Years before the controversial Horizon system was introduced in 1999, subpostmasters who used a Post Office system known as Capture suffered unexplained branch account shortfalls and the consequences that brought.
These subpostmasters, now elderly people, for years didn’t even realise that their losses could have been caused by software errors. Some were convicted of financial crimes and others were financially ruined.
It wasn’t until ITV’s dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal, in January this year, that the nation woke up. Former Capture users saw similarities to how they had been treated, and following the intervention of peer Kevan Jones, then MP for North Durham and long-time campaigner for justice for subpostmasters, a second campaign was born.
Because of the nearly two decades of campaigning done by former Horizon users, led by Sir Alan Bates, the smaller numbers of affected people and immediate media attention, it was a campaign that moved quickly.
Here are 10 stories on how the Capture campaign unfolded in 2024.
Soon after the ITV dramatisation of subpostmaster suffering, Kevan Jones – who, as an MP and now a peer, campaigned for subpostmasters affected by the Horizon problems for over a decade and a half – began looking for answers to why subpostmasters were blamed for unexplained shortfalls that occurred when using software known as Capture.
Rupert Lloyd Thomas, an IT expert who worked at the Post Office for 27 years, said that if the high hundreds of (possibly more than 1,000) PCs with Capture installed were sent to subpostmasters by Unisys from 1995, it could have been much more widely used.
Two former subpostmasters, whose lives were turned upside down after they suffered unexplained losses while using Capture, secure meetings with a government minister and a senior civil servant at the Department for Business and Trade.
Campaigner says he will not work with the Post Office, due to a lack of trust. “There are people that are tainted by the Post Office still working there and I won’t work with them because they are untrustworthy,” he said.
The government brings in specialist investigators, Kroll, to examine whether the Post Capture software may have also caused subpostmasters to have been wrongly prosecuted.
More echoes with the Horizon problems as former subpostmasters, who encountered serious problems with Capture, reveal they received no training.
Data on Post Office prosecutions reveals worrying similarities in how the Post Office treated Horizon and Capture users who suffered unexplained losses.
Analysis by specialist forensic investigators concludes there is a “reasonable likelihood” that the Capture system caused accounting shortfalls for which the users were blamed and, in some cases, prosecuted.
The Horizon Compensation Advisory Board has written to the secretary of state for justice urging the government to legislate to overturn convictions of subpostmasters based on the error-prone Capture system.
The Criminal Convictions Review Commission (CCRC) is reviewing cases of potential wrongful convictions where Post Office’s Capture branch software could be a factor and could add further cases.
Also read part 1: Post Office scandal in 2024: A year in the mainstream