The tragedy of the Horizon Scandal
Happy New Year! 🎉 I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and a good start to 2024 – a year that will for sure bring much-needed change.
Like many people across the UK this week, I’ve been watching Mr Bates vs the Post Office and feeling the shock, outrage and indignation at one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. (See Wikipedia for a summary, or Private Eye for an excellent and detailed report, Justice Lost in the Post. Computer Weekly has also published hundreds of articles on the scandal.)
In short, in around 2000 the Post Office implemented a new IT system called Horizon, built by Japanese tech giant Fujitsu in what was at the time the largest non-military IT contract in Europe. Almost immediately, sub-postmasters started noticing discrepancies in their books. Under the terms of their contracts, they were personally liable for any shortfalls. These hardworking people, pillars of their small communities, often living over the shop, lost their savings, homes, livelihoods and reputations. Several took their own lives.
This tragic story brings together several toxic strategies from the capitalism playbook:
- The big guys win, the little guys lose: The chief exec of the Post Office at the time took home a salary of over £700,000, while sub-postmasters were losing everything they had. She has still not been held accountable.
- Isolate and gaslight: The sub-postmasters were each told they were the only one who had the problem, so it must be their fault, not the computer system’s.
- Reward incompetence: The government continues to throw money at Fujitsu, which is being awarded hundreds of millions of pounds in new contracts, even at the same time as the government is paying out over £1bn of taxpayers’ money in compensation and in funding the ongoing public inquiry.
Having worked for a company that implements big IT systems, I understand that bugs creep in. Until humans are perfect, IT systems created by humans won’t be perfect. Bugs are almost unavoidable, and hence forgivable.
What is not forgivable is the conspiracy and cover-up that took place, even when it must have been obvious to the tech helpline – and subsequently to Post Office management – that a pattern was emerging, a pattern that pointed the finger of blame squarely at the IT system.
This is a politically difficult story for a Lib Dem to write about – our current and last leaders are both implicated in its history, while a Conservative MP, James Arbuthnot, was the first to champion the cause of the postmasters. But some stories transcend political allegiances, and lessons need to be learned, such as:
- Redesign incentives for CEOs: While CEOs are rewarded purely on profit, their incentive is to prioritise profit to the exclusion of the wellbeing of their staff, and sometimes even the ability of the company to perform its primary purpose (e.g. Royal Mail, privatised water companies, buses and trains). CEO compensation needs to span a broader spectrum of success metrics (and I personally would like to see a limit on executive compensation as a multiple of average worker pay, to start to reduce inequality).
- Include stakeholders in design and implementation: I am glad to see that sub-postmasters are being included in testing the new system. Just a shame that people had to actually die for this lesson to be learned.
- Admit mistakes: The tech helpline told sub-postmasters that their problem was an isolated incident, when it clearly wasn’t, apparently in a deliberate policy to deflect responsibility. Ultimately, the response of the Post Office was aggressive, when it could have been supportive. The goal should be to fix a problem rather than find someone else to blame for it.
The story makes for painful viewing, but it’s vital that we take a long, unflinching look at how the tragedy unfolded. We can’t bring back the sub-postmasters who were driven to take their own lives, or who died before receiving exoneration and justice, but we can at least ensure that their suffering was not in vain.
Other News:
I’ve just returned from a 5-day festival of ideas, Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, South Carolina. I gave a total of 5 presentations on a range of themes, and enjoyed eye-opening, occasionally jaw-dropping, talks by other participants. I’ve returned full of energy and ideas for the year ahead.
I have updated my website with further information on my values and principles, and priorities. Enjoy!
We’re back out canvassing this week, mostly in the Kington area of Wiltshire, and Grumbolds Ash with Avening in Gloucestershire. Please drop me an email if you’d like to join me.
Quote of the Week:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
– Martin Luther King
Have a great week!
💜
Featured image by Mick Haupt on Unsplash