The Post Office’s pursuit of 3,500 post office operators over 16 years with wrongful allegations of theft, fraud and false accounting has had a life-changing impact on those targeted.
Despite knowing there were faults with the Horizon accounting software that the operators were using, more than 900 were prosecuted and at least four suicides have been linked to the scandal.
Many of those affected have told heartbreaking stories about the financial and personal ramifications of being prosecuted and convicted to the ongoing public inquiry into one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK history.
Seema Misra
Seema Misra was sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant. She recalls being sent to a “horrendous” jail in Ashford, Surrey, Europe’s largest female prison, where she was placed on suicide watch after collapsing in court.
Among many other horrors she faced while incarcerated, Misra discovered a prisoner who had taken her own life and has said she would have killed herself in prison if she had not been pregnant. Misra gave birth to her second child in hospital wearing an electronic tag after she was released early for good behaviour.
It took 11 years to prove her innocence; she was cleared in 2021.
The 47-year-old post office operator from Surrey has told the inquiry into the scandal that Post Office bosses “acted like mafia” and said they had “blood on their hands”.
Her trial, in October 2010, became a test case for the reliability of Horizon, with her legal team telling the court that data from the computer accounting system could not be trusted.
While emails have revealed that Post Office lawyers had a report about a Horizon bug creating shortfalls at 40 branches in early October 2010, it was not disclosed to the defence at Misra’s trial later that month.
When she was convicted bosses celebrated. David Smith, then managing director, hailed her imprisonment as “brilliant news”.
Lee Castleton
Lee Castleton was made bankrupt by the Post Office after a two-year legal battle, in one of the most high-profile Horizon cases.
Castleton bought a post office in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, in 2003. However, within a year his computer system showed a £25,000 shortfall, despite him calling the Post Office’s helpline 91 times as he suspected the Horizon IT system was at fault.
He was taken to court by the Post Office, where he had to represent himself as he could not afford a lawyer, and was ordered to repay the money and pay costs of £321,000, which bankrupted him.
After the legal action, Castleton was forced to close his shop, sell his house and move into rented accommodation, while his wife suffered stress-induced seizures and his children had to move schools because of bullying. Castleton said of the bankruptcy: “It changed our lives completely. It was absolutely terrible and devastating.”
At the public inquiry, Stephen Dilley, who represented the Post Office in the civil claim against Castleton, admitted that the Post Office knew he would not be able to pay if he lost but that the state-owned company wanted to “show the world” it would defend the Horizon system.
Siobhan Sayer
Siobhan Sayer, 55, has told how she was separated from her distressed six-month-old daughter during a raid by investigators who visited her home in 2008 seeking £18,000 in funds missing from her Post Office business.
“They went through kitchen drawers, the filing cabinet, [and] tipped my underwear drawer upside down while joking about where I hid the money, saying it would be much easier if I told them where it was,” she told the Horizon IT inquiry last year.
“I was humiliated, terrified. I had a six-month-old daughter. I wasn’t allowed to see her. She started crying and I wasn’t allowed to leave to go and see her. That ended me. I had to end the interview as I couldn’t continue any longer.”
Sayer said that during the lengthy investigation she felt “generally harassed and intimidated”, including regularly finding someone parked outside her house. Ultimately, on the advice of lawyers, she pleaded guilty to charges of false accounting in 2010 – on the day of her daughter’s birthday.
She attended sentencing at court with a suitcase packed believing she would be sent straight to jail, and thinking “it would be left to dad to discuss [my incarceration] with them”. Sayer received a 40-week custodial sentence suspended for 18 months and 200 hours of community service and was allowed to return home.
Janet Skinner
Janet Skinner, 52, lost her house after being given a nine-month sentence in 2007 after being wrongly jailed over an accounting error.
The ordeal of the prosecution process, of which the public inquiry heard testimony that an investigator told an assisting lawyer she did not believe Skinner had stolen any money and that there was no evidence to prove it, had a dramatic impact on the health of the mother of two.
Amid the stress of a lengthy fight to prove she could not pay the allegedly missing money Skinner suffered a neurological collapse and was left paralysed from the neck down.
She had to learn to walk again, a rehabilitation process that took two years, and is still unable to work. Skinner believes her disability was brought on by the stress of her ordeal.
Timothy Burgess
“I got tarred overnight,” Timothy Burgess, a former post office operator from the village of Catterick in North Yorkshire, told the inquiry. “People ignored me, crossed the street. People were hostile. I ‘killed the village’ – I had that levelled at me.”
Burgess, who took over the sub-post office in July 2006, remembers noticing shortfalls the first day the IT system was installed. He was branded as “inept” by prosecutors who claimed he had been unable to cope with the demand of the job because he also ran a cafe and pub in the village.
He was accused of being responsible for a deficit of cash and items such as postal orders and stamps totalling more than £7,500. Ultimately, he admitted false accounting and was ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work and pay £500 court costs when he was convicted in 2011.
Judge Peter Bowers said at the time: “Your dishonesty was not taking money, but covering up your incompetence to the Post Office.”
Burgess’s relationship with his daughter “deteriorated quite a bit” and even a shift to a new school 30 miles away “was not far enough” to avoid the scandal. An attempt by his sister-in-law to buy the village pet store, something she “had her heart set on”, was thwarted by the owner because of her association with Burgess.
His prosecution was one of 39 overturned by the court of appeal in 2021.
