Former Sub-Postmistress Jo Hamilton has told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry how she kissed goodbye to her loved ones believing she’d be sent to prison for crimes she’d not committed.
Mrs Hamilton told day one of the inquiry she felt she was ‘going mad’ when unable to explain rising shortfalls in her accounts at the Post Office she ran in the village of South Warnborough in Hampshire.
She also detailed how she remortgaged her home and borrowed from friends in panic, fearing the sack because her books showed increasing unexplained shortfalls.
Mrs Hamilton was one of more than 700 Sub-Postmasters prosecuted between 2000 and 2014, based on information from the faulty Horizon accounting system, which had been installed and maintained by Fujitsu in branches across England and Wales.
She was prosecuted for a shortfall in accounts of £36,000 in 2006, having being told she was the only person facing issues with the accounting system. Mrs Hamilton was then persuaded to plead guilty to a charge of false accounting – less serious than the initial charge of theft which she’d denied at an initial court hearing – to avoid going to jail.
One of 56 Core Participants being represented at the Inquiry by Hudgell Solicitors, she told how the system initially showed a shortfall of £2,082 in 2002, which then ‘doubled’ as she attempted to resolve the issue, having taken advice from a support line.
She explained how she was repeatedly told to ‘put it right’ when reporting future shortfalls, and was warned she’d lose her job if she reported any more similar account discrepancies. This led to her remortgaging her home, and borrowing from friends, to cover the amount she was supposed to have in the Post Office safe.
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It would come up with a figure that you should have in your safe and you couldn’t open up the next day unless you agreed that you had that figure. It would generate the figure, so you’d just say ‘yes I’ve got that.
It kept going wrong and I kept having deficits so I remortgaged the house as I had a £9,000 one, then I borrowed £3,000 from a friend. In the end I just gave up. I didn’t know where else to go because I had already tried to get them (the Post Office) to come and sort it out.
I just backed myself into a corner and I couldn’t go anywhere else as I couldn’t get any help from the Post Office, and every time I said it wasn’t right they just said you’ve got to pay it.
She explained how she spent days and nights trying to resolve the problem and find an error in her own accounting – looking for something that wasn’t there – and an answer Post Office officials didn’t help her try and find.
“I really did think I was going mental. I’m not that unintelligent. I used to literally sit there like a mad woman with paperwork everywhere, all over the floor, thinking it’s got to be here,” she said. “I couldn’t get them to help me find it. It was just crazy. They had all the information at the other end, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Asked about how she felt when being sentenced, she said the thought of prison ‘terrified’ her, and influenced her decision to admit to a crime she’d not committed: “Prison terrified me. I would have almost said yes to anything,” she said.
“They made out that I was sorry for what I had done and that I’d got confused and made mistakes. I had to say it 14 times that I was guilty. It felt like it was rubbing my nose in it. I knew I’d done nothing wrong but I couldn’t explain it. I had my bag packed. I was terrified. I hugged my mum and dad goodbye, and my husband and my boys.”
Mrs Hamilton was spared prison but was ordered to comply with a community order and to pay back the £36,600 shortfall. She was supported at her sentencing in court by 74 people from her local community, including the vicar who spoke on her behalf.
The community also raised more than £6,000 towards the money she had to pay to the Post Office, “Other people went to prison and I didn’t. I think it saved me,” she said of those who had turned out in support.
Inquiry will look to establish ‘who knew what, and when in relation to Horizon’
Earlier in the hearing, Jason Beer QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, said although it had been established to ‘understand and acknowledge what went wrong in relation to Horizon’, the inquiry must keep Sub-postmasters, and the impact on their lives, at ‘front and centre’ of proceedings.
He added that it will seek ‘to establish who knew what, and when’ with regards the failings of the Horizon system. The first four weeks will hear direct from Sub-Postmasters in hearings held in London, Cardiff and Leeds, in which they will speak of the ‘Human Impact’ of all that happened.
“In what you in due course may conclude is the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history, these convictions were based on failures of investigation and failures of disclosure,” said Mr Beer QC.
“Prosecutions were founded upon an assertion that a computerised accounting system, Horizon, which was used in branch Post Offices, and operated by Fujitsu, was reliable when in fact it was not. What’s more, the public owned company that was responsible for bringing prosecutions, Post Office Ltd, knew that it was not.
“This inquiry has been established to understand and acknowledge what went wrong in relation to Horizon. It will build upon the findings that have already been made by the courts, in particular by seeking to establish who knew what, and when.”
Inquiry ‘not about an IT project gone wrong, but about people’
In setting out the impact on Sub-Postmasters and families, Mr Beer QC described them as “important, respected and integral parts of the local communities they served.”
He said: “Lives were ruined. Families were torn apart. Families were made homeless and destitute. Reputations were destroyed. A number of men and women sadly died before the state publicly recognised that they were wrongly convicted.
“Although the underlying subject matter of the inquiry is information technology, this inquiry is not, and will not become a dry technical investigation into an IT project gone wrong. That is because it is an inquiry which is actually about people.
“It is about people whose mental and physical health has been impacted, about people whose marriages and partnership have deteriorated or failed, about people who thought about taking their own lives, and in some cases, who took their own lives.
“Everyone should be aware the evidence we are about to hear is the tip of a very large iceberg.”
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