Ex-Bristol postmistress’ parents were made homeless as family lost almost £1m in scandal

A former Bristol postmistress’ parents were made homeless as the family lost almost £1 million after she became a victim of the Horizon IT scandal. Leanne Young, from Bedminster, worked in the St Philips Marsh post office for five years and says she lost her ‘health, sanity and home’ due to the errors of the IT system.

The 49-year-old had to borrow a five-figure sum from her parents, who were made homeless, to pay back the money.

Following years of campaigning, the Post Office has finally apologised for what happened and has been paying compensation to those impacted. But, Ms Young says she and her parents were left out of pocket ‘not far off a million pounds’, and that she has now accepted an interim payment from the Post Office.

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The money she has had back ‘isn’t close’ to the value of the house she lost. She started working for the Post Office on Feeder Road in 2004 and said before the Horizon IT system she had a ‘good life’ with a nice house and that she knew ‘exactly’ how much money the office had as she did the counting by hand.

Ms Young said the new IT system ‘turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened’ as she ‘lost everything’. She said: “I think it’s an absolutely disgrace. I think every single person who knew should be held accountable for what they had done to people like me.”

She counts herself as lucky because she wasn’t one of the victims who ended up going to prison. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office wrongfully accused 736 post office bosses, based on misinformation from a system that made it seem as if money was missing from their till.

During that period, weird things would happen, like the system saying there was £25,000 in the safe, or random amounts of money appearing and disappearing. “It got to a point when I was so depressed,” she said. “If I hadn’t had my parents money I’d have probably been prosecuted.”

Postmasters who were wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting are to be offered £600,000 in compensation. The Post Office Horizon scandal saw more than 700 branch managers given criminal convictions when the faulty accounting software suggested they were stealing.

As things stand, 86 postmasters have had their convictions overturned. Others are still waiting to have their convictions overturned.