The chair of the Post Office scandal public inquiry cannot rule out the “real possibility” that 13 people took their own lives as a result of their treatment by the Post Office after they suffered unexplained shortfalls in their branches.

In part one of his much-anticipated report, retired judge Wyn Williams presented his findings from the first phase of the public inquiry, which examined the human impact of the scandal. He also reported on the progress of the compensation schemes being run by the government and the Post Office.

Williams said, “The picture which has emerged and is described in my report is profoundly disturbing.”

In a 162-page report, he said at least 10,000 people have been impacted to different degrees as a result of the flawed Horizon IT system and the Post Office’s response to phantom losses falsely attributed to subpostmasters.

“It is impossible to ascertain, with any degree of accuracy, the number of persons who have suffered as a result of the misplaced reliance upon data produced by Horizon. I can say, however, with a degree of confidence that there are currently about 10,000 eligible claimants in the schemes providing financial redress and that number is likely to rise at least by hundreds, if not more in the coming months,” wrote Williams.

Referring to “Legacy Horizon” – the first version of the Fujitsu accounting and retail software used until 2010 – Williams wrote in his report that he is “satisfied from the evidence that I have heard that a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error. Yet, for all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate.”

He said that the subsequent version, Horizon Online, “was also, from time to time, afflicted by bugs, errors and defects which had the effect of showing gains and losses in branch and Crown Office accounts which were illusory. I am satisfied that a number of employees of Fujitsu and the Post Office knew that this was so.”

Williams added that, while he initially assumed the current version of Horizon in use at Post Offices “was far more robust,” he has since concluded that, “These assumptions may no longer be wholly justified given evidence provided to the inquiry on behalf of Fujitsu and from postmasters who use this version of Horizon.”

The report revealed that 59 victims have contemplated suicide as a result of their suffering and that although he “cannot make a definitive finding” that there is a “causal connection” between the deaths by suicide of 13 people, he did not rule it out as a “real possibility”. Williams reported that 10 of the 59 people that contemplated suicide attempted to do so, some on more than one occasion.

The report quoted one former subpostmaster, who said: “The impact on me of the treatment the Post Office subjected me to has been immeasurable. The mental stress was so great for me that I had a mental breakdown and turned to alcohol as I sunk further into depression. I attempted suicide on several occasions and was admitted to a mental health institution twice.”

The scandal saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongfully prosecuted due to unexplained account shortfalls that were caused by errors in the Horizon system. Thousands lost their livelihoods and had their lives turned upside down after repaying the unexplained losses.

Many were jailed as a result of the miscarriages of justice and more spent decades struggling to cope with criminal records for crimes they never committed – crimes which were subsequently proved never even took place. It is described as the widest miscarriage of justice in UK history, with 900 wrongful convictions overturned as a result of the scandal being fully exposed.

This is the first report to come out from the three-year public inquiry, revealing Williams’ findings on the scandal’s human impact and the state of the compensation schemes set up for Post Office scandal victims. Subsequent reports – expected later this year – will examine the causes of the scandal in more detail, and victims hope Williams will attribute blame for their treatment. 

In the first report, Williams also criticised the Post Office’s attitude to compensation: “I am persuaded that in the difficult and substantial claims, on too many occasions, the Post Office and its advisors have adopted an unnecessarily adversarial attitude towards making initial offers, which have had the effect of depressing the level at which settlements have been achieved.”

He called for swift action and demanded the government respond by 10 October and for free legal advice, compensation for family menbers and commitment to “true full and fair compensation.” Williams also said Horizon supplier Fujitsu, the Post Office and the government should publish a report by the end of October which outlines a programme for restorative justice.

His report focused on 17 case studies of people that suffered at the hands of the Post Office. Its findings are based on the inquiry’s 225 days, 298 witness statements and about 274,000 documents submitted by core participants

The public inquiry had run for nearly two years before mainstream media and the wider public became interested. An ITV dramatisation in January 2024 of the stories of victims, including campaign leader Alan Bates, finally put the scandal at the centre of UK national debate.

The drama featured the story of Martin Griffiths, one of the victims driven to take his own life by the scandal. In September 2013 at the age of 50, he deliberately walked in front of a bus. Griffiths was a subpostmaster in Ellesmere Port, and Williams writes about him in the inquiry report. He suffered for years with problems with the Horizon IT system. He was eventually suspended and given notice of termination by the Post Office. He made substantial payments to the Post Office to cover the apparent losses identified by Horizon, and his parents contributed all their savings, worth £62,000, towards paying off the money the Post Office insisted he owed. 

Pressure from victims forced the government to hold a statutory public inquiry, which could compel witnesses to give evidence. The government originally offered a review with no such power.

After a High Court victory in 2019, which proved errors in the Horizon system were to blame for accounting shortfalls, the first thing campaigning subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates said to Computer Weekly was that he wanted a statutory public inquiry into the scandal. He got it in May 2021, when a planned government inquiry was made statutory.

The public inquiry examined an issue that went on for two decades and saw subpostmasters wrongly blamed and punished for accounting shortfalls. It was split into seven phases.  The first phase, which Williams reported on today, focused on the human impact of the scandal, which revealed the extreme suffering of people at the hands of the Post Office.

Since the drama aired on primetime TV, the government has been forced into introducing unprecedented legislation to overturn the wrongful convictions of hundreds of former subpostmasters and increasing access to compensation, to more of the thousands affected.

There have been seven phases of the inquiry, which began with the victims telling their stories. This was followed in October 2022 by phase two, which saw an investigation into the Horizon IT system, its procurement, design, pilot, roll-out and modifications.

At the beginning of 2023, phase three put the operation of the Horizon system under the spotlight. Phase four, which began hearing evidence in July 2023, examined the practices of the lawyers and investigators involved in the prosecutions of subpostmasters.

In April 2024, a combined phase five and six began and featured directors, politicians and civil servants who, whether deliberately or not, contributed to the cover-up.  Phase seven looked at the the current situation at the Post Office and the future.

There have been many shocking revelations, such as the Post Office having knowledge that the Horizon software had bugs when rolled out, prosecution witnesses changing their statements when prompted by the Post Office, and lawyers hiding evidence during trials of subpostmasters because it would have made their prosecutions unsafe. 

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).

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