Reimbursement and compensation after Post Office scandal

United Kingdom Nearly a thousand British post office administrators wrongly convicted of theft and fraud receive reparations and money.AuthorsJulia Vié published on March 14, 2024

The British cabinet will introduce a bill on Wednesday to reverse the convictions of hundreds of British post office managers. They will also receive compensation. In what is known in the United Kingdom as the Post Office scandal, a total of 983 post office administrators were convicted of theft and fraud after their companies ran out of cash between 1999 and 2015. In reality, the problem lay with the Horizon IT system that they used, and with Post Office executives who defended that system. The British government offers post office administrators who were wrongly convicted £600,000 (702,453 euro). They can also choose not to settle for that amount and continue to litigate. The post office administrators who were not convicted but who had to pay the alleged cash shortages out of their own pockets can claim 75,000 pounds (87,819 euros). “We owe it to the victims of this scandal, whose lives and livelihoods have been heartlessly torn apart, to bring the justice they have fought so long and hard for,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday. With that decision, the former post office managers can finally start rebuilding their lives. Many of them went bankrupt and were maligned by their communities. A quarter of them even received a prison sentence. This reparation was a long time coming. The government actually only really took action when the drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office sparked a major public outcry in the UK early this year. Although the first errors in the IT system became known 25 years ago, and a lawsuit in 2019 found that post office administrators were not to blame, less than a hundred administrators had been exonerated at the beginning of 2023. A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of March 14, 2024.