ITV has won the BAFTA television special award for commissioning the acclaimed series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which tells the shocking true story of hundreds of innocent subpostmasters working in the UK who were wrongly accused and later charged of theft, fraud, and false accounting thanks to a malfunctioning IT system.
The four-part series, which aired last year, focuses on Alan Bates (played by Toby Jones), a subpostmaster from Wales who was accused of fraud by the Post Office. He became an activist and made it his mission to get justice in a legal battle that took ten years and cost millions of pounds.
Alan was just one of many subpostmasters caught up in the scandal. Keep reading to learn the astonishing true story behind the new show…
The true story behind the ITV drama
The Post Office scandal was one of Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice and saw many of the wronged sub-postmasters and postmistresses prosecuted and some imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit.
It all began in 1999 when the Post Office introduced a new electronic accounting system called Horizon. Glitches in the accounting software caused discrepancies worth thousands of pounds, with the system wrongly detecting financial shortfalls in Post Office branches.
© ITV STUDIOSOver 700 branch masters were blamed as huge amounts of money went missing from the accounts.
Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. The consequences were huge for these innocent workers, with some jailed while others were financially ruined and shunned by their communities. Some even passed away before they saw justice or compensation, with four having taken their own lives.
© ITV STUDIOSEventually, campaigners took the Post Office to court on behalf of 555 claimants and in 2019, a High Court judgement exposed the scandal, ruling that postmasters were prosecuted on the basis of data from the defective Horizon IT system.
With that, the Post Office agreed to pay £58 million in compensation to settle the dispute with over 500 sub-postmasters and postmistresses. However, an estimated £46 million was immediately sunk in legal fees, leaving only £20,000 for each victim.
Recent developments
Four years later, in September 2023, the Government announced that Post Office workers who have had wrongful convictions overturned are to be offered £600,000 each in compensation.
© ITV STUDIOSIn March this year, it was announced that The Post Office was being removed from one of the schemes set up to compensate victims of the Horizon IT scandal, with the government taking over responsibility for the Overturned Convictions Scheme.
More than 4,000 people in total have been told they are eligible for compensation. Under the previous government, a new law was passed to overturn the convictions of more than 900 people.
The ITV drama features the stories of real people who were wrongly accused of fraud. This includes Alan Bates, Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan), Lee Castleton (Will Mellor), Gina Griffiths (Clare Calbraith), Michael Rudkin (Shaun Dooley), and Pam Stubbs (Lesley Nicol).
© ITV STUDIOSSince its release, the series has made a huge cultural impact, triggering a national conversation and generating public outrage over the scandal and the way its victims were treated.
Mr Bates Vs The Post Office is available to stream on ITVX.
