Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office prosecuted sub-postmasters for theft, fraud and false accounting on the basis of shortfalls reported by the Horizon accounting system. People were imprisoned. People were bankrupted and lost their homes. Some died before their convictions were overturned.
In a very large number of those cases the shortfalls had been generated by the software.
The scale of the inquiry
The statutory inquiry chaired by Sir Wyn Williams examined more than two million pages of evidence. Volume 1 of his final report was published on 8 July 2025 and dealt specifically with redress and the human impact of the scandal, ahead of the remaining volumes.
That sequencing was itself a judgment about where the urgency lay. The chair separated compensation out and published it early because people who had been exonerated years earlier were still not being paid.
Nineteen recommendations
Volume 1 made nineteen recommendations. Among them was a proposal that the Department for Business and Trade create a redress scheme for close family members of sub-postmasters adversely affected by the scandal, in recognition that the damage did not stop at the person who was prosecuted.
The report set out in detail what the scandal did to people, describing wrongful convictions, financial ruin, broken relationships and severe emotional distress.
Why this sits under corruption rather than error
A software defect is an error. Continuing to bring prosecutions after being told that the system could produce false shortfalls, defending civil claims on the basis of that same system’s reliability, and resisting disclosure for years is something different in kind.
The Post Office was wholly owned by the government throughout, and the sponsoring department was represented at board level. The question the remaining volumes have to answer is not only what the Post Office knew and when, but what the state that owned it knew, and what it did with that knowledge.
What is still outstanding
Full payment of redress to every claimant has not been completed, including under the family scheme recommended in Volume 1. The remaining volumes dealing with culpability have not yet been published, and the inquiry has said they are substantially larger and more complex than it originally anticipated. No individual who ran the prosecutions has faced any legal consequence.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces back to one of these documents. If a link has died or a document has since been amended, tell us and we will update the piece.
- 01Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry: reports and statementsPost Office Horizon IT Inquiry
- 02Government response to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry report Volume 1GOV.UK
- 03Post Office Horizon scandal: justice for sub-postmastersBEIS Committee
FTG Newsroom
General reporting desk covering Westminster announcements, public inquiry reports and select committee findings.
More from this deskHave we got something wrong? We publish corrections in full and dated on the article itself rather than quietly amending it. Send us the document through the contact page.