I suggest you watch sessions involving Elaine Cottam, Rod Ismay and Helen Rose
A few things puzzle me about the whole affair. Firstly, the Post Office's power to conduct prosecutions when it was also the claimant and the investigator is literally incredible. It may have been defensible when POs were run on paper-based systems that were wholly controlled in the branch by the subpostmasters (SPMs). I doubt there were many occasions when the accounts didn't balance then because if they didn't, the SPM could easily work back through his or her own figures and find out where the error was.
Any errors were clearly down to SPMs. But when the Horizon computer system was introduced in 1999, the SPMs had no way of calculating the balances (unless they mirrored every transaction on the computer with paper and pencil) or challenging the numbers if they were wrong - which as we know they often were. This doesn't seem right to me.
In legal cases where the defence teams wanted to see where the evidence of 'theft' was, the PO resisted and refused or provided data that didn't provide the full picture. Rod Ismay head of the Product and Branch Accounts team in Chesterfield seemed to be at the apex of these efforts. He comes across as a bit of a jobsworth, an overly officious low-level accountant.
His job at some points seemed to involve coordinating desperate efforts to prevent any hint of problems with Horizon leaking out, regardless of who suffered as a result.
So, the poor old SPMs were forced to cough up thousands and thousands of pounds of their own money, to the point of bankruptcy in some cases, without recourse to the transaction data. They were simply expected to pay for the PO's mistakes, no questions asked.
Next, in none of the cases was there ever any evidence of theft other than the Horizon output. No SPM seemed to be living the high life, no marked notes were used or found, no PO money was ever discovered at the SPM's residences. A judge in one of the cases remarked in summing up that there was no solid evidence at all of any theft. The jury still voted to convict.
More than this, each SPM could presumably easily show plenty of evidence of using their own money, borrowing from friends and family, getting into serious debt, and maxing out credit cards. How many 'thieves' go into debt like that? It should have sounded alarms, but apparently didn't.
Elaine Cottam, a Retail Line Manager at the PO made decisions to suspend and terminate SPMs, accusing them of false accounting, even after she herself had made calls to the Horizon helpline on behalf of the same SPM just weeks before, complaining of errors and crashes in the Horizon system.
There were plenty of occasions like that where the evidence was obvious or should have been that Horizon needed investigation. She couldn't recall a 15-page witness statement with 84 pages of call logs attached showing dozens of incidents that she couldn't even remember seeing or writing but had signed along with a statement certifying the truth of it.
She claimed the SPM 'persistently' called the technical helpline with issues that weren't technical. The incident log showed that is exactly what they were. Crashes, blue screens, freezes, reboots. hardware failures over many months starting the very day Horizon was installed.
At the inquiry, she even hinted that the missing money at the Cleveleys (near Blackpool) branch was taken by the partner of Ms Wolstenholme - the SPM. In short, after all that has been made public in the past few years, she still didn't accept the computer was at fault!!
Investigators like Helen Rose didn't 'investigate' anything really. They assumed guilt from the outset and ignored anything that suggested the SPMs were innocent.
A lot of it came from a misguided sense of loyalty to the Post Office which developed into a siege mentality. I don't think any organisation would come out of such an inquiry well but the Post Office seems spectacularly badly run at every level above the branches and SPMs themselves. Yet they were the only ones paying the price.
I am not sure it can or should survive in its present form.
