Convictions of Post Office Capture system users to be reviewed by statutory body

The Criminal Convictions Review Commission (CCRC) is reviewing cases of potential wrongful convictions where Post Office’s Capture branch software could be a factor and could add further cases highlighted in a recent government commissioned report.

According to a Sky News report, the CCRC has five cases under review where the “Capture IT system could be a factor”. The statutory body added that it is “seeking further information” on eight further cases.

Following the wide publicity this year of the long-running Post Office scandal, where subpostmasters were blamed and punished for account shortfalls caused by the errors in the Horizon computer system used in branches, details of problems emerged of an earlier system known as Capture.

Subpostmasters’ struggles with the Horizon system were made public by Computer Weekly as long ago as 2009, but it was not until ITV’s dramatisation of problems experienced by subpostmasters, aired in January this year, that it reached the top of the national news agenda, where it has remained since.

Hundreds of former subpostmasters prosecuted based on evidence from the Horizon system have had their convictions overturned. The number could be over 1,000 by the time all affected convictions are overturned.

Soon after the drama in January, Kevan Jones, then MP for North Durham and now a peer, revealed the stories of former subpostmasters who had experienced problems with the Capture system.

Capture was a PC-based application developed by the Post Office and uploaded onto a personal computer to carry out branch accounts. The software – referred to by some users as a “glorified spreadsheet” – was a standalone system, unlike Horizon which is a complex, networked system connected to centralised services.

There has since been a government commissioned investigation carried out by Kroll, which found that there is a “reasonable likelihood” that Capture software caused accounting losses.

Regarding the Capture based reviews, the CCRC said: “The availability of information can be a particular hurdle in older cases.”

The CCRC began reviewing Horizon convictions in April 2015, with the first group overturned in December 2020.

One of the Capture users who came forward after the ITV dramatisation was Steve Marston. He had a branch in Bury, Lancashire, and was prosecuted in 1996 for theft and false accounting following an unexplained shortfall of nearly £80,000. Marston said he never had any problems using the paper-based accounting system until his branch, which he ran from 1973, began using Capture.

After an audit revealed a loss which he couldn’t fully cover out of his own pocket, he was advised to plead guilty of theft and fraud to avoid jail. The judge took into account two bravery awards Marston had previously received for standing up to armed robbers, saving him a jail sentence. He received a 12-month suspended sentence, lost his home and business, and went bankrupt.

Marston told Computer Weekly that the news that the CCRC is reviewing cases is welcome: “I hope this will speed things up and hopefully put us in a strong a position as possible.”

He added that the most important thing is that he and others like him have their names cleared.