People in North Yorkshire urged to keep using their local post office
Post office managers and post-masters are concerned their business will be impacted by the ongoing Horizon scandal
A North Yorkshire postmaster is urging people not to boycott their local post offices in the wake of the Horizon IT scandal.
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.
The government is now looking at way to speed up the appeals process - with the amount of convictions quashed still in double figures.
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.
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Now though, there are concerns that people could now start boycotting post offices in an attempt to get justice for those affected.
Andrew Hart runs the King Edwards Drive post office in Harrogate and the main post office in Starbeck: "Customers are very faithful and very concerned for us so they are coming in and saying 'we are never coming into a post office again, can we trust your system, what can we do?' and of course we've got to encourage them to just have faith and carry on coming."
"It's worrying and it takes up an awful lot of time reassuring people but that's part of the role of the local post office, you've got to reassure customers and make them feel safe and secure."
"The post office as far as I'm concerned and I'm an independent it's absolutely safe, we monitor our systems, we balance at the end of the night and if there are problems we do let the post office limited know."