The Post Office is unable to find evidence to support about 1,400 claims for redress, which is an increase in the number of people in the same position of limbo a year ago.
Despite writing to subpostmasters affected by the Post Office Horizon scandal, encouraging them to apply for redress, the Post Office is unable to find evidence for losses in many cases.
This is not a recent development. As revealed by Computer Weekly a year ago, more than 1,000 former subpostmasters were seeking compensation, despite the Post Office failing to find evidence that Horizon errors were responsible for the shortfalls
At the time, in April 2025, the government said it was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it. A spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said: “Each case is treated individually, and we are working to inform affected claimants on next steps as soon as possible.”
Most of these cases date back to before 2005, a time for which the Post Office has poor records.
One claimant, who is among those still waiting for redress, told Computer Weekly they had been informed that there are now 1,400 cases where evidence cannot be found.
The DBT and the Post Office had not responded to questions when this article was published.
News last week that scandal victim Parmod Kalia, 67, had died before receiving full redress was another example of justice being delayed and denied. Kalia, who was jailed as part of his sentence, had his wrongful conviction for financial crime overturned in May 2021.
The claimants have applied for a £75,000 fixed payment under the Post Office’s Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS) – previously called the Historical Shortfall Scheme – which was set up to offer redress to victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal.
There have been 9,505 so-called “eligible late claims” to the HSS, which mainly came forward after ITV’s dramatisation of the Post Office scandal, with 8,100 offers made by the government and 7,294 paid so far.
Calum Greenhow, CEO of the National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP), said the organisation is being contacted regularly by its members who are in the group of 1,400 cases. “Key to this is the fact that the onus should not be on the subpostmasters to prove they had losses caused by Horizon, but for the Post Office to prove they didn’t,” he said.
Contacted but not compensated
One claimant told Computer Weekly they had been contacted out of the blue in 2024 by the Post Office advising them to make a claim, but over a year later, the organisation has not settled the claim and has said it can’t find evidence.
Many cases date back to soon after the Post Office rolled out Horizon in 1999, and evidence is proving difficult to find.
MPs on the Business and Trade Select Committee have previously recommended changes to compensation schemes to give claimants greater benefit of the doubt when applying for redress, but these were rejected by the government.
In April 2025, committee chair Liam Byrne MP said: “The new government has made extremely important progress in accelerating redress payments to the victims of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. But too many are still waiting too long, and former subpostmasters are still dying before they receive justice. That is wrong.”
Separately, there are also calls for the government to legislate to overturn convictions that were based on the Post Office’s faulty Capture system, in the same way it did for those who were convicted of financial crimes based on evidence from the Horizon system.
Appellants seeking to clear their names must find evidence that they used the software from the 1990s.
Currently, 29 appeals are being reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), but the process is slow, and the Post Office has said it will contest appeals.
It was announced in July last year that the appeal against the 1998 conviction of one former Capture user, Patricia Owens, who died in 2003, was to be sent to the Court of Appeal by the CCRC, but it wasn’t sent until October, where it sits now.
Former subpostmaster Steve Marston, who was convicted in 1997, put in his appeal to the CCRC in December 2024, but is still waiting for a decision.
The Post Office Horizon scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to accounting software (see below timeline of all Computer Weekly articles about the Horizon scandal, since 2009).
