Mr Bates vs the Post Office: why did take an ITV drama to get the government to help the sub-postmasters?

Little did Bates and his partner Suzanne know at the time that 23 years later their story would be dramatised by ITV leading to the intervention of the Prime Minister, and finally some light at the end of the tunnel for some of the people caught up in the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern times.

In that intervening period, the Post Office aggressively went after hundreds of sub-postmasters through private prosecutions, accusing them of theft when cash imbalances showed up on Fujitsu’s faulty IT system. Every time they called the helpline to report issues, the branch managers were told they were the only person having that problem. 

Many went destitute trying to pay up erroneous shortfalls by re-mortgaging their home, while the Post Office sued others until they went bankrupt. The Post Office investigators were recently described as acting like the Mafia. 

In 2009, Computer Weekly first reported the issues Bates and his group - Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance (JFSA) - were having. In 2011, the BBC broadcast a segment on Seema Misra, a pregnant sub-postmaster who was wrongfully jailed for 15 months for theft while pregnant. That same year, Private Eye began its extensive reporting on Horizon as the latest in a string of government contracts that have gone wrong.

Since then, the campaign has been valiantly taken up by MPs (now Lord) James Arbuthnot and Kevan Jones, former chief executive Paula Vennells has showcased the Post Office’s obstructive behaviour in Parliament, the JFSA won its High Court case and Boris Johnson ordered a statutory inquiry into the scandal.

Yet it has taken a TV series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondhalgh, to get some decisive action from the Prime Minister. This week, Rishi Sunak promised to bring in a law to quash en-masse the wrongful convictions of sub-postmasters, and pay out a minimum in compensation of £600,000 to those prosecuted and £75,000 to those that lost their livelihoods.

The ITV drama, as excellent as it was, didn’t have any new information in it. All of the horrendous stories about pregnant women being prosecuted and sub-postmasters committing suicide were based on real-life events that had already been reported. So why has it taken the power of the goggle-box to get government action?

Jones, the Labour MP for North Durham, thinks that because some of the incidents were so shocking, it’s hard for people to believe until it’s laid out in front of them. He told NationalWorld: “The problem with the scandal in the past is that it’s quite complicated to explain. Some of it, I think the TV drama showed this, you wouldn’t believe what was actually happening. It’s very hard to believe what actually went on.”

SNP MP Marion Fellows, who has campaigned around the Post Office extensively since being elected in 2015, agrees. “I watched it with a member of my extended family who is a lawyer,” she told NationalWorld “He kept turning around to me saying: ‘Did that really happen? That’s terrible.’”

Fellows, who is the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Post Office, believes the drama has humanised the scandal. “Even the title sums it up,” she said. “It’s made into something the public loves - which is a David and Goliath story. One man going against the big man. 

“It’s just come out at the right time, when people were slowly getting to be more conscious of it. The timing of it is crucial, and also the fact that folk are sitting down and watching TV.”

Jones, who sits on the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, added: “What the drama did brilliantly is it told the sub-postmasters and mistresses story directly. It captures that very human essence, and that’s how brilliant the drama was.”

Former sub-postmaster Chris Head, who has launched a Change petition for compensation and accountability, told NationalWorld that he found it “frustrating” that it took a TV show to inspire the government. 

“I wish the drama had come along quite a few years back to bolster this kind of reaction, to galvanise the public and the government into some kind of action,” he said. “We don’t really care what it takes to get it into the limelight, if that’s what it is then so be it. What we need to do now is make sure we capitalise on it and drive it through to make sure there’s full and fair compensation.” 

Before the TV series came out at Christmas, Jones and Lord Arbuthnot were trying to arrange a meeting with Justice Secretary Alex Chalk to push for the wrongly convictions to be overturned faster. So far, only 95 out of 927 potentially erroneous prosecutions have been quashed. The meeting was never finalised however, since the TV show Chalk signed off the legislation to overturn the convictions en masse.

“I think what this [Mr Bates vs the Post Office] did is put rocket fuel behind them to actually come up with a solution,” Jones told NationalWorld. “I think they might have got there eventually but it would have taken them a lot longer without this.

“We [Horizon Compensation Advisory Board] put it on the agenda [to the Justice Secretary]. Whether we would have got what we got on Wednesday as quickly, I’m not sure we would have done to be honest. Certainly the members of the advisory board are determined to get this.”

Sadly, the delays have led to many sub-postmasters dying before they could be exonerated or get proper compensation. Jones’ constituent Tom Brown came to him more than 10 years ago, after he was accused of stealing £84,000. Brown, as was portrayed in the drama, kept trying to balance the Horizon system and the shortfall kept rising.

Post Office investigators raided his house, arrested him and “put him through two years of agony”, Jones explained. Then on the day of his trial, the Post Office withdrew the case. By that point however, Brown was bankrupt. “It’s aggressive, they weaponised the justice system against people like Tom,” Jones said. Brown sadly died just before Christmas, so never got to see the impact the ITV drama had. 

One thing that doesn’t appear to have changed over the years is how obstructive and un-transparent the Post Office has been. Even today (12 January) at the public inquiry, it has emerged that the Post Office sent large numbers of the same documents marked up as new material which delayed the hearings. Other disclosure delays have led to the evidence of a Horizon engineer twice being postponed. 

“The Post Office, even to today, even after all the apologies they’ve come out, has not changed,” sub-postmaster Chris tells me. “It’s so ingrained in the culture, it will never change until the Post Office is completely disbanded and rebuilt from the bottom up.

“All we need now is people thoroughly compensated, they need to be able to get back on with their lives and put back in the position they should have been in, had this scandal not happened. For the sub-postmasters to get proper closure we’ll need some accountability.” Perhaps we’ll need series two of Mr Bates vs the Post Office to push through that.

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.