Mr Bates vs The [UK] Post Office, two years on
- leightonassociates
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Remember the Mr Bates vs the Post Office mini-series? It screened in the UK on January 1-4, 2024 and in New Zealand three months later. Between 1999 and 2015, nearly 1000 subpostmasters (mostly franchisees) were civilly and criminally prosecuted for fictitious accounting shortfalls in their branches, that were actually caused by faulty retail software that was supplied by Fujitsu.
As the software problems were gradually discovered, they were covered up to protect the brand. Mr [Sir Alan] Bates was a subpostmaster who had been sacked from his branch in 2003 after three years of phantom shortfalls. While he wasn’t among those prosecuted, he lost the £65,000 he had invested in the business.
In 2010 Seema Misra was jailed for several months while pregnant with her second child (later exonerated along with Jo Hamilton and 37 others in the Court of Appeal).
[2021] EWCA Crim577 Hamilton & Ors v Post Office Limited
While there has been a lot of talk about compensation for wrongful prosecution and direct losses, and prosecution of those responsible for the cover-ups, timelines keep getting pushed back.
So far the only semi-tangible consequences for wrongdoers that we are aware of include:
Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, handed back her CBE amid calls for her to be stripped of it,
Jane MacLeod, General Counsel from 2015 to 2019, fled to her native Australia and refused to give evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry led by Sir Wyn Williams. We suspect that to have forced her early retirement.
Leighton Associates was the first media organisation in New Zealand to cover the Post Office scandal, starting with re-publication of articles by journalist Nick Wallis in December 2023 before producing some original material in 2024, eg:
Wallis is back with an article in Daily Mail - it’s around 3,000 words and the link is here:
The article includes these stats, as at 27 December 2025:
983 wrongful convictions, many now quashed
236 subpostmasters given prison sentences
10,000 subpostmasters eligible for compensation
2,703 outstanding claims
£1.3b compensation paid so far
£1.6b cost to taxpayer
350 died before receiving compensation
13 attributed suicides
0 people held to account
That’s right – no prosecutions so far. But we have seen many individuals squirming in their seats before the much publicised Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. One was Peter Sewell, who referred to Bridlington subpostmaster Lee Castleton, who he never met, as a “nasty chap”. Castleton, who was bankrupted by the Post Office in 2006 and is currently suing it, is pictured with Kiwi anti-bullying employment advocate Allan Halse in September 2025.
Had Halse, who has a union background, been a representative of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP) in the 2010s, he wouldn’t have turned traitor like George Thomson. He probably would have made the likes of Peter Sewell cry at his desk (although in my lay opinion Flora Page KC seems a little scarier, in a good way).
Tristam Price, Editor
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