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Mr Bates vs the Post Office

Jim Audiomisc said:
Erm. This has happened under the Tories. Yet as a Government they have ignored it. In reality they should have investigated long ago. *All* of those 'convicted' or simply ruined should have been pardoned and given full recompense + compensation and apologies. We should now proceed on the presumption that *all* cases during the relevant time were leading to unsafe and wrong 'guilty' verdicts, etc. We now know enough for this to be needed without individuals having to drag though courts *again*.

All of those who have covered up the truth whilst prosecuting/hounding/blaming/*killing* the postmasters, etc, should be dealt with. Indeed, a Government-sponsored action to recover costs + damages from them for distribution to the afflicted postmasters (or their children if they are now dead) seems approptiate. Time in pokey may also be sensible 'for the encourgement of others'.
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prosecutions of postmasters 1999 - 2015

1999 - 2007 : Blair
2007 - 2010 : Brown
2010 - 2015 : Cameron/Clegg

i don’t think it is fair not to include Labour and Liberals in this appalling charade - NOT a party political issue in my view, all about covering arses when things go wrong (something all parties are pretty adept at)
 
All govts through 1994 to 2024 knew the system didn't work and colluded to cover it up.

TBF there wasn't solid (public) evidence of the problems until 2009 so it was easy to deny/ignore prior to that

I haven't been following it and haven't watched the show but they need to release all the FAT/SAT/UAT documentation, test schedules/reports and transition reports.
 
Something that seems to be missed in analysis of this disaster is that in the second half of the last century for Fujitsu you could read ICL in many public sector managers' eyes.

In the 60s and 70s ICL had been so close to the UK government they had almost become an extension of it. I've long suspected that many of the relationships of trust built up in that period weakened government's ability scrutinise the new commercial relationship following the full Fujitsu takeover in the 90s.

That was clear, in a less catastrophic way, in a number of government contracts with Fujitsu.
 
raysablade said:
Something that seems to be missed in analysis of this disaster is that in the second half of the last century for Fujitsu you could read ICL in many public sector managers' eyes.

In the 60s and 70s ICL had been so close to the UK government they had almost become an extension of it. I've long suspected that many of the relationships of trust built up in that period weakened government's ability scrutinise the new commercial relationship following the full Fujitsu takeover in the 90s.

That was clear, in a less catastrophic way, in a number of government contracts with Fujitsu.
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👍

Defence Information Infrastructure - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Atlas Consortium - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
vacuum_tubes said:
All govts through 1994 to 2024 knew the system didn't work and colluded to cover it up.

TBF there wasn't solid (public) evidence of the problems until 2009 so it was easy to deny/ignore prior to that

I haven't been following it and haven't watched the show but they need to release all the FAT/SAT/UAT documentation, test schedules/reports and transition reports.
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Watch the show and you will realise the irony of your last sentence!
 
One of the problems for prosecution is that the suggestion the PO destroyed lots of potential evidence.
 
I would've thought destroying evidence is a crime in itself. See Boris WhatsApp messages p94 ad naus but probably only in a parallel universe!
 
Hi, petition signed, paula vennells, should not only lose her obe, but she should taken to court, and jailed, as she knew about the problem,
but we all know that will never happen,
all the sub post masters should raise a joint, criminal, or civil, case against her,
 
I'm not usually one to jump on the bandwagon and rarely sign petitions. However, we binged watched this series yesterday and I am utterly disgusted in the whole debacle. I have just signed this one.

She needs to lose this. Now.

The whole process also needs speeding up so these people who have been so incredibly harshly treated can get proper financial compensation.

Thank you OP for the thread. I had somehow totally missed this.
 
Amormusic said:
I'm not usually one to jump on the bandwagon and rarely sign petitions. However, we binged watched this series yesterday and I am utterly disgusted in the whole debacle. I have just signed this one.

She needs to lose this. Now.

The whole process also needs speeding up so these people who have been so incredibly harshly treated can get proper financial compensation.

Thank you OP for the thread. I had somehow totally missed this.
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Quite similar here - I hadn’t thought about the story until my wife suggested that we watched the series.
We were shocked and angry with the lies and covering up, followed by the managers carrying on with their careers, getting “golden goodbyes“ and honours.
 
Bob McC said:
Watch the show and you will realise the irony of your last sentence!
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Watched the series and the "real story" documentary last night.

It does imply that Post Office destroyed/lost documents but

vacuum_tubes said:
I haven't been following it and haven't watched the show but they need to release all the FAT/SAT/UAT documentation, test schedules/reports and transition reports.
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These documents

FAT = Factory Acceptance Testing
SAT = System Acceptance Testing
UAT = User Acceptance Testing

For public sector procurement the framework states that signed copies should be held by the supplier Fujitsu, Post Office as the customer and Crown Commercial as governance.

The SAT should detail all the testing done in FAT and include all scenarios e.g network disconnection and power fail during an operation etc.

TL;DR

What I'm saying is that they should be going after Fujitsu in the first instance for compensation as the system clearly wasn't fit for purpose. Everyone deserves and is entitled to (lots of) compensation but that shouldn't be met by the tax payer unless it is found that the issues were ignored by the Post Office and therefore the govt or Post Office are liable.
 
vacuum_tubes said:
What I'm saying is that they should be going after Fujitsu in the first instance for compensation as the system clearly wasn't fit for purpose. Everyone deserves and is entitled to (lots of) compensation but that shouldn't be met by the tax payer unless it is found that the issues highlighted during testing were ignored by the Post Office and therefore the govt or Post Office are liable.
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The issues to my mind are with whoever decided to reject reports and evidence of end-user issues, to lie about those issues right down to writing helpdesk scripts, to tamper with live data, to dig the hole deeper at every conceivable level in the face of additional reports and evidence.

These are the questions that need answering and the decisions that ruined so many lives. To my eyes they have all the hallmarks of non-technical government/corporate administration rather than computer systems developers. At every stage the easiest thing (from Fujitsu Siemens perspective) would be to admit an issue, identify it, and fix it. Standard IT practice. Everyone knows this sort of shit never works first time, the job is to make it work. Behaving like a Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock or Grant Shapps in this environment just doesn’t work as one is dealing with logic and data. It just needed to be debugged and fixed. No easy way out by lying.
 
vacuum_tubes said:
What I'm saying is that they should be going after Fujitsu in the first instance for compensation as the system clearly wasn't fit for purpose. Everyone deserves and is entitled to (lots of) compensation but that shouldn't be met by the tax payer unless it is found that the issues were ignored by the Post Office and therefore the govt or Post Office are liable.
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I'd be surprised if you could create a suitable test environment. Tens of thousands of sites and hundreds of thousands of miles of comms links with huge spikes in traffic at the end of a day is a significant contributor to a risk of intermittent failure. As is the need for an adequate range of training , guidance and support for a disparate cohort of people who were not recruited with work on a system of this type in mind.

I'd imagine that the test logs are present and in order were you to identify and scrutinize them. However I suspect that the testing criteria will have been set with project/supplier risks at least in mind if not to the forefront.

The big surprise for me in the TV series is the seeming failure to implement control and scrutiny after the system was delivered. In big government projects of this type well funded and resourced post implementation review and independent audit is vital. Failure to: plan, deliver and fund that lies with the Post Office
 
Tony L said:
At every stage the easiest thing (from Fujitsu Siemens perspective) would be to admit an issue, identify it, and fix it. Standard IT practice. Everyone knows this sort of shit never works first time, the job is to make it work.
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and releasing the test reports would identify where that happened

If the issues were highlighted to PO during testing then the govt is liable, if the known failure scenarios were not tested then Fujitsu are (possibly) liable.

AFAIK Fujitsu were providing a fully managed e2e solution for Horizon i.e the terminal in the PO, the connectivity back to the DC and the core server/database/processing elements.

If Fujitsu failed to test the connectivity infrastructure for failure scenarios then they are massively negligent (unless PO/Govt specifically requested that this not be tested)
 
vacuum_tubes said:
AFAIK Fujitsu were providing a fully managed e2e solution for Horizon i.e the terminal in the PO, the connectivity back to the DC and the core server/database/processing elements.

If Fujitsu failed to test the connectivity infrastructure for failure scenarios then they are massively negligent (unless PO/Govt specifically requested that this not be tested)
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If it turns out that Fujitsu were responsible for the denying, evidence tampering, lies and all round obfuscation at the root of this issue they need suing out of existence. Just end them as a company.

At this point I’m still more inclined to believe the root lies with the post office management as UK government and much corporate structure is just such a hellscape. An environment where shit always rises to the top and failure is rewarded. We see it right across everything. These awful people then just buy our politics and the whole thing bootloops and runs again.
 
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