Teju Adedayo regrets the day she agreed to speak to the Post Office’s investigators.
On the day they arrived in September 2005, she thought they had come to help her. After all, her post office branch in Gillingham, Kent, was recording huge and inexplicable shortfalls.
Yet, hours later, without a lawyer present and faced with the threat of jail for the disappearance of £53,000 from her accounts, she was confessing to stealing it.
“I started talking rubbish,” says Adedayo. “Anything to fit in, because two or three years in prison is not going to happen, I said to myself, not with three young children, not in my life.”
Adedayo has lived in the shadow of that day for the last 20 years, and it shows.
Her eyes glisten with tears. Leaning forward, she sighs deeply and looks down at her feet. “They just turned our lives upside down. I swear. They are bastards. I’m telling you. They’re rubbish. I’m 60 in a few months – couple of months I’ll be 60.”
Although Adedayo’s conviction was quashed in 2021, the confession she says she was coerced into making means she has been denied the compensation awarded to others whose lives have been upended by the affair.
Adedayo is the kind of person who greets new people with a hug and tries to insist on buying the tea. She frequently makes reference to her religious faith as she tries to make sense of the trauma inflicted on her and her family through her involvement in the Post Office Horizon scandal.
As a result of her conviction, she says she lost her homes and her business, her marriage foundered, she was left suicidal and has never worked since.
Adedayo, who came to the UK from Nigeria as a teenager, has lost her faith in British fair play, after one of its most emblematic and trusted institutions made her life a living hell. The Post Office, as she saw it, was a trusted partner, so emblematic of British society that it carried the queen’s logo; she did not want to go into business with individuals who could defraud her, or with people she may fall out with.
“I really trusted the Post Office,” she remembers.
“When I went into this business, I went with: ‘What could go wrong? It’s the queen’s logo. This definitely is the guarantee I needed.’ But I didn’t realise that they have no respect whatsoever for that logo. Whatever.
“I don’t know how to go about telling you how disappointed I am with the whole mess.”
‘I knew something was wrong …’
It was in the spring of 1999 – and with high hopes – that Adedayo moved with her then husband and their three young children to take over the Rainham Road sub-post office in Gillingham.
Operators run their branches on a self-employed basis under contracts with the Post Office. Adedayo saw it as an opportunity to take charge of her own future, with her own business that would give her the flexibility to earn while looking after her young family.
In the beginning, the accounting work was carried on paper. Discrepancies arose, but nothing that could not be easily reconciled – “tops maybe £3, £5,” says Adedayo.
But 1999 was also the year the Post Office began rolling out Horizon, a new counter-top sales and accounting software developed by Fujitsu. Horizon was supposed to automate processes previously done by hand, streamlining the work of the operators. But behind the scenes, Fujitsu already knew there were bugs in the system.
Despite that, the software was installed at Rainham Road in 2000.
Adedayo says problems began immediately. “It started throwing up … deficits of some sort, like shortages.”
Alongside her sub-post office branch, Adedayo ran a convenience store. She would make good any shortfalls by taking money from her shop and transferring it to her post office business. But these transfers soon began to take a toll on her bottom line.
“This is my own money to take back to the cash and carry, [to pay] my paperboys – things like that. I have to pay them,” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, maybe [we made] mistakes.’ And we kept talking about it, myself and my assistant. But I was getting really fed up of it when it started going up, and I thought: no, something is wrong.
“We would call them … We were calling the network helpline like there is no tomorrow [telling them]: ‘We’re short.’” But, says Adedayo, each time she called the Post Office’s helpline, staff would just tell her to approve the transactions – otherwise her branch would not be able to open the following day.
“Honestly, honestly, if they said to me jump, all I need to say is how high, because I trusted them so much,” she says. It was a trust that was to prove disastrous. “[They said:] ‘Oh don’t worry about it. You have to make it OK. Maybe next week you will get an error notice come through. You will have a transaction error.’”
But error notices did not come, Horizon owned up to no transaction errors, and the shortfalls grew.
By September 2005, Adedayo’s shortfalls had grown to £41,000. No longer able to cover them with the turnover from her shop, she began the process of remortgaging her home to find the cash.
She hoped her constant reporting to the Post Office would prompt it to come to help her resolve the errors. Its auditors came on 5 September. She had been out taking her children to school and when she returned, she says, she found her assistant kicked out of the sub-post office. And to begin with, Adedayo wasn’t allowed in either.
“I noticed a lot of our books, how we set our things, are not there – so they’ve packed up and they’ve sent some of the things out before I got there. I got there like, I must say, maybe about 8.30am or so … and they’ve already removed [things], before I’ve even got there.”
Adedayo was told her branch had a shortfall of more than £50,000 – £10,000 more than she had reported back to the Post Office via Horizon the previous week.
A row ensued. “I said to them: ‘Is this peculiar to me?’ They said, ‘Yeah, have you heard it anywhere else?’ I said, ‘No.’ And it’s true.
“It’s only now, in the inquiry …”
Wary of the impact of the highly visible row on her customers, Adedayo agreed to the investigators’ request to continue the conversation upstairs. “I wish I had not said that,” she says now. “I wish I had said we can stay right down there, in all honesty.”
Adedayo says that it was while they were upstairs, in the flat above her shop, that the Post Office’s investigators threatened her with prison. She says they told her that if she admitted taking the money, and agreed to pay it back, everything would go away.
But, she says, they demanded she come up with an explanation of where the money went: “Oh, you have to come up with how the money was missing. Where is the money? What have you done with it?”
A transcript of Adedayo’s conversation with the Post Office investigators, disclosed to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, records what she told them. It took place without a lawyer present.
In it, she says she took £50,000 to pay off friends or family – it is not clear which – who loaned her the money to start her business, on the basis she would repay it when she had the funds.
Adedayo describes how, under pressure from investigators, she came up with this story on the spur of the moment. “In my head I said to myself, I need to have a story, because if I don’t come up with a story they’re going to take me in the police car, and the kids will watch, because by the time they get back, by the time they get the police on me, they’ll see me handcuffed. I didn’t want that to happen.”
Nevertheless, Adedayo appeared at Maidstone magistrates court, where she pleaded guilty to false accounting.
“Before we went in I remember saying to my barrister at the time, ‘I don’t want to plead guilty,’” says Adedayo. “And she said, ‘You better plead guilty … because if you don’t it will go really bad for you. The Post Office will make sure you go to prison, and that is what we are avoiding here.”
Her case was transferred to Maidstone crown court for sentencing and she was given 50 weeks, suspended for two years, 12 months’ probation, and ordered to complete 200 hours’ community service.
‘I was ashamed to the core’
The conviction destroyed Adedayo’s life. “They thought I was a criminal in the society,” she says. Vandals spray painted “thief” across the door of her shop.
She suffered a mental health collapse, unable to face the world, unable to talk to her husband, unable even to show her face at the school gates to collect her children.
With customers staying away, what remained of Adedayo’s convenience store business failed after about a year, but her criminal conviction made it impossible for her to find work. She fell into debt and her home, which had been remortgaged to repay the £52,864.08 the Post Office claimed she had taken, was repossessed.
“I was ashamed, ashamed, ashamed. Ashamed to the core,” she says. “My dad had a heart attack, shortly after all this happened. And the reason was his bubbly daughter was no longer bubbly. I didn’t want to leave the house.
“On the day it was on the front page of the local paper, we were getting ready for school, and I went to go and get the papers in. I just shut the shutters. I told the kids to go back to bed … The thing is – ugh – you’re a thief. The Post Office has that logo; [it is the] queen against you.”
Adedayo thought she was the only one. It took almost a decade to realise she was not.
In 2015, a leaked report by Second Sight, a firm of forensic accountants the Post Office hired to investigate Horizon, and then fired, revealed the software’s objective of producing a clear transactional audit trail allowing easy investigation of any errors “had not always been achieved”. It was around this time Adedayo first saw news reports indicating the injustices Horizon had caused.
“I remember saying to my daughter: please read this article,” she says. “So she read it, and she said: ‘Oh my God, Mum. This sounds like your story.’”
Adedayo contacted Alan Bates, the former post office operator who founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, and whose campaign was dramatised by ITV, and attended a meeting of others who had been affected by Horizon. “This is when I knew, it was not just me,” she says. “And I was hiding, and I nearly wanted to kill myself. I was saying to God, you know you have to take me because the shame will come off the kids, you know.
“But I didn’t know there were so many of us.”
But Adedayo’s path to justice was not smooth. Because of her conviction, she was deemed ineligible to join the group litigation order that led the way to the 2019 ruling that blew the scandal wide open. She says it was Bates who advised her to contact the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which eventually took up her case.
On 14 May 2021, Adedayo’s conviction was quashed at Southwark crown court, alongside that of Parmod Kalia, who was jailed for six months in 2002.
They became the 46th and 47th operators cleared of convictions secured by evidence from Horizon, after the Post Office declined to retry their cases. But even then, their struggle was not over. Because both had made confessions and pleaded guilty, the Post Office maintained there was enough non-Horizon evidence to indicate a crime had taken place and has so far refused them proper compensation. Adedayo has received a small sum but intends to fight for more.
She now believes her race played a role in the way she was treated by the Post Office. Last year a document unearthed via a freedom of information request revealed the company used a racist slur to categorise black workers under investigation.
“When I saw that I thought to myself, ‘These are the people I went to work with, these rubbish people.’ I was absolutely livid, because I thought … ‘I spent all my savings to come to you, knowing you think I’m a negroid.’”
Adedayo’s hope is that she can now move on with her life. “I would really like to go back to do something I’m passionate about,” she says. “I would like to have the opportunity to put my life back on track.”
