Cumbrian's urged to not boycott post offices

A new ITV drama detailing the post office scandal that saw post-masters across the country prosecuted is worrying Cumbrian post office managers.

Hundreds of people who had been working for the Post Office were wrongfully convicted for supposedly stealing money from the service between 1999 and 2015, in what has been dubbed the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history.

However, rather than human error and corruption being the reason for the discrepancies, it was instead the faulty Horizon accounting system that was being used by the Post Office that was to blame.

In total, 700 branch managers at the Post Office were accused and convicted of stealing money from the Office.

The story of postmaster Alan Bates taking the Post Office to court to prove postmasters' innocence has now been dramatised on ITV in a new series called Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

Since the show has started airing, around fifty new complainants have come forward to claim compensation for the damages they were put through.

Now though, there are concerns that people could now start boycotting post offices in an attempt to get justice for those affected.

Charlie Dixon manages a post office in Ulverston, he explained why this may have the opposite impact: "You can see the upset and distress these post-masters were going through, but it was completely out of their control. They were trying their best to rectify a situation that just kept getting worse and worse.

"The worse thing anybody can do now though is to boycott the post offices. We're here and we've always been here doing our best at the heart of the community. We help people with everyday things like banking, posting items and even more so with more banks closing.

"You can come to us for 101 things and if people were to think that boycotting the post-office would help, it's only going to affect the post-masters and not make a great impact in the grand scheme of things."

It comes as the Metropolitan Police are investigating allegations of "potential fraud" coming from the prosecutions, including money that had been recuperated by postmasters as a result of the convictions.

In a statement, Scotland Yard said that two people were interviewed as a result of the ongoing investigation, which was first opened in January 2020.

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