Thirteen people may have taken their own lives and others were bankrupted or became seriously ill as a result of Britain’s Post Office scandal, a public inquiry found yesterday, laying bare the toll of one of the country’s worst miscarriages of justice.
Inquiry chair Wyn Williams said yesterday he was satisfied that executives at the state-owned Post Office knew, or should have known, that its computer system was capable of error, despite publicly maintaining the fiction it was accurate.
From 2000-2013 the Post Office pursued branch managers for losses that appeared in their accounts but were in fact caused by flaws in an IT system supplied by Japanese computer company Fujitsu. About 1,000 people were convicted.
Public outrage about the scandal mounted last year after a TV dramatisation of the case, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which led to legislation to exonerate those convicted. In the 162-page first volume of his report, Williams called for urgent action to ensure ‘full and fair’ compensation for victims. He said it was impossible to ascertain exactly how many people had been impacted, but said there were about 10,000 eligible claimants across four compensation schemes.
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