BBC in Suri.
One morning, he got a message on Twitter from someone who worked at a local taxi
company asking if the BBC needed drivers. >> If we had a taxi account, I would have
just forwarded the tweet to my manager and let them deal with it. Uh, but we didn't. So, I said something quite
flippant like, "Oh, well, that depends on whether or not your drivers will come on air and tell us some of their great
stories." And I got a response back saying, "Oh, I've got a story to tell you." All right. And I thought, "Oh,
that's interesting." Nick exchanged numbers with the man who ran the taxi company. His name was
Deender Misra and gave him a call. >> And over about 40 minutes, very tearful minutes and and at times
slightly rambling, he told me that his pregnant wife had been thrown in prison for a crime she didn't commit. And his
pregnant wife was called Sema Misra and she had been the subpostmaster at Westby
Fleet Post Office. So, Sema had been convicted of theft because she was alleged to have stolen
£74,000 worth of money from her subpost office and the evidence against her came from
the Horizon IT system which said she had holes in her accounts. She was complaining all the time that she was
having problems with this computer system, that she couldn't get the numbers to add up. And that's when the
post office had told her, well, if she didn't make them good, she was going to lose her job as a sub postmaster. So,
she covered up these discrepancies that she was getting. And the post office then decided that that was a criminal
offense and they prosecuted her for false accounting and theft. Sema admitted false accounting, but she
denied theft. She said, "No, I have never consciously taken any money out of this system. It's just disappeared."
But Sema was found guilty of both false accounting and theft and sentenced to 15
months in prison. She was 8 weeks pregnant. Nick was interested in the story and
Defender Misra told him there was someone else he should talk to, another former subostmaster named Alan Bates.
>> He was sacked in 2003 for refusing to accept liability uh for discrepancies in
his account. He said, "It's not me. It's not my staff. I've trained them well. It's your IT system. It's creating these
discrepancies. Give me the proper tools that I need to interrogate my accounts properly and then we will find the
source of this discrepancy and we'll get it fixed." And the post office just said, "No, the discrepancy is your
liability. You make it good or you will get fired." And there was a standoff and
Allan got fired. And he was so outraged by his treatment that he set up a a website called post office victims.org.
org.uk and he asked for people who'd suffered at the post office's hands to get in touch and
by the time it got to 2009 they arranged their first meeting and there were only about 20 sub postmasters
former subosters who turned up at the meeting but it was the first time they'd all met face to face and they shared
their stories and they all realized that the post office had treated them in exactly the same way whilst telling them
that they were the only people having problems with the Horizon IT system. >> The post office in the UK dates back to
the 1660s when it was set up by King Charles II. >> This was before Great Britain even
existed. It's we think the oldest secular uh branch of government in existence. It
was considered to be part of the fabric of the nation. It's very proudly run. It
was always governmentowned. And it was I mean it's a bit like the Pony Express in in America. It has that
kind of legendary status. And then in the 20th century the image of the kindly couple running your local village sub
post office trustworthy honest center of the community upstanding entrepreneurial
individuals who would always be looking out for people whilst providing the services that the post office did became
embedded in the national psyche as well. So you had this slightly warm fuzzy community image.
>> The subpost masters were handling things like people's pension payouts, banking
deposits and withdrawals, and utility bill payments. Before 1999, it was up to the subpost
masters to keep track of their transactions by writing everything down in a ledger.
>> And the post office hated it. And what they didn't like was the fact that when
they handed over money from cash centers to an individual post office, they lost
sight of it. They were entirely reliant on the trustworthiness of the subostmaster and their signing of
correct accounts. So when Horizon came along, it was like the big bang. It was going to open an electronic window on
everything that was happening in a post office branch. >> The post office had contracted a
software company called Fujitsu to develop Horizon. What they came up with was full of bugs
and glitches. But Nick says the post office had already spent hundreds of millions of
pounds on Horizon. So they decided to go through with the roll out. >> Because the post office weren't carrying
the financial liability the individual subosters were. >> According to their contract, subpost
masters were responsible for any losses due to their negligence or error. And unless they could prove that any error
was Horizon's fault, quote, "Deficiencies must be made good without delay." The subpost masters weren't told about
the flaws in the system. Nick says the training on how to use the system was inconsistent.
Some subpost masters received 3 weeks of training, but others were only given a single day.
And at the time, some of the subpost masters weren't very familiar with computers.
They were told if they had trouble with the Horizon system, there was a help line they could call
>> which colloquially quickly became name as the Horizon help line whereby subosters who, if they couldn't make
their numbers add up, were supposed to call up and get some guidance. It quickly transpired that the helpline
that was available to subpost masters was as patchy and ad hoc and sometimes downright ineving
that they got. And they were often talking to frontline call center workers who knew less about the system than they
did, who were working to a script and who told them what to do. And if that didn't solve the problem, chances are
they would be told, "Well, it's it's obviously a mistake at your end. You're going to have to make it good."
>> Sometimes the calls to the helpline did end up being escalated enough that technicians would investigate. And
sometimes they remotely implemented fixes. But of course, the post office had a vested interest in not telling its
subpost masters about any errors in Horizon because it didn't want word getting out that it might be operating a
substandard IT system. It was paranoid about protecting the reputation of this system because they'd bet the farm on
it. So protecting the mothership became this prime directive of the post office.
They could not countenance any criticism made privately by subpost masters and certainly not publicly because the whole
edifice would come crashing down. Nick says the post office also told individual subpost masters who reported
issues that they were the only ones having problems and that it couldn't be Horizon. And so they were told
specifically by the post office that it couldn't be the IT system because it was
a computer system. It's like a glorified calculator and it and it works brilliantly and no one has uh has has
ever had a problem that like the one that they're describing. So they were very very much on their own and it had
an appalling effect on them because not only did they have to keep shoveling money into this uh system in order to
get the books baz but these were competent often very skilled business people who started doubting their own
sanity because they could not understand how money was falling through their fingers and yet didn't know what they
were doing wrong. And of course it led to all sorts of paranoid issues. They would sack innocent staff because they
assumed that they had to be the problem. In fact, they were often advised by their unions that they had to watch
their staff like hawks. The post office sometimes said, "Well, who else works behind the counter?" Well, if it's your
wife, have you looked at what your wife's doing? You know, it broke broke up families.
>> Several former subpost masters say that they became so overwhelmed with stress
that they had a heart attack. By 2011, dozens of former subpost masters, including Scott Darlington, who
had bought the post office in Elderly Edge, had joined Alan Bates's group, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance.
Scott remembers the first time he went to a meeting, people took turns telling their stories.
>> And once you heard other people's stories, it was like a sense of relief that this you you knew for sure then
that this wasn't you. But there's a long road ahead. I mean, even Alan said that,
you know, we know there's some problem, but getting something done about it. There's another, you know, kettle of
fish, and it could take years, if at all. By this time, Nick Wallace had begun reporting on the story, but he
says it wasn't really picked up by the national media, but one member of Parliament did hear
about it. And in 2012, he and other members of Parliament pressured the post office into starting an external
investigation into the problem. The external investigators struggled to get the post office to cooperate. They
said requests for documents were often delayed or ignored. One of the lead investigators, a
forensic accountant named Ian Henderson, said that when they finally received everything, it didn't take long to
realize that, quote, "We may be looking at a significant number of miscarriages of justice.
Within a year, the investigators released a report. It revealed that there were flaws in the
Horizon system. >> And the post office was so appalled by this report that although it was forced
to make the first iteration of this report public, it then engaged a basically a black ops team to start
undermining the credibility of this independent team and and bismerching all their future work. uh literally issuing
rebuttal documents to their own independent investigators over the course of the next two years that that
they were working for them. And and so the post office knew it was sitting on a very very serious problem. So we had the
scandal of the prosecutions of these poor people being sent to prison despite not having committed a crime. And then
from 2013 onwards, the post office knew it had a problem and it did everything possible to stop that problem from
becoming public. We'll be right back. Ian Henderson, the forensic accountant investigating the post office, said that
he quote felt we were dealing with a cover up and possibly a criminal conspiracy.
Meanwhile, more and more former subpost masters had joined Alan Bates's group. In 2016, they filed a legal claim that
became a class action lawsuit the following year. The case was called Bates v. Post Office
and it included hundreds of former subpost masters. >> The number of postmasters like myself
had grown to 555 which became we were known as the 555. The judge assigned to the case decided
to break proceedings up into separate trials. The first would focus on the contract
the subpost masters had signed with the post office. It began in November 2018 and many of
the subpost masters traveled to London from all over the country to attend. A lawyer representing them argued that
the post office held too much power over the subpost masters. Partly because the
contract itself was unfair and partly because many of the subpost masters had never even seen the whole contract.
Alan Bates testified that he'd only been sent three short documents and that he'd
had no idea the full contract was 114 pages long. Another former subpostmaster testified that she'd taken over the job
from her husband after he died. She said she'd never seen any contract and had never heard her husband mention it. And
it turned out the post office had no record that he had ever signed a contract. The judge hadn't ruled on the first
trial yet when the second trial began 3 months later in March 2019. This trial would be investigating the
Horizon system itself. A former employee from Fujitsu, the company that created the Horizon system,
testified. Richard Ro worked at Fujitsu between 2001 and 2004 and he was hired to work
in a team of 30 uh in the secure unit at the Fujitsu headquarters in Barkshire in the UK fixing problems
with Horizon. They would deal with support tickets that came through that pointed to faults with hardware,
software, communications, whatever. and he described the system as very very shaky. In fact, he used a particular
word uh which is quite rude to describe how bad the system was. >> What word did he use?
>> He said it was a pile of [ __ ] >> Richard Ro also spoke about the work he'd done at Fujitsu and about doing
something that the post office had said was not possible, remotely accessing the
subpostminals. He said he and his colleagues went into the terminals that were sitting remotely
on Postmasters branch counters and fixed problems in them overnight. They could they even had the power to download
everything that was in a Postm's branch, look at all the code, alter it, including the numbers in the branch
account, and then redownload it. And it was important because before, you know, it was it was the post office was
saying, well, only the subpost masters have access to the system, so they're the ones making the mistakes. No one
else could be making mistake. >> Exactly that. The post office flatly denied that it or Fujitsu had any way of
altering the branch accounts of a subostmaster. and they had to deny it because they prosecuted these people on
the basis that they were the only ones who had control of their accounts. Now, if remote access was not just possible,
but people like Richard R had been doing it on a regular basis, then there was no
way these prosecutions could be safe. >> And then in the middle of the second trial, the judge issued his ruling on
the first trial. The judge wrote that parts of the subpostm's contract were quote
oppressive and that at times the post office acted as though it is answerable only to itself.
He also wrote that during the trial one senior post office official had tried to
mislead him and quote paint the post office in the most favorable light possible regardless of the facts.
and it was damning of the post office to the extent that the post office applied
to have the judge booted off the case. >> The post office claimed that the judge
was biased. The judge refused to remove himself. So, the post office went to the
court of appeal, but the court of appeal ruled that the post office's attempt to
remove the judge was quote absurd. When the second trial finally resumed, independent IT experts testified that
they'd found dozens of bugs with the Horizon system and that they'd uncovered a report from 2001 that explicitly
stated there was a bug with Alan Bates's Horizon terminal. Before the judge's ruling, the post
office and the subpost masters agreed to a settlement of £57,750,000. Nick says even though it looked like a
big number, it didn't leave much for each individual subpostmaster. When Scott Darlington heard the news, he
started doing the calculations. >> 45 million of that was taken up in legal fees. There was only 11 million left
between the 555. Well, unfortunately, if you do the maths on that, it's only about 20,000 each. And most of us had
lost our homes, our livelihoods, businesses, um, everything. You know, hundreds of
thousands of pounds. Uh, this isn't going to touch the sides. So, this was a bit of a it was a great result, but a
disastrous outcome financially for us all. >> And many of them like Scott Darlington
and Sema Misra still had criminal convictions. The judge issued his ruling for the
second trial 5 days after the settlement was announced. He wrote that the post office continuing
to claim that Horizon was reliable was quote the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.
And then he said one last thing. He was so gravely concerned about some of the evidence that he had seen given uh in
previous trials where post office and Fujitsu witnesses had essentially given false
evidence that he was going to pass a file to the director of public prosecutions, which he did. and the
director of public prosecutions passed that file on to the Metropolitan Police and the Metropolitan Police started
their investigation in January 2020 and it's still ongoing. It's called Operation Olympus. It's been running for
5 years now and they have said on the record that they are looking to start charging some of the people responsible
in 2027 or 2028. >> After the post office settled in late 2019, the criminal cases review
commission in the UK started referring cases of convicted subpost masters to the court of appeal.
In December 2020, six subpostmaster convictions were overturned. Sema Misra and Scott Darlington were
both exonerated. In April of 2021, a public inquiry began formally hearing evidence in 2022
and found a quote disastrous human impact and that at least 13 people affected by the horizon errors have died
by suicide. When we reached out to the post office press office for comment, they directed
us to a statement on their website which reads in part, "We apologize unreservedly for the suffering which the
post office caused to postmasters and their loved ones. At least 900 convictions have been tied
to the Horizon errors, but by May 2024, only 103 of those had been overturned." That month, in what the Guardian called
an unprecedented act of Parliament, the British government passed a law overturning all the remaining
convictions. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has said it's quote the biggest single
series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. Compensation plans have been set up for
the subpost masters affected by the horizon errors, but many are still waiting to be paid.
And there are people who've applied for compensation who are nearing the end of their lives
uh who still haven't yet been processed by this by this compensation system. So,
it's had to be taken off the post office. It's now in the hands of the government, which has added to the
delays. And although a billion pounds in compensation has been paid out already,
there are people with complicated cases who are unwell, who are desperate for money, who are potentially nearing the
end of their lives, many of whom have have died. I mean, we we we think the figures are now more than 200 people
have died waiting for their full and final compensation. >> Five former subpost masters, including
Sema Misra, have received awards from the British state honoring their work. campaigning for justice.
Alan Bates was kned. Scott Darlington still lives six miles outside Elderly Edge.
Do you go into the post office branch to to do things now? I mean, is it kind of
bittersweet walking into the post office? >> I I don't go in. No. I have had to go in
a couple of times in the last 16 years, but as a rule, I don't go in. No. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and
me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna
Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Canain. This episode was mixed by Michael
Rayfield. Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode
of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Nick Wallace's book is The Great Post
Office Scandal, the fight to expose a multi-million pound IT disaster, which put innocent people in jail.
You can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our
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We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media
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Scott Darlington ran the post office in a village outside Manchester for four years. One day, the computer system told him there was money missing from the branch – and he was accused of theft and fraud. “I started thinking, ‘Maybe I’ve done this and I just haven’t realized that it’s been me.’”

Nick Wallis’s book is The Great Post Office Scandal (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-great-post-office-scandal-nick-wallis/df00ffa3f22bde44?ean=9781739099206&next=t). Scott Darlington’s book is Signed Sealed Destroyed (https://bookshop.org/p/books/signed-sealed-destroyed-scott-darlington/3fbe23e48a60b1f9?ean=9781036921323&next=t).

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Artwork by Julienne Alexander: http://www.yssrs.com/. Check out our online shop: https://shop.thisiscriminal.com/

Episode 341 originally published November 21, 2025 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-341-the-post-office-11-21-2025/

Music in this episode: “Bossa Boa” by Blue Dot Sessions “Grumpalo” by Blue Dot Sessions “The Records” by Blue Dot Sessions “Slow Line Stomp” by Blue Dot Sessions “Ivory Pillow” by Blue Dot Sessions “Drawing Room” by Blue Dot Sessions “Our Only Lark” by Blue Dot Sessions “Road to Petersby” by Blue Dot Sessions “Thread of Clouds” by Blue Dot Sessions “Bauxite” by Blue Dot Sessions “Jumpup” by Blue Dot Sessions

Brief Summary

Scott Darlington shares his wrongful conviction story linked to the flawed Horizon IT system affecting UK subpostmasters.

Key points

The Discrepancy Grows. Scott discovers a shocking £44,000 discrepancy in his accounts, leading to immense stress.
Scott's Guilty Plea. Scott pleads guilty to false accounting to avoid prison, despite believing in his innocence.
Horizon System Rollout. The introduction of the Horizon system was seen as a revolutionary change for post offices, but it was fraught with issues.
Miscarriages of Justice. Investigators uncovered significant flaws in the Horizon system, leading to numerous wrongful convictions.
Judicial Ruling on Horizon. A judge condemned the Horizon system as unreliable, comparing it to flat earth beliefs.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I felt like a pariah in society, you know, walking around.

Scott describes the stigma he faced after his conviction.

15:57WatchJul 24, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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