Mr Bates and the post office

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gas112

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Anyone watched this it`s an absolute scandal . Peoples lives ruined . The Met have certainly been dragging their heels over the past 3 years in prosecuting those in the post office that allowed this to continue and lied to parliament and the courts . Hopefully the series gives them the kick up the arris to get a move on
 
This fact annoys me over the case. The woman in charge of the scandal



In 2019, she became chair of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London but in December 2020 left this role early. In April 2021,[3] following the quashing of 39 of the subpostmasters’ convictions, she resigned – under pressure – from her duties as an Anglican priest,[4] and from directorships at retailer Dunelm and at supermarket chain Morrisons.[5]


Needs bringing to justice, quickly, but as always at higher levels it will be swept under the carpet and lessons will be learned
 
I don't want to defend her, because the injustice was on her watch, but she didn't join the PO until well after Horizon was live and the issues came to light. Her error was bad leadership and possibly covering up the scandal. There is a real risk that the TV program could hamper the chances of any criminal charges being brought. As said in the other thread, I would like to see her lose her CBE. On the other hand Angela Van Den Bogerd was specifically called out for misleading the judge and that may have ground.

Plod do seem to working a perverting the course of justice angle.
 
motorbiking said:
I don't want to defend her, because the injustice was on her watch, but she didn't join the PO until well after Horizon was live and the issues came to light. Her error was bad leadership and possibly covering up the scandal. There is a real risk that the TV program could hamper the chances of any criminal charges being brought. As said in the other thread, I would like to see her lose her CBE. On the other hand Angela Van Den Bogerd was specifically called out for misleading the judge and that may have ground.

Plod do seem to working a perverting the course of justice angle.
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That's enough for me.

Covering up is probably worse than than not being aware of the issue.

Bad management seems to get rewarded well at higher levels.
 
And why was Adam crozier not mentioned in it who was in charge when Horizon was being introduced , would it be anything to do with he left to become ceo of ITV and still has friends in high places within the company
 
gas112 said:
Anyone watched this it`s an absolute scandal . Peoples lives ruined . The Met have certainly been dragging their heels over the past 3 years in prosecuting those in the post office that allowed this to continue and lied to parliament and the courts . Hopefully the series gives them the kick up the arris to get a move on
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Were all the earlier cases under the auspicesof the Met, or were they distributed round the country?
I don't know the answer, is why I'm asking.
if they were all under the Met, then the Met should have realised that there was a problem, suddenly all these fraud alleagations arising where there were none before.
However if the cases were distributed around the country, each police force may have only dealt with one or two, so wouldn't have realsied the enormity of the situation.
 
The Post office conducts its own criminal investigations and prosecutions, something I mentioned in the other thread. That is part of the problem. There were no Police and CPS involved.

It's one of the few cases where the CPS do not take over a prosecution by alleged victim due to the massive conflict of interest. I think there is a strong argument for that to be reviewed.
 
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www.bbc.co.uk

Post Office scandal: Rishi Sunak considers measures to clear all victims

The justice secretary is looking into steps to help hundreds of wrongly convicted sub-postmasters.
www.bbc.co.uk

Stripping the post office (or rather asking the CPS to take over) is one of the points being considered. This makes sense. Victims should not be able to bring private criminal prosecutions on anything like the scale the PO does.

Its correct that the Met police are responsible for investigating the possibility that people inside PO, their agents and contractors committed crimes including perverting the course of justice.
 
A really good friend of mine was a post office auditor during this period.
She had started as counter staff and worked up to that position.
She became increasingly concerned with the amount of 'fraud ' they were finding and management assertions that Horizon was infallible.
Eventually became so stressed had 6 months off work .
During this period applied for and got a job with prison service as an accountant.
She of course was required to sign a non disclosure agreement before she left post office.
 
Courts ordering a witness to answer a question trump's an NDA.
 
Reputations ruined, Suicides, deaths, homes lost, Jail sentences.

And recompense, still awaited for many.

How do these people responsible for this, sleep at night ???

The word Horrendous doesn't seem adequate.
 
trazor said:
Reputations ruined, Suicides, deaths, homes lost, Jail sentences.

And recompense, still awaited for many.

How do these people responsible for this, sleep at night ???

The word Horrendous doesn't seem adequate.
Click to expand...

They convince themselves it wasn't their fault.

The best example is in Dale Carnegie's book - how to win friends and influence people.
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"Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do nobody any harm. "

A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girl friend on a country road out on Long Island.

Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said: "Let me see your license." Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead.
 
Stripping her of her medal helps no-one and nothing, certainly not justice. The people who wrote the software seem chiefly responsible but also appear to belong to an untouchable foreign company
 
blup said:
The people who wrote the software seem chiefly responsible but also appear to belong to an untouchable foreign company
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It is far more complicated than that - the system would have been designed by system analysts, possibly working from a brief generated by one or more business analysts. It was then written by computer programmers and then tested by a (separate) testing team. Specialist code, such as comms or security software (as in a distributed system such as this) is often the product of a separate development team, as commercial developers rarely do systems or comms software.

Once the application has been passed by the software house team it should be tested by a separate team at the client, who in larger systems also use computer auditors to validate the results generated by the system. Even after that you'd normally have a live test pilot run with (hopefully) a manual audit to confirm results.

At all stages bugs are noted and passed back to the development team to be corrected. But the decisions sbout what gets fixed is ultimately down to nanagement, not developers. So just who do you prosecute?

More of concern was a tiny clip supposedly set at Fujitsu in Bracknell, in their "operations centre", where an operator seems to have been telling someone that they could modify transactions to correct computer errors! In any secure system this should be simply impossible to do. If the comms is corrupting records then the software needs to be amended in such a way that this becomes either impossible or at worst exceptionally rare. The error log which was produced later in the program I watched would seemto imply that comms errors were occurring far too frequentently. IMHO that is where the real IT issue lies. Who permitted these operations centre staff to make such changes? What was done to ensure that these errors were trapped and corrected? So not quite a development or testing issue - more a management issue, surely?

As to a "foreign company", hardly. Fukitsu was originally called ICL (International Computers Ltd) and were very British. Their software is allegedly still developed here, but they hardly fill me with confidence given how much of a bunch of jobsworths they at one time were (and still are according to.one acquaintance who is in IT management). My missus worked for them for a while; I worked with them on several projects in the past - which tends to bias us both somewhat

.
 
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