Corruption & the Post Office Horizon scandal
How the Identification Principle protects the guilty
The enormity of the Post Office Horizon scandal is hard to grasp or define. The allegations of fraud and perverting the course of justice by a few individuals, currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Servce, even if proved, seem a wholly inadequate response.
Our political leadership and our institutions seem unmoored and paralysed by the failure of “An anchor of UK communities for centuries”[1]. This is understandable. Hundreds of wholly innocent people running “community hubs” “at the heart of communities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”, have been systematically abused for two decades by a framework that should have protected them. Lives have been destroyed and even ended as a direct result of what has happened. The nation is shocked and appalled from top to bottom and struggling to understand what has happened and why.
For the general public, the prospect of lengthy investigations and the concern that the powerful will not be held to account is palpable. This note seeks to define the problem and identify a key impediment to justice.
We do have a definition of the Post Office Horizon scandal that could be applied; it is: “The abuse of entrusted power for private gain”. This comes from Transparency International and dates from around 2010, it is their definition of corruption. The first part of this sentence can be straightforwardly applied to the hundreds of private prosecutions brought against the innocent.
The second part “for private gain” does not have to be financial. The esteem of remaining an executive at “one of the most admired institutions in the public sector”, could be described as a gain. More directly, executive reward at the Post Office is based on its profitability and the scale of the abuse has allowed tax specialist Dan Neidle to call that into question: “Bonuses have been paid to the executive team based on an apparent level of profitability which does not exist”[2]. The executives put in place a staff bonus scheme for successful prosecutions.
We should call the Post Office scandal what it is: Corruption
The Transparency International definition is not a statutory definition of an offence of corruption in the UK. In fact, the UK lacks an accepted definition of corruption at all. The UK Anti-Corruption Plan of 2014 (updated in 2016) quotes the TI definition above, but also quotes the UN and World Bank definitions. It doesn’t accept any of these but plumps instead for “what the UK public may commonly view as corruption”, without defining what that view might be.
I suppose, as a member of that public, it appears to me that Post Office Limited is the corrupt abuser of hundreds of innocent people, and by extension their communities and the UK public as a whole. Despite this responsibility, the recently amended Identification Principle prevents this corporate body being held to account. Unless an individual from Post Office Ltd is proven to have committed an offence the corporate body simply escapes accountability for its own criminal behaviour. It is above the law.
This is a travesty. The Identification Principle stands in the way of natural justice and this scandal should compel its revision. We should be able to convict the Post Office Ltd as an adult with criminal responsibility, without having to prove that another person did the deed. Once convicted the Post Office assets could be confiscated and compensation could be awarded to its victims from those assets.
[1] All the quotes in this text above are taken from the Post Office website. Accessed 21/1/24 https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/en/about/our-story/who-we-are/
[2] Accessed 24/1/24 Tax Policy Associates (2024) https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/01/12/934m/