Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 15th March 2026.
By my reckoning, the final count is 71. Last week, the Scottish Government published its statutory report on the operation of the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences (Scotland) Act 2024. Passed by Holyrood in 2024, the Act’s sole purpose is to quash the conviction of subpostmasters and their staff who were wrongly convicted of crimes of dishonesty between September 1996 and December 2018. Since the act received royal assent, officials have been working to identify how many people fall within its scope.
The data published by the Scottish Government this month presents the first reliable national picture of the true extent of the Horizon scandal here. Having reviewed 100 cases under the new Act, the Government has identified 65 convictions to be quashed, on top of the six Scottish postmasters already exonerated by the Appeal Court back in 2024. That brings the total Scottish body count to 71 people wrongly accused, prosecuted and convicted for crimes they did not do. This is the most widespread miscarriage of justice in Scottish legal history.
Convictions quashed ranged from 1999 to 2016, with the majority of cases falling between 2002 and 2010. 48 people were convicted of embezzlement, 14 of theft and 3 for fraud. Officials have managed to track down 62 of the 65 people to let them know their convictions have now been quashed. Three individuals, for reasons unknown, remain “untraced”. 52 have made applications to the UK Government’s Horizons Convictions Redress Scheme so far.
How many were jailed? We know subpostmasters were imprisoned in the rest of the UK after having been convicted on the basis of Horizon printouts. The story of Seema Misra is particularly affecting here. Having pled not guilty and denied responsibility for the money Horizon asserted was missing from her West Byfleet branch, Misra was nevertheless convicted at trial.
When she turned up to be sentenced, eight weeks pregnant, the Surrey subpostmistress hadn’t conceived the notion she might be sent to jail. She was. The judge selected a headline figure of 15 months. Misra immediately fainted away in the dock, ending up in hospital before being transferred into state custody. Her conviction was quashed in 2021. She picked up an OBE in the 2024 New Year’s Honours list for services to justice.
Until last week, we only knew for sure that one person had lost their liberty in Scotland as a result of the Horizon scandal. Aleid Kloosterhuis’s conviction was quashed by the Appeal Court in Edinburgh in 2024. She pled guilty in 2012 to embezzling £20,000 from her Post Office branch on the island of Gigha and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. How many more people found themselves in Misra and Kloosterhuis’s situation? How many more people did our justice system wrongly jail?
Now, at last, we know. The new data confirms that 16 people received custodial sentences in Horizon cases in Scotland. This represents just under a quarter of all Post Office convictions and a much higher rate of incarceration than has generally been supposed. The new data doesn’t shed any light on the length of the prison terms these subpostmasters received. The remaining balance of convictions concluded by way of community sentences and fines.
As the impact of this scandal becomes clearer, we can also begin to answer some of the big questions this scandal has posed both for institutions in Scotland and the rest of the UK. I’m afraid the answers aren’t terribly reassuring.
In England, the Post Office acted – and abused its position – a private prosecutor. It was all at once the notional victim of these crimes of dishonesty, the civil claimant for missing money, the plea bargainer trying to persuade subpostmasters to pay up or face the full force of the law, and the prosecutor deciding what evidence should be shared with the defence and the courts in Horizon cases. As everybody now knows, it wasn’t candid, didn’t disclose information damaging to its case and committed an abuse of the criminal justice of process as a result.
Did having an independent prosecution system make any difference? In Scotland, it wasn’t the Post Office but the procurator fiscal who decided who should and shouldn’t be prosecuted. The Post Office was defined as a “specialist reporting agency”, which essentially meant it was able to pass evidence on directly to prosecutors rather than involving the police in its investigations. The Lord Advocate stripped it of this status in 2024 because of its “fundamental and sustained failures in connection with Horizon cases in Scotland”. But by then, I’m afraid, the damage was done.
While there are examples of cases where Scottish prosecutors knocked back cases sent to them that relied on Horizon evidence between 2013 and 2016, the numbers suggests that COPFS generally acted as a post box for Post Office allegations.
When the scandal crashed into mainstream public attention as a result of ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office drama in January 2024, there were some optimistic suggestions that the rates of prosecution in Scotland might be lower than the rest of the UK, suggesting that the involvement of COPFS had tempered, at least to some extent, the prosecuting zeal of its specialist reporting agency. The new data suggests this was a fool’s hope. Across the UK, more than 700 people were prosecuted for crimes of dishonesty prompted by Horizon shortfalls. If 71 postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland, that’s a tenth of the total UK estimate. Head for head, these numbers demonstrate that Scottish prosecutions went ahead at much the same rate as in the rest of the UK.
Did corroboration make an appreciable difference? In Scotland, you can only be convicted if the prosecution can point to two independent pieces of evidence that the crime was committed and it was you who committed it. This is, rightly in some contexts, invoked as an invaluable safeguard against miscarriage of justice, ensuring you cannot be convicted of a crime you did not do on the evidence of a single plausible but dishonest witness. But so far, the data and Scottish case studies suggest corroboration didn’t work as much of a safeguard at all for postmasters implicated after “computer says guilty”.
Interviewed by Post Office security officers, many postmasters made what were often characterised as admissions in subsequent criminal cases against them. The evidence suggests most pled guilty, mostly on legal advice – that it was impossible to challenge the computing evidence, that the sentence might be stiffer if they denied responsibility, that prison might be avoided, if only they enter that guilty plea.
The new Scottish data doesn’t tell us anything about how many of the 65 cases the Government has identified were contested by those accused. Of the six cases which went before the Appeal Court before Holyrood and Westminster stepped in to provide for Horizon prosecutions to be automatically quashed, only one of the six postmasters pled “not guilty” and put the proof against them to trial.
When this happens, the evidence is never tested in court. Objections which might have been taken into account, about just how voluntary postmasters’ incriminating statements were, went unexplored. The fairness of these interviews wasn’t considered. The technical issues of the Horizon system’s robustness – something beyond the ken of most solicitors instructed to defend postmasters on these summary charges anyway – was not challenged. The lack of the kind of corroborating evidence you might expect to find in a large-scale fraud case was not explored.
Think of it this way. Imagine you’d embarked on an embezzling spree and added thousands of pounds of untaxed income to your pocket book which wasn’t there before. How might this newfound wealth impact on how you live or what the bloodhounds of the law might find if they came chapping and raided your home for corroborating evidence of your grand larceny? A stash of Elvis memorabilia in the attic? A bonny new car in the front drive? Expensive holidays? Trips to Turkey for a new smile? A serious update in the quantity, quality and cost of your nights oot?
In fraud and embezzlement cases of any magnitude, there is something to show for the missing money – be it a lifestyle change or tangible evidence of goods and property which the fraudster cannot explain. In the Post Office Horizon cases, none of this was properly investigated. In cases where tens of thousands of pounds were “missing” from the branch accounting system, there was precisely no evidence of tens of thousands of pounds in expenditure by the people accused of taking it. There were no mattresses full of money. No dodgy offshore accounts. No evidence of these people making suspicious lodgements of thousands of pounds of cash in folding money and old coppers which they’d somehow smuggled out of their branches undetected.
The final report of Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry into the scandal is due to be published this year. One lesson we might take from the scandal is this. Be it a confession, a fingerprint, a DNA match or seemingly reliable computer data – if we treat any kind of evidence as infallible, if we refuse to accept human processes can only ever fail gracefully – we’ll keep making the same mistakes, again and again and again.
Andrew Tickell 