“Time and time again, catastrophical things happen and very few people are held accountable”says investigative journalist Nick Wallis and until people know that the easiest thing for them to do is to tell the truth and instead for them to keep covering up there will continue to be scandals of this sort
Nick Wallis, who is speaking about his book at the Waterside this Sunday, is the author of a book while lays bare the scandal of at least 738 subpostmasters who, between 2000 and 2015, had been prosecuted by the Post Office for theft, false accounting and fraud.
The prosecutions were based largely on evidence drawn from Horizon, the Post Office’s deeply flawed software system that threw up duplicate entries, lost transactions and made erroneous calculations. If these errors resulted in apparent losses, Subpostmasters were forced to settle the discrepancies from their own pockets, sometimes for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Those who could not pay were sacked and taken to court. Proud pillars of their communities were stripped of their jobs and livelihoods.
Many were forced into bankruptcy and or borrowed from friends and family to give the Post Office thousands they did not owe. The really unlucky ones were sent to prison.
Nick became aware of the potential of the story after getting a cab and the driver told him that his pregnant wife had been thrown into prison for a crime that she did not commit.
Working for BBC Surrey at the time, he investigated for three years finding others in the same situation, with spotless records and who had no real need or desire to steal from teir own Post Office
“Either all these people were lying through their teeth or multiple. miscarriages of justice may have taken place”
“I was always taught it was better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man goes to prison” said Nick when we spoke to him but at the time he could generate little interest in the story.Only when Private Eye were aware, and then the BBC made a Panorama programme about it in 2015, and a campaign in the magazine Computer World was interest generated.
“A number pf people with criminal convictions were just not getting listened to by the Post Office.The Post Office, said Nick “had bet the farm on the integreity of a system that did not work well” adding that they didn’t want to hear about those potential problems, especially if it had led to them wrongfully prosecuting people… there was an institutional corporate denial about something that was happening in front of their faces”
You can find out more about the story and the investigation behind it at the Waterside this Sunday as part of the venue’s Refract Festival
