Lawyers representing sub-postmasters in the Post Office Horizon software scandal have called for a full public inquiry to take place.
39 of the 42 former sub-postmasters had their wrongful convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal last week, following a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, in Hamilton and others v Post Office Ltd [2021] EWCA Crim 577.
They were prosecuted by the Post Office between 2003 and 2013, and convicted of crimes including theft and false accounting, when its faulty Horizon accounting system showed unexplained shortfalls and discrepancies. However, it was the software at fault and the Post Office has since admitted unreliable computer evidence may have been used to prosecute more than 900 sub-postmasters.
The Court of Appeal held the Post Office’s failures of investigation and disclosure ‘were so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the “Horizon cases” an affront to the conscience of the court.
‘By representing Horizon as reliable, and refusing to countenance any suggestion to the contrary, Post Office Ltd effectively sought to reverse the burden of proof’.
Neil Hudgell, of Hudgell Solicitors, said: ‘The Post Office failed to offer any sort of explanation as to why wholesale disclosure of evidence was withheld in cases, nor why a proper investigation was not carried out when known problems in the Horizon system started to appear.
‘Instead they sought to attribute failings to incompetence and not bad faith, and to engage in legal gymnastics to seek to persuade the court away from finding a clear systemic abuse of process of the criminal law.’
He called for a judge-led public inquiry, ‘where all those who played any part in this large-scale injustice are required by law to appear and be fully questioned under the rules of evidence and held to account as the independent review currently underway does not have the powers required’.
