Five more convictions overturned

Five former postmasters and postal workers had their convictions, which relied on evidence from the Horizon accounting system, overturned yesterday.

Five more convictions were quashed yesterday at the Court of Appeal, taking the number of overturned convictions to 81.

They included Jack Smith who, having started in his job at the Post Office in 1974, is believed to be the longest-serving former postmaster to have had a conviction overturned. He was convicted in 2004 after 30 years of service at his branch in Newall Green, Manchester, and is now 78.

Grant Allan, 53, postmaster at Winsford, Cheshire, pleaded guilty to fraud in 2013. He was prosecuted using evidence from former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins, the current subject of a criminal investigation due to allegedly having misled several postmaster trials. In Mr Allan’s case, the court heard Jenkins had not reviewed the logs and data specific to the case, but nonetheless stated that Horizon records showing losses were accurate.

Duranda Clark, 65, was a branch manager of the Thaxted Post Office in Essex, and was convicted of fraud in 2009 after £41,000 appeared to go missing. She was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for a year and ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work.

Robert Boyle, 73, was convicted of theft, accused of taking over £11,000 at his branch in Alfreton Road, Nottinghamshire. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison suspended for two years and asked his defence team to make a statement at the time disputing Horizon’s reliability. Graeme Hall, representing Mr Boyle at the Court of Appeal yesterday, said: “He was 60 years old when he felt compelled to enter his guilty plea… it was all the more galling given he’d identified Horizon as the problem.” The experience was “traumatic and financially ruinous, he found it impossible to find work and had to sell his home. The scars will affect him for the rest of his life.”

Richard Hawkes, 75, of Talconeston, Norwich, was the fifth postmaster to have his conviction overturned, having been convicted of five counts of false accounting in 2005. He talked after the hearing about feeling profound relief: “You can feel the weight of it draining off your shoulders, down your body. You can’t believe what effect it has on you. People say don’t think about it, think about something else, but in quiet moments your brain goes back to it, and you can’t stop it. You get an uneasy feeling. Even last night I was anxious. You wake up thinking, I wonder if at the last minute it could go wrong.

“Now I haven’t got a stain on my character, it’s absolutely brilliant, I can hold my head up high.”

The Horizon Scandal:

If you’re new to the Post Office story, the Great Post Office Trial podcast gives an overview. In 1999 the Post Office rolled out an accounting system, Horizon, to every branch. It immediately started going wrong and creating holes in postmasters’ accounts, sometimes for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Despite some managers at the Post Office knowing there were bugs, the organisation made people pay for the shortfalls and prosecuted hundreds for theft and false accounting. Thousands of postmasters lost their savings, livelihoods, homes, and even died by suicide. Many have died without justice. The Post Office continued to insist Horizon was error-free until 2019 when it lost a long, drawn-out battle in the High Court. More than 80 convictions have so far been overturned.

I wrote the first investigation into the scandal in 2009 while at Computer Weekly, and they have continued to cover it since I left - their timeline can be found on any of Karl Flinders’ recent articles.