The Post Office was run by “thugs in suits” and was willing to do “anything and everything” to hide Horizon failures, former subpostmaster Alan Bates has said.
Giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, the chief campaigner for the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) made a series of damning allegations about the government-owned company, including that it spent over two decades trying to silence him and terminated his contract as a subpostmaster because he stood up to them.
Mr Bates said the post office was seemingly willing to do "anything and everything to try and keep the failures of Horizon hidden" regardless of who it has to "trample" in the process.
He also accused the government of allowing the “once great institution” to be stripped by “little more than thugs in suits” who have been acting with “impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict.”
He added: “Prior to and since my termination from the branch, I have spent the last 23 years campaigning to expose the truth, and justice, not just for myself, but for the entire group of wrongly treated/wrongly convicted subpostmasters.
“I have dedicated this period of my life to this cause which, sadly, has been necessary since Post Office Limited has spent this entire period denying, lying, defending, and attempting to discredit and silence me and the group of SPMs [subpostmasters] that the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) represents.”
Mr Bates has played a pivotal role in bringing to light the Horizon IT scandal, which saw the wrongful conviction of more than 900 sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015 due to the faulty IT system.
As a former subpostmaster, Mr Bates had his contract terminated by the Post Office in 2003 after refusing to accept liability for shortfalls in the accounts at his branch in Llandudno, North Wales.
Since that time, Mr Bates has been campaigning vociferously for justice for himself and his colleagues after many of them had their lives, businesses and livelihoods blighted by wrongful accusations and convictions of fraud, false accounting and theft.
Mr Bates became the key figure in the ITV drama Mr Bates versus the Post Office which propelled the Horizon scandal into the public eye.
Since the TV show, the government has announced the mass exoneration of postmasters convicted during the scandal.
Mr Bates told the inquiry about his own experience of trying to draw attention to inaccuracies he’d encountered in the IT system, including a day in December 2000 when he contacted the Post Office’s helpline seven times, with one call lasting about an hour.
The inquiry was shown slides from an undated presentation titled Horizon Integrity written by Dave Smith, former managing director of branch accounting at the Post Office, which showed that Mr Bates was eventually dismissed from his position because he became “unmanageable”.
On one of the slides, Mr Smith writes of Mr Bates’ dismissal: “Bates had discrepancies but was dismissed because he became unmanageable. Clearly struggled with accounting, and despite copious support, did not follow instructions.”
Mr Bates, when asked what he understood to be the reason for the termination, said: “Basically, I think it was because a) they didn’t like me standing up to them in the first instance; b) they were finding it awkward; and c) I don’t think they could answer these questions and they had a feeling I was going to carry on in a similar vein going forward.”
The former postmaster was also highly critical of Sir Ed Davey after the former postal affairs minister refused a meeting with him in 2010, describing the now Liberal Democrat leader’s words as “disappointing and offensive”.
Sir Ed refused to meet with Mr Bates about the plight of the subpostmasters on the grounds that the government had an “arm’s-length relationship” with the Post Office, which prompted the campaigner to respond with another letter which read: “It’s not that you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter after all, you do own 100 per cent of the shares and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.
“It is because you have adopted an arm’s-length relationship that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits, and you have enabled them to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict.”
A Liberal Democrat spokesman said Sir Ed was “lied to” and was “sorry that he didn’t see through the Post Office’s lies, and that it took him five months to meet Mr Bates”.
Alan Bates said he has not returned to work since being dismissed as a subpostmaster due to his campaign for justice, adding: “I didn’t set out to spend 20 years doing this.”
He added: “The key issue has always been to expose the truth right from the outset because the other things, they followed on – once you know the truth about issues, the rest will hopefully follow on afterwards.
Addressing his campaign for justice for subpostmasters, Mr Bates said: “As you got to meet people and realised it wasn’t just yourself, and saw the harm and justice that had been descended upon them, it was something you felt you had to deal with. It’s something you couldn’t put down.”
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