The Great Post Office Scandal Quotes

“Add £300m to £780m and you get a minimum of £1.08bn of public money either already spent or allocated towards dealing with the Horizon scandal and its fallout. This sum fulfilled a prediction Ron Warmington made to me many years ago – that the Post Office was sitting on a billion pound disaster, it was just too clueless to realise it. The realisation has now set in. Of course, it is taxpayers who are footing the bill.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“The judges found the idea that a government-owned company should in 2013 have to be warned about the legality of shredding documents in these circumstances and perverting the course of justice was ‘extraordinary.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“With the government’s tacit backing, the Post Office board had spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money trying to deny it had been responsible for some of the most appalling behaviour in UK corporate history. Now it was admitting responsibility for prosecuting 44 innocent people.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“Now Post Office employees were engaging in public virtue-signalling about their organisation’s supposed commitment to mental health, whilst simultaneously trying to prevent justice for hundreds of people who had suffered the most appalling treatment at their hands.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“The programme also strengthened the commonly-held suspicion that slapping theft charges on Subpostmasters who had large discrepancies was nothing to do with evidence but a tactic to secure convictions. One document revealed a discussion about the best approach for securing a Proceeds of Crime Act order against a Subpostmaster. It read: ‘I am never confident with false accounting charges … the theft charge makes life so much easier.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“Here was an independent investigator giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry that a publicly-owned company run by the person sitting next to him had brought criminal prosecutions without sufficient evidence, and that miscarriages of justice had very possibly occurred.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“Their ability to investigate transactional discrepancies, or to defend themselves against allegations made by Post Office, were often thwarted because, following their suspension (usually on the day of an audit) they were, as a matter of Post Office policy, denied access to the branch… Post Office investigators also removed records, often including personal documents such as diaries… Applicants have also reported that, despite their requests, they never regained access to any of the records they needed to prove their innocence.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“Colin says, ‘It became clear we needed to “switch” and start discrediting Second Sight. And that’s what began to happen. Post Office began to discredit the people we had hired by saying things like … they’re “too old”, or it’s been too long since they did a job like this, or they’re not up to the job. And that was purely because the Post Office did not like the conclusions that Second Sight were coming to.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“According to Kay, criminal prosecution ‘was used as a threat and executed without any underlying investigation, proper review or understanding of CPS guidelines – in one case we reviewed, an in-house Post Office lawyer had marked a file as “insufficient evidence to prosecute.” Then a few days later that lawyer filled in a “prosecute this person” form. This was an absolute abuse of the right to bring prosecutions. If the CPS had been involved those prosecutions would never have taken place.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“The more Subpostmasters the Second Sight team spoke to, the more issues came to light. The more issues came to light, the harder it seemed to get any answers.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“And this is what rankled. The Subpostmasters who were calling in the problems and whose livelihoods depended on Horizon functioning properly, did not appear to feature much in Fujitsu’s corporate thinking. The Post Office was the client, not the Subpostmasters, and Horizon was the golden goose. So long as Horizon gave the appearance of functioning as it should, the client was going to be happy. What they didn’t know, couldn’t hurt them.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“Over the 14-year period the Post Office was prosecuting people, dozens of Subpostmasters have reported they were told by Post Office contract managers, investigators and helpline operators that they were the only ones having problems with Horizon.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“In the four years leading up to the rollout of the Horizon system, the Post Office prosecuted 52 Subpostmasters or Post Office staff for shortfall-related offences. In the four years after the rollout, the number more than quadrupled to 220. No one outside the Post Office queried this leap in prosecution activity because no one was aware of it. The Post Office was not required to publish its numbers.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The story of the fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

“This story is littered with hundreds of individual human tragedies rendered almost unremarkable by the scale of what went wrong. One miscarriage of justice should make us angry. Five hundred miscarriages of justice should make us five hundred times more angry, but it doesn’t. As human beings we’re not capable of processing information in that way. The inevitable consequence is that people responsible for the widespread destruction of multiple livelihoods are never punished proportionately (if they get punished at all). In this, as in other cases, they should be. The Post Office, the government, Fujitsu, the NFSP and the justice system ruined hundreds of people over two decades. The individuals responsible should not be allowed to get away with it, but I suspect they will.”
― Nick Wallis, The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail