Post Office Horizon scandal: praise for ITV drama as MPs plan to raise redress issue in Commons

Alan McLoughlin said the impact of ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office has been “quite remarkable.”

In what has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history, the Post Office, between 2000 and 2014, prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters because information on the Horizon accounting system made it look as though money was missing from their sites.

In February 2005, Mr McLaughlin was convicted of false accounting while in charge of a Post Office at Tennent Street.

He had denied the allegations and commissioned an expert accountant’s report in support of his defence.

His conviction was eventually quashed at the Court of Appeal in Belfast in October 2022.

ITV’s four-part mini-series, which is still available online at ITV.com is based on the real-life story of postmaster Alan Bates and his legal battle that paved the way for others to have their convictions overturned.

Speaking to BBC Radio's Good Morning Ulster programme, Alan McLaughlin said the impact of the TV drama has "been remarkable".

He said: "I think, in focussing on four or five different personalities, it had a resonance with the wider public.

"They have seen people just like themselves. They are not movie stars or footballers or whatever, involved in a scandal. They were people just like themselves who were overwhelmed by a scandal not of their own making.

"They could have been any one of those people and I think that's what's been the real breakthrough in terms of general public awareness."

Conservative backbencher David Davis is pushing for an emergency debate in the Commons on the miscarriage of justice.

Former Tory minister Mr Davis stressed it was down to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle to grant urgent questions from MPs but he believed there was “no doubt” the issue would come up in the chamber in the coming days, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The Post Office is wholly owned by the Government and a public inquiry into Horizon is ongoing.

Scotland Yard said on Friday that officers are “investigating potential fraud offences arising out of these prosecutions”, for example “monies recovered from subpostmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions”.

The Metropolitan Police had already been looking into potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice in relation to investigations and prosecutions carried out by the Post Office.

A Post Office spokesperson said: “We fully share the aims of the current Public Inquiry, set up to establish what went wrong in the past and the accountability for it. It’s for the Inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues it is examining.

“We are acutely aware of the human cost of the scandal and are doing all we can to right the wrongs of the past, as far as that is possible. Both Post Office and Government are committed to providing full, fair and final compensation for the people affected.

"To date, offers of compensation totalling more than £138 million have been made to around 2,700 Postmasters, and interim payments continue to be made in cases which have not yet been resolved.”