Government “urged” to overturn all convictions based on Post Office Capture

The Horizon Compensation Advisory Board has written to the secretary of state for Justice urging the government to legislate to overturn convictions of subpostmasters based on the error prone Capture system.

The influential group, includes peers James Arbuthnot and Kevan Jones, who both campaigned for victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal for many years, wants similar legislation to that used to overturn wrongful convictions based on the controversial Horizon system.

In May, Parliament approved a law that will see hundreds of subpostmasters with wrongful convictions based on Horizon system data exonerated, This followed  the airing of ITV’s dramatisation of the Horizon scandal.

Computer Weekly reported in January, that former users of the Capture software had come forward claiming they had been prosecuted for unexplained shortfalls.

Former MP Jones, who now sits in the House of Lords, spearheaded a campaign for subpostmasters who believe they suffered losses and criminal prosecution as a result of Capture errors in a similar way to those that were convicted of crimes based on Horizon data.

Advisory board chair Chris Hodges wrote to Shabana Mahmood MP, the secretary of state for justice, advising that the Horizon and Capture situations are “indistinguishable.”

“We find it impossible to distinguish between the injustice suffered by the Horizon victims and the Capture victims. The Capture victims deserve particular speed in response in view of their greater duration of suffering and their advancing age,” wrote Hodges. “We urge you to overturn all the Post Office-driven convictions from the Capture period by legislation as soon as possible.”

After pressure from campaigners following public anger over the Horizon scandal, the government commissioned an investigation of Capture to be carried out by forensic specialists Kroll. Its report, published last month, concluded there is a “reasonable likelihood” that the Post Office’s Capture software used by hundreds of subpostmasters in the 1990s caused accounting shortfalls for which the users were blamed and, in some cases, prosecuted.

Hodges told the secretary of state: “We have read the Kroll Report and media stories of the terrible experiences of individuals, and seen statistics about the number of Post Office investigations and prosecutions from the ’Capture years’. Sickeningly, the evidence about the behaviour of Post Office investigations and management is the same as what took place in relation to the Horizon victims,”

Former Capture user Steve Marston, a former subpostmaster in Bury, Lancashire, was convicted in 1996 of theft and false accounting following an unexplained shortfall of nearly £80,000. He said he had never had any problems using the paper-based accounting system, only when his branch, which he ran from 1973, began using Capture. Marston, who has been campaigning since January, recently told Computer Weekly that he hopes to have his conviction overturned soon.

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).

• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •

• Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •

• Also read: Post Office and Fujitsu malevolence and incompetence means huge taxpayers’ bill •