An exercise in highly paid lawyers dancing on the head of a pin. We deep dive into the roles the law, the lawyers and the courts played in this scandal.
This wasn’t a case of a few bad apples, the whole system was stacked against the Subpostmasters. The system silenced, suppressed and hid information and nothing like justice was achieved.
At some point the overriding duty to the court owed by lawyers got lost in a fog of protecting the client at all costs. The barrister acting for the Sub-postmasters, after reading internal Post Office legal advice from 2014, said “In my almost 30 years’ experience at the bar I have never come across information that has been so electrifying. It almost caused my teeth to fall out when I read it.”
It took 20 years and a class action for Tracy Felstead to recover a mere £17,000 pounds for her wrongful conviction in 2001.
And this story is far from over yet. The Solicitors Regulatory Authority is a core participant in the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry which is probing the in house and external lawyers for potential wrongdoing.
Source Material
Nick Wallis, ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’, 2021, Bath Publishing.
Paul Marshall, ‘Failed Justice - how commercial interest displaced the interests of justice in the Post Office case’, 30 March 2022, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Legal Studies
Disclaimer
This podcast is for reference purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. You should always obtain legal advice about your specific circumstances. The views expressed in these podcasts are the speakers' own. They should not be taken as recommendations of the Society of Construction Law Australia
In the opening I introduced that the Horizon software was the main deliverable of a billion pound PFI project let by the Post Office. The contract was awarded in May 1996 to Fujitsu who won the job because of their winning offer to bear the software development costs in exchange for 8 years guaranteed transaction fee every time a customer of the Department of Social Service used their new swipe card in a Post Office.
It doesn’t take long for the deal and the software to go off the rails.
How on earth did this come about and why is it such a hard lesson for us to learn that it can be the technology at fault, not user error.
Source Material
Nick Wallis, ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’, 2021, Bath Publishing.
Paul Marshall, ‘Failed Justice - how commercial interest displaced the interests of justice in the Post Office case’, 30 March 2022, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Legal Studies
Disclaimer
This podcast is for reference purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. You should always obtain legal advice about your specific circumstances. The views expressed in these podcasts are the speakers' own. They should not be taken as recommendations of the Society of Construction Law Australia.
The UK Post Office Scandal – Megaprojects, IT Systems and the Law
This story is about the most widespread miscarriage of justice in English history. The scale of this story exceeds the witch trials of the 16th and 17th century.
This story is relevant to every construction lawyer in Australia because it is a story rooted in how we deliver major projects, how we think about technology and its reliability and how we compromise our fundamental obligation as lawyers to act in the best interests of the law.
This story will make you shake your head in disbelief. But as you listen to it, you need to keep in mind, all the way through, that there were lawyers, just like you and me, doing what they thought was their job.
And this story is about regular people who worked for and ran Post Offices all across the UK who were prosecuted for theft by the Post Office after the launch of the Post Offices’ first digital system, called Horizon. Almost 700 people were successfully prosecuted for theft by the Post Office. But they hadn’t don’t it and it took 20 years to prove their innocence.
Source Material
Nick Wallis, ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’, 2021, Bath Publishing.
Paul Marshall, ‘Failed Justice - how commercial interest displaced the interests of justice in the Post Office case’, 30 March 2022, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Legal Studies
Disclaimer
This podcast is for reference purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. You should always obtain legal advice about your specific circumstances. The views expressed in these podcasts are the speakers' own. They should not be taken as recommendations of the Society of Construction Law Australia.