As regular readers of this blog will know, Bath Publishing has gained a well-deserved reputation as publishers of very useful and accessible books on various legal topics, including employment law and family law. In 2015 they published the first of my two books on planning law, and they have subsequently published several other planning law titles. Having now worked with Bath Publishing over a period of more than six years, I hold them in very high regard and have been very pleased to see this firm’s growing success and reputation.
So I was excited to hear of Bath Publishing’s latest and very interesting publishing venture. This is the publication of THE GREAT POST OFFICE SCANDAL: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion IT disaster which put innocent people in jail
About the book
On 23 April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Sub-postmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. It is a scandal that has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.
The 39 were just a few of the 738 people who, between 2000 and 2015, had been prosecuted by the Post Office for theft, false accounting and fraud. The prosecutions were based largely on evidence drawn from Horizon, the Post Office’s deeply flawed software system that threw up duplicate entries, lost transactions and made erroneous calculations. If these errors resulted in apparent losses, Sub-postmasters were forced to settle the discrepancies from their own pockets, sometimes for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Those who could not pay were sacked and taken to court. Proud pillars of their communities were stripped of their jobs and livelihoods. Many were forced into bankruptcy and/or borrowed from friends and family to give the Post Office thousands they did not owe. The really unlucky ones were sent to prison.
This is the story of how these innocent people fought back to clear their names against a background of institutional arrogance and obfuscation, a fight dragged out by the Post Office’s refusal to accept responsibility for its failings.
Nick Wallis, an award-winning freelance journalist and broadcaster, has been pursuing this story since 2010 when he met a taxi driver who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she did not commit. Since then, he has recorded interviews with dozens of victims, insiders and experts, uncovering hundreds of documents to build up an unparalleled understanding of the story.
Using these sources, Nick has been instrumental in bringing the scandal into the public eye. He broadcast his first investigation for the BBC in 2011. In the same year he took the story to Private Eye. He has subsequently made two Panoramas, a Radio 4 series, and raised thousands of pounds to crowdfund his own court reporting for the Post Office Trial website.
Nick has now written the first definitive account of the scandal. He takes us from the ill-fated deal that brought Horizon into existence, through years of half-truths and obstruction, to the tearful scenes at the Court of Appeal this year. He exposes the secrecy and mistrust at the heart of the story, and the impact that it had on the victims. He also chronicles how this story’s hero, Alan Bates, started as a lone public voice of dissent but went on to beat the Post Office - against overwhelming odds – at two of the highest courts in the land, and win some redress for the victims.
This book will be available from Bath Publishing from 18 November 2021.
Price: £25.00 in Hardback
Horizon Scandal Fund: Bath Publishing and the author are donating 10% of the revenue from the book sales to a 'fighting fund' so that Sub-postmasters can continue their quest for proper redress and compensation.