A mother-of-two who ran a village post office and was wrongly accused of stealing £34,000 told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today that “lots of people’s lives were ruined”.
Pauline Thomson ran her business in the village of Matfield in Kent and said it was a “dreadful, dreadful experience” when the Post Office decided to prosecute her for theft, “I had to sell the local newspaper and it was my face on the front page,” she said.
Mrs Thomson 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.
Mrs Thomson, now 72, said she lost her income and it had a profound effect on her and her husband’s health. He later suffered heart failure and she was prescribed anti-depressants, “I’m still on them, maybe I’ll need them for the rest of my life,” she told The Inquiry.
Mrs Thomson said she began working for the Post Office when she was 26 and “thoroughly enjoyed it“. She decided to invest in her own sub-post office business in 2004 as she “saw it as an opportunity do all the hard work, and get the benefit for myself.”
But shortfalls began appearing soon after, “£100 or so” between 2004 and 2007 and she told The Inquiry she would make up the amounts out of her own money. But in 2008 the figure suddenly rose to £34,000: “That didn’t make sense in a small village post office. There shouldn’t be £34,000 in cash, a village post office should never have that,” she recalled.
One morning as she walked to work with her dog, she saw two Post Office auditors waiting outside, “I was relieved as I thought they can help me get to the bottom of it. I told them straight away the figures didn’t match up,” she said.
In the afternoon Post Office investigators joined them, then: “They went away and five minutes later two policemen came in with the investigators and he said, “charge her with theft’. There was no explanation, I was put in the back of a police car,” said Mrs Thomson.
The police car had pulled up outside the shop in the middle of the village and she said she was taken to the station, fingerprinted and put in a cell; her house was also searched: “I felt absolutely awful. They went on and on at me, ‘we know you’ve got debts’, ‘did you take the money?’, I kept saying ‘no’,” she told The Inquiry.
She left the police station at 9pm and then had to return home and explain to her husband what had happened. Over the years Mrs Thomson explained to The Inquiry she had not told her husband about the shortfall issues as she didn’t want to bring the “worry home.”
“My husband was shocked, he felt I should have told him. But I didn’t want him to be as worried as I was. I didn’t tell the children or family for nearly two years after, I was too ashamed. I was told it was only me and there were no other problems.”
At Maidstone Crown Court she agreed to plead guilty to three charges of false accounting, the theft charge was then dropped. “The local community was very supportive mostly. Lots of people wrote letters on my behalf but I did stop walking my dog due to the abuse I’d get,” she said.
Mrs Thomson was sentenced 180 hours of community service which was carried out at a local charity shop, but the financial impact was far reaching: “It was a huge deal as I was the only one earning. We rented a bungalow and we had to be evicted as we couldn’t pay the full rent, it had a huge impact on us. Eventually I walked people’s dogs, my husband delivered papers. We didn’t have a social life; we couldn’t afford anything,” she said.
The effect on their health was equally as devastating: “My husband was very strong for me, but he worried terribly. He would sleep with the keys under his pillow as he said he didn’t know if I would be there in the morning. He had heart failure and was in and out of hospital for years, he was never the same.”
Mrs Thomson said when she was charged and prosecuted, like many other sub-postmistresses and sub-postmasters she was also told by the Post Office that she was “the only one” and “I believed it. But my barrister said ‘you are not’, he had heard of others. I just thought I was totally on my own. Then I realised there were other people out there.
“No one from the Post Office has admitted responsibility or held their hands up, they just went on and on prosecuting all these people and it’s just not right. It’s just ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said.
Mrs Thomson 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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