A former Post Office worker has told the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal he tried to kill himself on three occasions after being wrongly imprisoned for stealing from his employer.
Another, also giving evidence on Tuesday, called for his former bosses including Adam Crozier, now chair of BT, to attend the hearings and answer for their role in the scandal.
Parmod Kalia, who was jailed for six months in 2001 after the organisation’s flawed IT system incorrectly suggested a £27,000 shortfall at his Orpington post office, told the inquiry how his once tight-knit family had been torn apart in the two decades since.
“It came as a bit of a shock when the prison wardens wanted my belt and my tie, that was a bit humiliating,” said the 63-year-old father of four, who was taken to Surrey’s High Down, a prison designated with the UK’s second-highest security level, after being sentenced.
“I was numb at the time. Walking through the front door, being asked to strip and given a uniform … I was locked up basically for 23 hours a day.”
Kalia, who had his conviction quashed last year but has yet to receive an interim compensation payment from the Post Office, said he had “buried” the events as best he could until a BBC Panorama documentary about the hundreds of wrongfully prosecuted Post Office workers aired in 2015.
“Since then I’m now in depression and I have anxiety issues,” he said. “In April last year I went to my GP and for the first time I told him I was suffering from depression and anxiety and had attempted suicide on three occasions in 2015.”
Kalia and his wife had struggled until as late as 1am some nights trying to get the Horizon IT system to balance the takings, as his young daughter slept behind the shop counter, and was ultimately forced to ask his mother for most of her savings after a union representative told him to try to pay the loss to “keep out of the courts”.
His mother never knew he went to jail as she was taken to India while he was in prison – “if she had found out it would have killed her there and then,” he said – and neither does his older sister. However, he is no longer on speaking terms with his brother, has had to face questions from his children over whether he took the money, and lives separately from his wife.
Kalia said since the suicide attempts in 2015 he had been living in charity-linked accommodation. “We haven’t gone down the route of divorce,” he said. “I am a telephone call away. But we don’t have a husband and wife matrimonial relationship. They have classified us as a dysfunctional family, all because of my conviction.”
Joan Bailey, who ran a Post Office and several smaller satellite offices in mid-Wales with her husband, said her husband was referred to a mental health team because he “didn’t see any point now … he was talking about suicide” as Post Office investigators pursued the couple for a shortfall of about £13,000.
Over a period of six years she estimated the couple paid about £40,000 – drawing on loans and pensions and trying to save by running the heating for just two hours a night in the bitter Welsh winters – to the Post Office to attempt to cover the continuing incorrect shortfalls thrown up.
Chris Trousdale, who in 2002 at just 19 took over a Post Office his family had run for 150 years, told the hearing the IT system would not balance even in his first week with the Post Office trainer “watching every transaction”.
He produced records showing that he called the Post Office IT helpline, which he dubbed the “hell line”, almost 200 times over a period of 15 months.
After a harrowing experience dealing with Post Office investigators – whom he says used bullying, coercion and intimidation tactics, a common theme repeated by witnesses at the inquiry – he saw a doctor and was diagnosed with acute stress reaction and PTSD.
“To this day I look back with a bit of terror,” he said. “They were a law unto themselves. They wanted people to believe they were the police, or bigger than the police.” His mother, who went on to run the post office, with a new computer system, was also diagnosed with PTSD.
Trousdale, now 39, called for management at Royal Mail and the Post Office to take responsibility.
“When I was prosecuted, Adam Crozier was the chief executive,” he said. “I think he should be here answering questions as well as all the other heads of the Post Office.
“I don’t think there is anyone who should be allowed to get away with this, it has been happening for 20 years. Bosses were paid bonuses based on performance. Victims’ money [paid to cover the balance shortfalls] in my opinion was going into the pockets of those that had persecuted them.”
Crozier, who is chair of Premier Inn-owner Whitbread as well as BT, was chief executive of Royal Mail Group, of which the Post Office was part, from 2003 to 2010.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
