Postmasters launch new claims against Post Office following TV show

Fifty new claimants have come forward since the show began airing

Author: Rory GannonPublished 6th Jan 2024

Dozens of new postmasters and sub-postmasters who were wrongly blamed for stealing money from the Post Office have come forward after its dramatisation on TV.

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, fifty new complainants have come forward to claim compensation for the damages they were put through.

Dr Neil Hudgell, Executive Chairman at Hudgell Solicitors, has taken on the new cases being brought against the Post Office and said that while these new postmasters were not all convicted for their discrepancies, they had been devastated in other ways.

Speaking to the BBC, he explained: "The majority of the 50 new cases were not prosecuted but lost their livelihoods, lost their homes. But there's a small handful of people who were convicted that have come forward, three in total at the moment, which is obviously a tiny number proportionate to those that are still out there.

"And I think the common feature of these is totally unsurprising. It's people that have been so heavily damaged by the Post Office psychologically that they have been so fearful of coming forward and going through the process again."

Three of the claimants have also had to receive psychiatric care as a result of stress they went through by being accused.

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. No one has been arrested.

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