Impact. Should it all be a matter of history repeating?

At a Parliamentary meeting to discuss our recent impact report, I said this...

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On Monday we published a report on the Impacts of the PO Scandal on its victims-survivors. Lord Arbuthnot kindly hosted a meeting with SPMs and Parliamentarians to discuss some of the issues. Here is the text of the speech I gave.

Lord Arbuthnot, colleagues, subpostmasters and mistresses, and your family members, welcome and thank you for giving up your time.

We are grateful for the chance to speak to your parliamentary colleagues to discuss our report on the impact of the PO scandal. I want to do two things: one is to explain the central lessons the report. We think it an important, thorough, and moving telling of the truly awful harm inflicted on SPMs and their families by PO but also how their repeated engagements with the law, and attempts to get redress, have continued that harm. We call this the ripple effect.

The second is about prevention: about how we make it more likely that such harms do not happen again.

In the report, we think we delve deeper into the stories and pain experienced than even the Inquiry could. We did two surveys one of sub- postmaster’s and the other of family members, both found about two thirds showed signs of deep trauma: post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety, in particular.

This was true whether or not people were convicted or even prosecuted. Unjust accusation; arbitrary, unfair treatment were the problems.

We used in-depth interviews, with a great deal of care being taken by my colleagues, Drs Sally Day and Karen Nokes, to interview people sensitively and to tell their story as accurately as we can.

Let me use two quotes to try to capture a sense of how fundamentally some SPMs have been scarred. One said:

“I don’t like the person I am now. It’s impacted us financially and socially. I don’t go out anymore. I cut off all my friends because, as I say, some of them didn’t want to know me. …Who wants a friend who, 10, 20 years later, is still harping on about the Post Office?

And a second:

“The me before this happened isn’t the me that’s here now. I’m a totally different person. I’ve just got a big hole. …I don’t feel things anymore. I mean, yes,
I cry when I get upset…I just don’t feel anything, and that’s no way to live.”

In those two brief quotations, we get a sense of how stigma, stigma in the local paper and on the news, stigma at the school gates, whispering campaigns, spitting and abuse, led to many sub-postmasters being ostracised or to isolate themselves at home.

Social exclusion, to use an old phrase in a new way, of the most vivid kind.

Stigma was accompanied by financial ruin: kicked out of their Post Office branches, sometimes locked into a ruined business that remained behind, suffering banks doing what banks do in situations of financial stress, unable to look after themselves and their families and forced to engage in fire sales of any assets that remained. A financial domino effect that led to many being supported by their families, friends, by loans or handouts.

Financial ruin stayed with them. They were unable to get work with dishonesty convictions, or simply the cloud of accusation, hanging over them.

Many could not pay for essentials.

There was a cascade of harm from trauma to stigma to anxiety to alcohol misuse and illness to sometimes profoundly shocking mental health breakdowns.

Yet it often felt that their life was wiped out in one day; the day they were suspended, or accused, or imprisoned, the arbitrary injustice that started then and continued. This profound breach of trust, this idea that as one subpostmaster told us, “the British justice system has sat back and allowed this to happen”.

It has left many personally, physically and mentally, socially and politically, mistrustful. As one told us, they have remained ever since in a “heightened state of arousal just waiting for the worst” all the time. It’s why some are still phobic of computers, paperwork, and officialdom, and why some feel their lives are beset by moments of panic or loss of control.

It comes as little surprise, but is incredibly important to understand that, as one interviewee told us, their relationships have been put “through the shredder”. Everyone in the family unit needs support and nobody can give it, everyone is suffering. Children suffering gossip, bullying, panic attacks and self-harm or worse and yet are still trying to protect their parents, trying to look after parents who are suffering and feeling that they have abandoned their own children because they are in such a mess.

Many of those we talked to had endured suicidal thoughts, thinking that their families would be better off without them. Sadly, as we know, several SPMs (and family members) have acted on such thoughts and tried to or ended their lives.

Some of the last-ditch moments ended more happily because of the support the subpostmasters have provided each other. Public support and vindication, the brilliant ITV series, and Parliamentary action on the quashing of convictions have also helped them feel they are no longer pariahs.

But…

The feeling of being let down, the waiting for the worst in a heightened state of arousal, the anxiety and depression, was exacerbated, and is re-visited on them, by each stage of the process they have gone through.

Some of this is necessary, or unavoidable. It is incredibly painful for them to watch witnesses give unsatisfactory evidence before the Inquiry, but there is at least a measure of holding to account even sometimes in their evading of Counsel’s questions.

To reach that point they had to fight their way through the criminal justice system, a shadow of what it should be, the post office mediation scheme, the Bates group litigation, and what I would call the “half glass of empty” approach of the Court of Appeal, and into the compensation schemes initially designed by the Post Office’s lawyers, apparently at the (then) government’s insistence.

Whilst politicians on all sides of the house have done miraculous work, particularly on convictions, and post office ministers, and here I should mention Kevin Hollinrake and Gareth Thomas – and their civil servants, now struggle hard to improve to make compensation schemes quicker and fairer. We all know the fundamental problems of trust, speed, and adversarialism ‘lawyers being lawyers’ remain.

Our report is a plea to take even more seriously the social and psychological harm that subpostmasters, and particularly their family members, have suffered. But also to think differently about how to meet their needs.

There is the beginnings of a debate about public Inquiries, whether they work, how much they cost, whether there are better ways. The Horizon IT Inquiry has some limitations but that should not detract from the great work it has done. So far I would say it gives subpostmasters cause for hope. But, after that, they will need to wait for any holding to account through the courts and the professions disciplinary processes if – as is likely but not definite– the Inquiry finds some individuals responsible alongside the more slippery blame placed on ‘the system’.

On the system… It was in 2009 when problems became public and 2013 when they should have been accepted by the PO and 2019 when they began to be legally recognised.

We have to keep asking ourselves, why are we, more importantly why are these subpostmasters, still waiting for answers and action in 2025 and what can we do about that?

The failures of criminal justice (prosecutors in particular, but also courts and defence), civil justice, corporate governance, and professional regulation all featured in the comments of subpostmasters to us. Many SPMs support changes in the law on private prosecutions, computer evidence, and the Hillsborough law duty of candour. Many are concerned about legal aid. British justice really did seem to just sit back and allow this to happen.

Swift and fair compensation, including for family members, is rightly a focus and I am sure we will, and look forward to, hearing more on that from some present here.

What else should be a focus. There is a need to think very carefully about the big structural issues.

Why was (is) the criminal justice so careless with palpable injustice?

How do we turn round cover-up culture? Why do those with resources find it so easy to hide behind lawyers and PR?

Why are courts such useful tools in their armoury?

How do groups like the SPMs find achieving justice so difficult?

For it is these problems that ruined lives: made too many tell us their lives were empty, or they did not like themselves anymore, or that their families would be better off without them.

Justice sits back for people like the SPMs. And it should not.

So I make a plea: can we, can you, are we, are you, willing to do more to change that? I suggest these questions for you to respond to now and over time:

1. Can we develop independent, fairer, quicker, less adversarial investigation and redress mechanisms?

2. Can we include elements of restorative justice and therapeutic support for victims of scandals?

3. Can we, how do we, short circuit the attritional legal and political dance towards public inquiries and ensure they lead to action rather than words?

4. How do we tackle cover-up culture in Britain?

5. What do we do to make lawyers better and court processes less poisonous?

6. How do criminal justice and appeals systems need to change? Lord Leveson is looking at efficiency. There is so much more that needs attention.

Thank you very much for listening (reading).