FOR much of my lifetime, the post office was where our community did its business.
In Castle Bromwich, Kingshurst, Smith’s Wood – the sub-postmaster knew your name, kept an eye on the older folk who came in for their pension and held the trust of the whole street. Running the local post office wasn’t just a job. It was a position of standing.
People believed the postmaster’s word, because the postmaster had earned it. Then a computer system called Horizon told a lie. It said money was missing that had never gone anywhere.
And instead of asking whether the machine was wrong, the Post Office decided the people must be.
Hundreds of honest sub-postmasters were accused of theft and false accounting. Some remortgaged their homes to cover shortfalls that didn’t exist.
Some were dragged through the courts and bankrupted. Some went to prison. Several, we now know, took their own lives. It is the greatest miscarriage of justice in our country’s history and it was done to ordinary people whose only crime was to be trusted.
You would think, once the truth came out, the people responsible would rush to put it right. They have not. The company that built the faulty Horizon system is Fujitsu.
It sat at the very heart of this scandal. And years on, it still has not said how much it will pay towards compensation or when it will pay.
When its executives came before the Business and Trade Committee, which I chair, earlier this year, they admitted something I found genuinely astonishing: the company had set aside nothing – not a single penny – towards a bill that could run past £2billion.
They were happy to keep taking government contracts. They were not, it seemed, in any hurry to face the cost of the lives they helped ruin. That is the kind of unfairness that makes people lose faith – when the powerful walk away and the decent are left waiting.
So, last week the Business and Trade Committee published a short, blunt report. We told the Government it must put in whatever resources it takes to clear every outstanding Horizon claim by the end of this year.
The complexity of these cases is no excuse for more delay. And we told Fujitsu plainly to stop hiding on the sidelines: make an immediate interim payment, name a figure, set a timetable, and help bring this shameful chapter to a close.
I think most people round here understand this instinctively; if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to trust the system to be fair to you – and when it fails, the people who broke it should pay to fix it. That is all these sub-postmasters ever asked for. After everything they’ve been through, it is the very least we owe them.
28th Jun, 2026
