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In the first stunning installment of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, baffling financial losses in local post office branches cause Subpostmasters to be fired and prosecuted. There’s a lot for audiences to digest, so allow us to provide more detail and context around questions like ‘How do local post offices operate in the UK?’ ‘What was the experience of branch managers calling the Horizon helpline?’ And ‘How did Jo Hamilton’s village support her?’ [Contains spoilers.]
How Does the UK Post Office Work?
In Episode 1, we see Alan Bates locked in a postal booth within a general store. We then meet Jo Hamilton, who combines her postal duties with running a bakery. What’s going on here?
Unlike the US federal postal system, Britain’s Post Office is a state-owned private company. Self-employed branch managers (or Subpostmasters) work for, and are under contract with, the Post Office. These local branches are at the very heart of their communities and often a social hub, offering a range of postal, government, and financial services like administering pension checks and social security, helping individuals obtain driver’s licenses and passports, providing banking services to small local businesses, and accepting parcels for delivery.
The Post Office UK “ensures 99.7% of the population lives within 3 miles of a post office and 93% live within 1 mile,” according to its official website. “We do this nearly entirely on a franchise basis in partnership with independent business owners who operate post offices.”
The entirely separate Royal Mail does all the delivering of letters and parcels to millions of addresses across the United Kingdom six days a week.
How Were Horizon Helpline Calls Handled?
A Subpostmistress sees her online shortfall double while taking advice from the Horizon support line in Episode 1. Another branch manager is on his 91st call to Horizon only to hear his problem addressed with “You’re the only one.” How was Horizon initially rolled out and what support did postal branch managers get from helpline agents?
Horizon was introduced in 1999 to replace mainly paper-based accounting practices in local post offices. In the documentary The Real Story of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which will air on MASTERPIECE on Sunday, April 28th at 11pm ET and again on Sunday, May 5th at 7pm ET, the real Jo Hamilton says, “An engineer arrived. He screwed [the Horizon terminal] on the desk. I asked him what it was, and he goes, ‘That’s Horizon. It’s going live shortly. You’ll hear all about it.’”
The launch “to 13,000 busy, non-technical Subpostmasters was hasty, and training was inadequate for the scale of the transformation in the workflows involved,” reports The Guardian (UK). A former Horizon helpline agent tells Computer Weekly (UK) he was often on the phone with someone who had little or no IT knowledge. “A lot of Subpostmasters had worked in their branches for decades and had not even been around a personal computer. … [They] were always quite frantic, so stressed, asking, ‘How have I got this figure? How am I going to reconcile this account?’”
We were much happier to push down on the Subpostmasters and say, ‘it’s your issue’ than to push it upwards and ask…why we are having so many calls about this?” says the Horizon agent.
Does the British Post Office Run Its Own Criminal Investigations?
Jo Hamilton anticipates police arrest in Episode 1, but her solicitor informs her that the British Post Office has the right to run its own criminal investigations and has done so for over 300 years.
Indeed, the Post Office Investigation Branch (IB) is the “oldest recognized criminal investigations force in the world,” according to The Postal Museum (UK). “For more than 335 years it has worked to detect offenses against the post and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes.” Along with looking into supposed misdeeds by the public, the IB also probes alleged offenses by postal staff, including working undercover to do so. Today, both the Post Office and Royal Mail still operate their own security and investigative teams, though the IB’s work is being reexamined in light of the Subpostmaster scandal.
Did Jo Hamilton’s Community Offer Her Support?
It’s an affecting moment when Subpostmistress Jo Hamilton arrives in court to find her Hampshire neighbors there to support her with a standing ovation. Turns out they did more than that.
Instead of going to trial for theft, Hamilton agreed to a plea bargain—accepting a lesser charge of false accounting and agreeing to repay her supposed £36,000 shortfall. In the documentary The Real Story of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Hamilton says she could only raise £30,000 from her house. She called a village meeting. “I had to explain to everybody that I was in trouble with the Post Office.” While Hamilton assumed people would think she’d stolen the missing funds, they demonstrated remarkable trust in their Subpostmistress. “Someone put up a hand and said, ‘Well, couldn’t Jo have an early Christmas present?’” she says. Together, her neighbors contributed her remaining balance.
Hamilton was later “supported at her sentencing in court by 74 people from her local community, including the vicar who spoke on her behalf,” according to the legal firm representing the Subpostmasters. “The community also raised more than £6,000 towards the money she had to pay to the Post Office.”
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