TRANSCRIPT
The company behind the faulty IT system that led to the wrongful conviction of hundreds of managers of Post Office branches up and down the UK apologised for its role in the country's biggest ever miscarriage of justice.
Paul Patterson is the Europe director of Japan's Fujitsu.
“Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice. We were involved from the very start, we did have bugs and errors in the system and we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of the sub-postmasters. For that we are truly sorry. To your question chair around our ethics, I believe we are an ethical company. The company today is quite different to the company in the early 2000s and clearly we need to demonstrate that both to our customers, to government and to the wider society.”
Fujitsu also committed to offer money to compensate those affected.
Mr Patterson told a committee of lawmakers that the company has a “moral obligation” to contribute to the fund seeking to recompense those sub-postmasters who, over decades, suffered from the failures of the Horizon accounting system.
“Yes, I believe there is a moral obligation I have already I've already said that. I think it's also important that the inquiry deals with these, deals with these very complex matters with all the parties involved. Yes, we have a part to play. Yes, the Post Office, already this morning, we've talked about lawyers, we've talked about the law. I think all of those matters need to be discovered to bring transparency and to bring the truth. And in that context, absolutely, we have a part to play and to contribute to the redress, I think is the words that Mr. (Alan) Bates used, the redress fund for the sub-postmasters.”
The Commons’ Business and Trade Committee is trying to determine how to speed up compensation for the victims.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed to introduce unprecedented legislation to reverse the convictions, following a television docudrama that created a huge surge of public support for the former postmasters.
Last week, Sunak said legislation to reverse the convictions will be presented to lawmakers soon.
“The stories are appalling, people were treated absolutely appallingly, that's wrong and we should do everything we can to make it right. I would say, that over the past few years, my predecessors started the process of doing that, had the inquiry. Actually as chancellor I approved the compensation schemes for the first time, which are now in the process of being paid out.”
It comes in the wake of a television docudrama that aired earlier this month and fuelled public outrage.
The ITV show, “Mr. Bates vs the Post Office,” told the story of branch manager Alan Bates, played by Toby Jones, who has spent around two decades trying to expose the scandal and exonerate his peers.
Mr Bates told the inquiry that he was frustrated that financial redress is taking decades.
“Frustrated, to put it mildly. I mean, there is no reason at all why full financial redress shouldn't have been delivered by now. It's, it's gone on for far too long. People are suffering, they've been, they're dying. We're losing numbers along the way. And it just seems to be tied up in bureaucracy. And that seems to be the big problem.”
After the Post Office rolled out the Horizon information technology system, developed by Fujitsu, in 1999 to automate sales accounting, local Post Office managers began finding unexplained losses they were responsible to cover.
The state-owned Post Office maintained Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty.
Between 2000 and 2014, around 900 postal workers were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with some going to prison and others forced into bankruptcy.
In total, more than 2,000 people were affected by the scandal.
Some killed themselves or attempted suicide.
Others said their marriages fell apart and reported becoming community pariahs.
Among them was Jo Hamilton, a former sub-post mistress.
“I'm fighting for the group that still haven't had... well they've had virtually nothing. I mean, I'm not privy to what they actually have had, but I've heard, you know, they've had tiny interims and literally they're in this factory of bureaucracy that just swallows up paperwork.”
Mr Bates is also seeking accountability.
“People in jobs of, I don't know, high responsibility, they're not being held to account at the end of the day, and I'm hoping, in this particular instance, that people are held to account. ... My gut feel on this, having looked at lots of paperwork over the years, is how much did Post Office really know in the early days, and how much did government really know in the early days, about what was happening at Fujitsu? I think everyone's going to be surprised about how much was known.”
Nick Read is the current chief executive of the Post Office.
“What astonishes me when I look back to 2014 through to 2015 is that there are between 55 and 75 prosecutions, approximately, every single year. It is an extraordinary number. Don't get me wrong. It is an absolutely extraordinary number.”
A group of postal workers took legal action against the Post Office in 2016.
Three years later, the High Court in London ruled that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and that the Post Office “knew there were serious issues about the reliability” of the system.
