A former sub-postmaster who was running his own village post office business at the age of 19 told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today that it was time the Post Office “put victims first and not themselves” and until that happened “we are not going away.”
Chris Trousdale was the one of the youngest miscarriages of justice victims as a result of the Post Office Horizon scandal. Today he explained how his wrongful conviction for an £8,000 shortfall ruined his and his family’s lives.
Mr Trousdale was one of more than 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses who were prosecuted by the Post Office based on information from its faulty Horizon IT system between 2000 and 2014. A High Court ruling in 2019 found the system contained “bugs, errors and defects”, causing a “material risk” that shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts had been caused by the system.
Mr Trousdale, of Whitby, was a student when the sub-post office business in his home village in the Yorkshire Moors came up for sale. He told The Inquiry he came from a long line of post office workers, which included his great-grandparents and the family had between them “150 years of service” and he wanted to take on the business “to serve his community”.
It came with a shop and a petrol station, other potential buyers wanted to close the post office section, he said, but he was successful in his bid to keep it going. The now father-of-two said he began to run it in 2002 but training on the Horizon IT system was “totally inadequate” and “alarm bells should have rung but for youthful naivety”, he said.
A request for more training was declined and from then on “I don’t think there was a week that went by where there wasn’t a discrepancy,” he said. He told The Inquiry records kept showed that he had made 188 calls to the helpline, ”one every other day”.
In 2003 an auditor arrived, and Mr Trousdale said he told him straight away there was “£8,000 not showing on the account”. He told The Inquiry investigators then arrived and reminded him he had signed The Official Secrets Act and shouldn’t talk to anyone about the matter, his wife was asked to leave the house while he was interviewed, he recalled.
He told The Inquiry: ”They said, ‘You’ve taken this money, where is it? Got a big posh car?’ I said, ‘I don’t have a driving licence’, it went from bad to worse,” he recalled and he now looked back on that day with “a bit of terror.”
Mr Trousdale was then suspended and said he suffered “acute stress reaction and PTSD” and was prescribed medication by his doctor. He was then told he would be prosecuted for false accounting: “I was told, if I don’t plead guilty they will add a theft charge and I could face several years in jail. So, I didn’t have any choice. Everyone said, ‘you can’t go to jail’,” he told The Inquiry.
He was given a community service sentence and put on probation. Mr Trousdale, now aged 39, said afterwards he had to borrow up to £19,000, partly to pay back the Post Office and the financial impact has never gone away. The prosecution also effected his mental health, “I don’t think you’ll speak to a person at this inquiry that it won’t be with them for ever,” he said.
His mother was also diagnosed with PTSD, he said, and he was not reconciled with his grandfather who also worked for the Post Office and couldn’t understand “how this organisation could possibly lie.” He died before Mr Trousdale’s conviction was quashed, “that was one of the biggest tragedies, he wasn’t around to learn the truth,” he told The Inquiry.
Mr Trousdale described the Post Office as “a massive pack of lying hounds,” and added, “they continue to cover it up and let us suffer. There’s no contrition, no remorse, just brand protection; just put the victims first for once,” he said.
Mr Trousdale is one of 56 former Post Office workers to appear before the Inquiry, all supported by Hudgell Solicitors to successfully appeal against their convictions and have them quashed at the Court of Appeal last year.
Despite the Post Office admitting there were 736 convictions of Sub-Postmasters in which Horizon was ‘intrinsic’ to prosecutions – and therefore unsafe – still less than 100 people have had their convictions quashed.
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