Not heard of the Post Office Horizon Scandal? Imagine committing your life to serving your community and running a local Post Office only to find yourself suddenly wrongly accused of theft or false accounting, facing losing your job and even being sent to prison.

This nightmare became a reality for many subpostmasters across the UK, all because of a faulty computer accounting system – Horizon – which the Post Office installed in thousands of outlets but refused to accept had been to blame for variations and discrepancies in accounts.

Despite being aware of problems with the software, the Post Office aggressively demanded that many ‘pay back’ amounts – often running into many thousands – which could not be accounted for.

Many were eventually advised to plead guilty in court to crimes they hadn’t committed, as they were unable to explain why thousands of pounds had apparently gone missing.

People suffered mental health breakdowns, some who had been accused took their own lives.

It’s an almost unbelievable story of injustice which cost many hard-working, community serving individuals so much – livelihoods, reputations, liberty and lives.

Without doubt, hundreds were wrongfully convicted – and now the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance is leading a campaign to have each and every one of those wrongful convictions overturned.

To do that, we need the help of the public to fund the strongest legal representation.

How you can help

To give these law-abiding members of our communities the justice they deserve, we have secured the services of a leading legal team to ensure we can get these cases in front of the Court of Appeal.

Leading civil liberties and human rights specialists Hudgell Solicitors have agreed to lead on the case and have already been campaigning for justice alongside MP Karl Turner.

One of the UK’s leading appeals barristers, Tim Moloney QC of Doughty Street Chambers, has also committed to supporting the case for all wrongful convictions to be overturned.

We now need to raise £25,000 to make sure we can start the process of covering the costs of getting these cases to the Court of Appeal.

Help us clear the names of each and every subpostmaster wrongly accused, and wrongly convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Please donate what you can and share this page on social media, via WhatApp and email to spread the word!

The background

The scandal has been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history, but only came to light after a legal fight lasting nearly two decades and resulted in a group of more than 550 postmasters winning a victory in the High Court in December 2019.

The Post Office accepted defeat and agreed to pay a £58million settlement, but due to the legal costs involved over the many years of gathering evidence and getting it to court – and with the Government refusing to cover those costs - only around £10million was left over for the claimants in damages.

The High Court judgment highlighted ‘a culture of secrecy and excessive confidentiality generally in the Post Office, but particularly around Horizon’.

The judge said that ‘behind the scenes there were at least a number of people within the Post Office who realised that there were difficulties with the Horizon system’ and that it engaged in “oppressive behaviour” when demanding sums of money that could not be accounted for by the Subpostmasters affected.

In conclusion, the judgement said it had been proved, ‘beyond any shadow of doubt’ that Post Office had been allowed by successive governments to ‘wrongly inflict numerous injustices on Subpostmasters whilst governments ignored cries for help.’

As the High Court case highlighted and exposed the unreliability of the Horizon IT software, it is now only right that every potential unsafe conviction is now fully investigated and challenged.

This time, we want to ensure claimants are fully supported by the best legal team, but that any legal costs are covered before the process of looking to overturn their convictions begins.