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Hello!
After covering the story on Times Radio on Thursday evening, I helped provide some information for a piece by Ali Mitib in the Times today about the likelihood of prosecutions of those responsible for the Post Office scandal. The bad news is that any prosecutions won't start until 2027 and possibly not before 2028.
You can read the full Times article here. Hopefully it also made the print edition. I do like reading the Saturday Times "in the flesh" when I get the chance. Today I have a good excuse to go and buy it!
More PO IT woe
To the surprise of no-one, the Post Office has binned its Horizon IT replacement, known as The Project Formerly Known As NBIT. The PO has wasted tens of millions of pounds on this folly and it should hang like a millstone around outgoing CEO Nick Read's neck.
Read had lots of jobs, but replacing Horizon was a very important one. As CEO, NBIT was his decision and his unfolding disaster to own and monitor. How and why he decided to do it in-house without properly scoping the competence of his execs to even hire the right people, let alone design and manage a project of this importance is beyond me. Read completely and utterly failed, costing his organisation and the goverment a fortune, none of which he will ever be held accountable for.
More in the Daily Mail, here.
Issy Hogg
Thanks to everyone who got in touch re the sad passing of Issy Hogg. I have added comments to my piece from Lord Arbuthnot and Amanda Butler (née Glover). Vic, Issy's partner, kindly allowed me to use a newer photo of Issy at the bottom of the article. He also asked that anyone wishing to come to the funeral on 18 Dec get in touch with him first as they are almost at capacity at Basingstoke Crematorium. Vic's email address is vic.hogg@icloud.com.
Thanks
I am deeply grateful to the new subscribers who have joined this mailing list recently, and profound thanks to those who have signed up to my (free) gender newsletter. I've done no work on it or accompanying website at all so I need to turn my attention to that now.
Feel free to have a look around and sign up if you're interested in hearing about the gender wars. Warning: the website is still very much a work in progress, so please don't expect much for the time being.
Back a week on Monday with news of the first day of closing submission from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.
Have a great weekend.
Nick
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Chris Head became Britain’s youngest ever Subpostmaster at the age of 18. In 2006 he was given the keys to the West Bolden branch near Sunderland. According to an interview he gave to The Sun newspaper, Chris had small discrepancies from the start of his tenure. In 2014, Chris says the Post Office’s Horizon IT system at his branch “went out of control“. One week Chris had a £40,000 shortfall. Within a few weeks it had more than doubled to £88,000. Chris was suspended in 2015 and the Post Office pursued him through the civil courts for the cash they...
Lisa Busch KC, one of the most significant unsung heroes in the Post Office scandal, has died after a short illness. Busch represented former Subpostmasters Seema Misra, Janet Skinner and Tracey Felstead at the Court of Appeal Hamilton hearings in 2021 after the barrister Paul Marshall and his junior Flora Page were forced to stand down. It was Busch’s advocacy, using arguments grounded in Marshall and Page’s work, which persuaded the Court of Appeal that the Post Office perpetrated a Category 2 abuse of process. I watched Ms Busch make her arguments in court during the Hamilton hearings. She was...
The day began with a tolling of the metaphorical bell. Before the former Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake gave evidence, the chair of the Post Office Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, told us that another former Subpostmaster has died, again without receiving full and final compensation. Her name was Carol Riddell. She was the Subpostmaster at East Bolden, near Sunderland, between 1992 and 2000. Sir Wyn told the Inquiry: “During her time as sub-postmistress, Mrs Riddell had to contend with a very serious armed robbery at her post office, during the course of which she was blinded by having acid thrown...
Sir Alex Chisholm KCB was one of the most powerful government civil servants during a crucial phase of the Post Office scandal, and to nerds like me, his evidence was always going to be of some interest. Chisholm made it quite clear (watch it here) he was crawling all over the Post Office’s disastrous defence to the Bates v Post Office group litigation, but that every duff decision was its to make alone. “I was very clear in my advice to the Secretary of State”, Chisholm told the Inquiry, “that the department need to be a neutral party in relation to...
