the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

I have an interest in this story, in that I was a Post Office counter clerk in 1977/78, working at the Crown Offices, ie; Post Office owned and operated rather than sub-offices, at Chelmsford, Witham, Dunmow, Ontario, Brentwood and Ingatestone, all in Essex. Then in 1978/79 I worked at Chelmsford Head Post Office sending out cash and value stock (stamps, premium bonds etc) to the sub-postoffices in the Chelmsford Head Post Office area.

In 1982 I joined the team who trialled automation systems in Crown and sub-office sites around the country, a project that proved the business case for what later became Horizon. That project ended in 1984, as far as my involvement was concerned and I had no further involvement with the sub-offices until 1989 when I became Head of Operations at Post Office Supplies, where one of my teams managed the supply of forms and stationery to the Post Office in general, including the sub-office network.

So there are my credentials, for want of a better word, for commenting on this scandal. I have no working knowledge of Horizon having only ever encountered it as a customer in post offices, but I do know about balancing a Post Office till, designing, writing and testing software to run a Post Office till. I know about running said software and and developing it, so I have been intrigued by the Horizon scandal as it has developed, and there are various things that concern me.

Balancing a till is a matter of the value stock and cash that you started the accounting period with against where you are now, taking into account what business you have transacted in between. In my day it was all manual, and if you were over or under then you had probably counted something incorrectly, and a re-count would usually find the error. There was always the chance that you had paid out someone more than you should have (if you underpaid them they would normally let you know) or failed to charge the correct amount, but such circumstances were very rare in my experience. A big over/under was the easiest thing to find because there were fewer places to look for it: It was the £2.67, or similar discrepancy that was difficult because it could be anywhere and you had to do the whole lot again. Sod’s Law decreed that it would be almost the last thing that you checked that would reveal the error.

Working with the automated systems that we trialed you still counted your cash and value stock, but now the system told you what should be there. The systems made life easier, and from a business point of view, more efficient in that hundredweights (literally) of paperwork could be dispensed with. Balancing your till, certainly in the two offices that I was involved in supporting, became easier.

As I understand the Horizon issues the losses were in four figures or worse. Some of the losses that I have seen would have been the best part of a day’s worth of pension or family allowance payments, so how on earth could they be right? There were always the odd rogue amongst the Post Office employed clerks and the sub-office ranks, but I know how that sort of theft works, and how it is discovered. None of the cases involving Horizon that I have read about fit the pattern. No, I do not have all of the facts, but I smell a rat here.

It is possible that there is a glitch in the software, maybe more than one, but I am not convinced. It would have to be a very poor system and I doubt that. In any case, the laws of chance require that the odds of an error would go either way and there have been no reports of mysterious overs, only losses. I’ll speculate no further on that.

There have long been rumours within the business that it was possible for the centre to make amendments to local details. Now that was always a possible system requirement, but when we looked at it back in 82-4 it would only have been possible with an audit trail and there had to be evidence of what had been done available at both ends and an audit report on such transactions was available. What was happening with Horizon I don’t know.

For me it is obvious that there was something wrong. I know how thorough The Post Office investigations were for many things, I was often one of those investigating wrong doing of all sorts, and, having found something wrong on my patch, had to pass it on to others to investigate. It seems to me that none of these Horizon cases were properly investigated, and that the mounting evidence of a problem was ignored.

Until I moved on to other things in 1996 I would have been sure that the senior management in Post Office Counters would not have allowed this scandal to develop, but the people that I knew well and worked with up until then all moved on or had retired by the end of that decade. I am not aware of knowing anyone involved in Horizon, although there may be a name or two emerge that rings a bell. I would love to be able to talk to someone on the inside to get an understanding of what happened and how. The Berkshire Belle, my wife of more than thirty years now, is also very distressed by the scandal because she knew the sub-office network better than I did. She worked to support it in various capacities as she climbed through the ranks over fifteen or so years and attended their conference every year from the late 70’s to 1989 (when we went to the Scarborough one together). If any of you out there remember Fay from Swindon, then that is she. Feel free to say hello via this site if you’d like to.

There is a group of people who knowingly allowed this scandal to develop. They have caused pain and suffering to people and should be held to account for it. It is a national disgrace.