Computer Weekly has been instrumental in the breaking of the Post Office Horizon scandal; it’s been reporting since 2008. Putting it mildly, interest has spiked with ITV’s release of a four part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and yesterday (3 January 2024) Computer Weekly pubished an article that answered a question about Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) which had mystified us here at LA for several weeks.
“Computer Weekly has investigated the Post Office Horizon scandal since 2008 and is, in fact, part of the story.”
We were late to the party, though we reported the release Nick Wallis’s book The Great Post Office Scandal in late 2022. In December 2023 we picked out three articles from www.postofficescandal.uk and re-published them with permission from Nick Wallis.
A well-established legal mechanism for covering up for serious wrongdoing is the ubiquitous NDA, and we’re not saying New Zealand is any better or worse than the United Kingdom in this area.
The publication of a 1998 NDA between jailed sex offender Harvey Weinstein and her then 24 year old PA Zelda Perkins made its way to a Parliamentary inquiry, amidst concerns about NDAs throughout the #MeToo movement.
Here in New Zealand, NDAs under Section 149 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 have been used since 2013 or 2014 as the go-to for gagging whistleblowers. Even where these NDAs form part of contracts to pervert the course of justice or commit serious wrongdoing behind the cloak of legal privilege, these have nonetheless been enforced against former government employees by the Employment Relations Authority (similar to the Employment Tribunal), by way of compliance orders, penalties and costs. The most recent example we know of is Oranga Tamariki (Ministry for Children) against whistleblower Graeme Win. After we reported that in 2021, it appears that general counsel of Crown entities from Kaitaia to The Bluff started getting the message – some of our material is of interest to mainstream reporters too.
We haven’t had the privilege of reporting any fresh whistleblower retaliation events since, although a slightly older one remains before the Employment Court; Hamilton City Council v Halse, as does a bogus SLAPP-like proceeding brought by the management of Tauranga Hospital against cardiac physiologist Ana Shaw. That one is five years old and we’ve been covering it for four years.
Back to the recent Computer Weekly article, and the mystery it solved for us:
“The Post Office used criminal and civil legal action to shut subpostmasters up. If subpostmasters continued to complain and make noise about the system, it would find ways to stop them because it didn’t want the wider network of branch operators to find out.
For example, if a subpostmaster being blamed for an unexplained shortfall sought expert IT advice, the Post Office would often back down. In 2003, when the Post Office was suing a subpostmaster who was blaming Horizon for shortfalls at her branch in Lancashire, a judge ordered it to appoint an expert IT witness. When the expert revealed problems with Horizon, the Post Office paid off the subpostmaster and forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.”
By 2003 the Post Office would have prosecuted hundreds of subpostmasters for fictitious shortfalls. Sure, they were forced to discontinue a few prosecutions when IT experts got involved. But the NDA as a “Plan B” was obviously very effective and that’s why it’s taking so long for the likes of Jarnail Singh, Gary Thomas and Paula Vennells to be brought to book.
Excerpts from Computer Weekly article re-published with permission from Karl Flinders.