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Millie Castleton was eight when her subpostmaster father was falsely accused of theft by the Post Office. Immediately, her family were branded thieves and liars. She moved school, where she became the target of bullying for her father’s “theft”. The verbal abuse was followed by physical. Racked by stress, meanwhile, Millie’s mother developed epilepsy, and Millie began sleeping with her to be on hand when she suffered seizures. The child became depressed and self-loathing, feeling like “a burden” to her family. She won a place at university but developed anorexia and could not continue.
In her absolute gut-punch of a statement to Sir Wyn Williams’ Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, whose first report volume dropped on Tuesday morning, Millie wrote: “I fought. I tried. I am better for it … That nagging voice in my head still says ugly things sometimes. It still tells me that my past and my family’s struggle will define me, that it will be a branding on my skin forever … I’m 26 and am very conscious that I may never be able to fully commit to natural trust. But my family is still fighting. I’m still fighting, as are many hundreds still involved in the Post Office trial.”
How does every one of these stories feel like the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? How did Millie’s father, an entirely innocent man, end up hounded into homelessness and a £310,000 “debt” to the Post Office? How in the ever-living Fujitsu does Lee Castleton still not have justice nearly two decades on?
That story is just one case highlighted in the first volume of the report, with Williams calling the human impact of the Post Office scandal “profoundly disturbing”. Other takeouts? The most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history just got wider. We used to think that 900 innocent subpostmasters were convicted after the Post Office pursued them for branch shortfalls – shortfalls that were not in fact down to theft, but to a computer system the Post Office and its developer, Fujitsu, knew was faulty. Today we learned there were in fact approximately 1,000 convictions. At least 10,000 victims were eligible for compensation, and that number is rising.
And there have been even more tragic numerical upticks. It was previously thought that six victims of the Horizon scandal had taken their own lives; today we learned it was at least 13. A further 59 victims contemplated suicide at various points in their ordeal, and 10 of those actively attempted to take their own lives. At least one was admitted to a mental health facility on more than one occasion. Many self-harmed. Many say they began to abuse alcohol.
Some numbers haven’t changed, though – the tally of people charged for ruining this many thousands of lives still stands at precisely zero.
That blame side of matters will be addressed in the next phase of Williams’ report, and a significant police investigation is already under way. But the inquiry chair wanted to use this first volume to urgently catalyse the “full, fair and prompt” redress the government keeps saying is due to victims. In fact, he’s very keen the government should spell out what full and fair redress means. Ideally by, like, yesterday – but in the absence of that, ASAFP. That’s not Sir Wyn’s abbreviation, I should stress. But it’s very much the vibe of this compelling report, given the number of victims still to be compensated by any one of the four redress schemes. Of these, three are run by the government, and one by the Post Office. The Post Office! That feels totally normal – like appointing the wolf as loss adjuster for the three little pigs’ house insurance claims.
Yet even at this first stage, Williams was clear that these thousands of individual horror stories were not the result of some kind of antagonist-free natural disaster. They happened because there were perpetrators. Someone blew thousands of houses down. His report states that all of these people and their wider families are to be regarded as victims of “wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu”.
Indeed, a notable feature of today’s report is how many of the victims had begged for help when their Horizon terminals started showing weird shortfalls. One postmistress had made 256 calls to the helpdesk about Horizon problems. She would later be incarcerated and denied contact with her daughter on the latter’s 18th birthday. Her daughter died the following year. I have to say that even selecting which glimpses of suffering to include in this column feels disrespectful to all the others – the fact is that every single one is a tragedy whose ripples can only be guessed at. Small wonder Williams recommended that close family members affected by this are also compensated.
And so to another of those families. The facts of Harjinder Butoy’s story are modern, but its emotional dynamics feel like something straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. Here was a man in the prime of his life, with a thriving small business established with a loan from his brother. Then, a twist of fate … and the descent is dizzyingly rapid. The total loss of reputation, a court case, imprisonment. His shame – the shame of an innocent man – reported in newspapers from the Daily Telegraph to the Punjab Times. Harjinder’s whole family were sucked into the vortex of his misfortune – his wife was left homeless and penniless with their three young children; his brother’s loan could never be repaid; his parents gave everything to try to ameliorate his situation, though everything wasn’t enough. Mr Butoy spent longer in prison than any other victim of the Post Office scandal, and 14 years passed between his suspension and his conviction being quashed. His bankruptcy dogged him for a decade or more, his mental health has been destroyed, and he has never been able to find work.
It feels impossible not to think of Harjinder’s fall in counterpoint to the seemingly unstoppable rise of senior executives at Fujitsu, and most particularly at the Post Office, where the boss class secured bonuses, directorships, and – who knows? – maybe even a few places in hell.
Harjinder broke a long silence on the eve of this report’s publication. “I just want everyone to know the impact, what’s happened to us all,” he said. “But I also need someone to be punished and let them go to prison and feel like what we’ve been through.” Quite so. But do “someones” like that go to prison – or is it only people like Harjinder Butoy who do? That is the key question which remains, and no country where the little people pay for the sins of the bigwigs should ever consider itself properly civilised. Compensation should be full and fair – but so should justice.
