Post Office disclosure failures force delays on IT scandal inquiry

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The inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal has been beset by further delays, as a series of disclosure failures frustrates the investigation into one of the widest miscarriages of justice in modern British history.

Lawyers acting for the inquiry on Tuesday revealed that about 363,000 emails had been discovered by the state-owned Post Office’s auditors on a legacy mailing system that had not been previously disclosed.

The revelations mean evidence from two “significant witnesses” will be delayed, further hindering the inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of several hundred postmasters for theft between 2000 and 2014 because of a fault with the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.

MPs have labelled the scandal one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent legal history, with hundreds of victims still awaiting compensation.

Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, said the Post Office’s lawyers notified his team late last week of the emails’ existence. Further correspondence on Monday night revealed that several thousand were pertinent to hearings taking place the following afternoon.

Beer said the late acknowledgment of the emails added to a long list of disclosure failures, including “hard copy documents found in new Post Office locations” and the “use or misuse of search terms when conducting the disclosure exercise”.

The Post Office had been scheduled this week to respond to a legal notice issued in July by the chair of the public inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, compelling officials to provide all relevant documents or face the threat of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment.

At the time, Williams said the notice would help “guard against the possibility” that some representatives were “unwilling or unable to comply strictly with requests”.

The deadline for compliance with the notice has already been extended twice. However, Post Office lawyers said on Tuesday that there were additional databases that had yet to be searched for relevant documents.

Lawyers acting for affected postmasters said the disclosure failures added to the toll on the victims, and that many of the documents highlighted on Tuesday had not been available when civil and criminal cases were brought by the Post Office.

“The non-disclosure and suppression of documents about relevant information is at the very heart of the Post Office scandal,” said Paul Marshall, a barrister who has acted for a number of Horizon victims.

Echoing several other lawyers acting for postmasters at the inquiry, Marshall said the failures were “wholly consistent with the Post Office’s conduct in connection with the Horizon system from the very outset”.

The Post Office said disclosure involved more than 60mn documents and it had “no interest in delay” and was working “round the clock” to review and provide material to the inquiry.