About Us
The Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) was formed in 2009 by a small group of Subpostmasters from all around the country who had suffered serious problems with Post Office and its Horizon computer system that had been introduced in 2000. The JFSA has been the workhorse behind the campaign to expose this state sponsored cover up and injustice.
Currently the JFSA is centred on achieving financial redress for the many hundreds of victims of Post Office and its flawed Horizon computer system. Much of the history of the group and their stories can be found within this website.
From the day of the computer system first being installed, Subpostmasters had experienced problems with Horizon, but Post Office’s stance with was nearly always ‘you’re the only one to have problems’. Yet Subpostmasters did have problems, serious problems, life changing problems, and because of the shortages the Horizon system declared, it meant many Subpostmasters suffered atrociously at the corporate hands of Post Office. A Post Office that concentrated on asset recovery, rather than investigation of the root causes of these problems. A Post Office that refused to consider that its Horizon system could ever be to blame.
Over the years Post Office aggressively held a defensive position that there was nothing wrong with Horizon and that the problems experienced by Subpostmasters were mainly due to their incompetence or were simply theft. Often Post Office rolled out its Ministerial masters to front and support its claims in response to numerous questions being raised by MPs.
Yet hundreds of Subpostmasters had lost their post offices and their investments, with all the financial implications that then landed on their doorstep – if they still had one. At the same time Post Office would be demanding they pay back any ‘shortfall’ offering no evidence other than a Horizon printout, and often not even that.
In some cases Post Office would bring a private prosecution against a Subpostmaster. Frequently in these instances Post Office would not provide any evidence, and if it did, it might only be a Horizon printout, as they would ‘horse trade’ with the Subpostmaster, offering to drop a theft charge in return for an admission of false accounting. Taking up such an offer was generally understood by the Subpostmaster to be the best way of avoiding a custodial sentence, but it never always worked.
It was also often the case that when a Subpostmaster had returned incorrect trading figures to Post Office they were led to believe they had technically false accounted, so agreeing to having done so in order to have the theft charge dropped, seemed sensible. All of which suited Post Office as it meant that it didn’t have to provide any evidence and was able to recover the ‘shortage’ using the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), which in many cases led to loss of their business, their home, they were made bankrupt and in some instances received a prison sentence. (However, as the court found in the 2018 Common Issues trial, returning inaccurate trading figures based on Horizon was not false accounting, and since the judgments of the two trials, the Criminal Cases Review Commission has referred most of these cases to the Court of Appeal – the largest referral the CCRC has ever made)
The Journey
From November 2009 when 30 of the victims met for the first time and the JFSA was born, the story of what had happened to those in the group appeared in the media from time to time and the group’s numbers continued to grow, so in 2012, with the aid of MP pressure, an initial scheme was set up to allow independent investigators examine a small number of these cases. It was evident to the investigators that there certainly was something not right, and a further scheme was set up that 150 of mainly ex Subpostmasters applied to have their cases investigated. Despite a retired Court of Appeal judge chairing the management of that scheme, early in 2015 Post Office unilaterally terminated it, the day before the investigators were to release their report into their findings.
So those who had signed up for the schemes had been left high and dry by Post Office once again (‘duplicitous’ was the word used by one MP to describe Post Offices actions at this time), yet the schemes had generated a number of independent reports into cases and a damning report by the investigators into the failures and shortcoming of Post Office and its Horizon system. Later in 2015, using the material produced by those schemes, the JFSA secured the services of a legal firm, and with its help, obtained the funding to eventually begin civil litigation proceedings against Post Office.
Yet over the intervening years, the determination of the group was solid and at meetings of the victims of Post Office’s brutality, people who had run businesses often in the heart of a community, met to offer support to others and confirm their resolve to expose the real truth no matter how long it took. It was a long slow laborious process for the JFSA to eventually get Post Office into court in 2017 in a group litigation action by over 550 mainly ex Subpostmaster. This eventually culminated in outstanding legal victories for the group in both the Common Issues and Horizon trials, where the group’s claims were not only vindicated, but the atrocious conduct of Post Office was exposed for all to see, and here you will find a brief introduction into the issues and the judgments. The full versions of the highly readable judgments from the trials can be downloaded from the site’s documents page.
Much has happened, albeit slowly, since this website was first set up in 2009. Originally it was a rallying point for new victims to let them know they weren’t ‘the only ones’, it then turned more to campaigning and to exposing what Post Office had done to people. More recently the site has been used to herald the triumphs the group has achieved in the court (with a little bit of help from an excellent legal team).
Nowadays the site is more a historical record of the stages the group went through over the years and many of the original pages have been retained in the site’s archive, as are links to media coverage and a number of downloadable documents. Yet at the time of compiling this webpage, the JFSA is still campaigning to recover the costs (+ interest) the victims incurred for providing nearly 1000 pages of court tested damning evidence about the flaws in Post Office’s Horizon system, the incompetence of Post Office in managing its business and the failings of its only shareholder – the Government.
Following the damning judgments from the two trials that has continuing implications in many directions including criminal convictions of many subpostmasters being quashed, a Statutory Inquiry into the debacle is underway and a complaint of maladministration has been brought with the Parliamentary Ombudsman against BEIS and HMG.
The JFSA continues to fight for the financial redress the original 555 victims are entitled to in order to return them to the position they would have been in had Post Office not ruined their lives.
Currently the JFSA is centred on achieving financial redress for the many hundreds of victims of Post Office and its flawed Horizon computer system. Much of the history of the group and their stories can be found within this website.
From the day of the computer system first being installed, Subpostmasters had experienced problems with Horizon, but Post Office’s stance with was nearly always ‘you’re the only one to have problems’. Yet Subpostmasters did have problems, serious problems, life changing problems, and because of the shortages the Horizon system declared, it meant many Subpostmasters suffered atrociously at the corporate hands of Post Office. A Post Office that concentrated on asset recovery, rather than investigation of the root causes of these problems. A Post Office that refused to consider that its Horizon system could ever be to blame.
Over the years Post Office aggressively held a defensive position that there was nothing wrong with Horizon and that the problems experienced by Subpostmasters were mainly due to their incompetence or were simply theft. Often Post Office rolled out its Ministerial masters to front and support its claims in response to numerous questions being raised by MPs.
Yet hundreds of Subpostmasters had lost their post offices and their investments, with all the financial implications that then landed on their doorstep – if they still had one. At the same time Post Office would be demanding they pay back any ‘shortfall’ offering no evidence other than a Horizon printout, and often not even that.
In some cases Post Office would bring a private prosecution against a Subpostmaster. Frequently in these instances Post Office would not provide any evidence, and if it did, it might only be a Horizon printout, as they would ‘horse trade’ with the Subpostmaster, offering to drop a theft charge in return for an admission of false accounting. Taking up such an offer was generally understood by the Subpostmaster to be the best way of avoiding a custodial sentence, but it never always worked.
It was also often the case that when a Subpostmaster had returned incorrect trading figures to Post Office they were led to believe they had technically false accounted, so agreeing to having done so in order to have the theft charge dropped, seemed sensible. All of which suited Post Office as it meant that it didn’t have to provide any evidence and was able to recover the ‘shortage’ using the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), which in many cases led to loss of their business, their home, they were made bankrupt and in some instances received a prison sentence. (However, as the court found in the 2018 Common Issues trial, returning inaccurate trading figures based on Horizon was not false accounting, and since the judgments of the two trials, the Criminal Cases Review Commission has referred most of these cases to the Court of Appeal – the largest referral the CCRC has ever made)
The Journey
From November 2009 when 30 of the victims met for the first time and the JFSA was born, the story of what had happened to those in the group appeared in the media from time to time and the group’s numbers continued to grow, so in 2012, with the aid of MP pressure, an initial scheme was set up to allow independent investigators examine a small number of these cases. It was evident to the investigators that there certainly was something not right, and a further scheme was set up that 150 of mainly ex Subpostmasters applied to have their cases investigated. Despite a retired Court of Appeal judge chairing the management of that scheme, early in 2015 Post Office unilaterally terminated it, the day before the investigators were to release their report into their findings.
So those who had signed up for the schemes had been left high and dry by Post Office once again (‘duplicitous’ was the word used by one MP to describe Post Offices actions at this time), yet the schemes had generated a number of independent reports into cases and a damning report by the investigators into the failures and shortcoming of Post Office and its Horizon system. Later in 2015, using the material produced by those schemes, the JFSA secured the services of a legal firm, and with its help, obtained the funding to eventually begin civil litigation proceedings against Post Office.
Yet over the intervening years, the determination of the group was solid and at meetings of the victims of Post Office’s brutality, people who had run businesses often in the heart of a community, met to offer support to others and confirm their resolve to expose the real truth no matter how long it took. It was a long slow laborious process for the JFSA to eventually get Post Office into court in 2017 in a group litigation action by over 550 mainly ex Subpostmaster. This eventually culminated in outstanding legal victories for the group in both the Common Issues and Horizon trials, where the group’s claims were not only vindicated, but the atrocious conduct of Post Office was exposed for all to see, and here you will find a brief introduction into the issues and the judgments. The full versions of the highly readable judgments from the trials can be downloaded from the site’s documents page.
Much has happened, albeit slowly, since this website was first set up in 2009. Originally it was a rallying point for new victims to let them know they weren’t ‘the only ones’, it then turned more to campaigning and to exposing what Post Office had done to people. More recently the site has been used to herald the triumphs the group has achieved in the court (with a little bit of help from an excellent legal team).
Nowadays the site is more a historical record of the stages the group went through over the years and many of the original pages have been retained in the site’s archive, as are links to media coverage and a number of downloadable documents. Yet at the time of compiling this webpage, the JFSA is still campaigning to recover the costs (+ interest) the victims incurred for providing nearly 1000 pages of court tested damning evidence about the flaws in Post Office’s Horizon system, the incompetence of Post Office in managing its business and the failings of its only shareholder – the Government.
Following the damning judgments from the two trials that has continuing implications in many directions including criminal convictions of many subpostmasters being quashed, a Statutory Inquiry into the debacle is underway and a complaint of maladministration has been brought with the Parliamentary Ombudsman against BEIS and HMG.
The JFSA continues to fight for the financial redress the original 555 victims are entitled to in order to return them to the position they would have been in had Post Office not ruined their lives.