UK Post Office Scandal: corporate governance insanity

The UK Post Office Scandal was a corporate governance catastrophe, and seeing the results laid bare is extremely difficult when you consider how leaders allowed it to get to this point. 

Around 1,000 wrongful convictions, around 10,000 seeking compensation, and a horrifying 13 cases of suicide: those are the figures emerging from the first volume of the report into one of the most astounding leadership failures in UK corporate history.

It began with glitches in accounting software, but senior leadership failures morphed it into something else entirely. Innocent post office workers from up and down the UK were wrongly accused, wrongly convicted; some lost thousands in personal savings trying to cover losses that didn’t actually exist. Others lost jobs and homes too.

The fact that none of this was ever necessary, and that the real problem was denied for years represents a corporate governance disaster. The core principles of asking questions, support, and logical-decision making were thrown out the window when it came to the UK Post Office. In other cases of IT failure, the biggest crime was lax control, but this has taken many steps further into the deliberately vindictive.

It’s a simple truth: if the problem stares at you in the face and, as a leader, you do nothing, you have not only contributed to it, but made it far far worse.

When governance professionals try to teach about that issue in the future, this is the example they will use. 

Volume one of a public inquiry into the Post Office scandal was released in July 2025. It expanded on what we already knew about the Post Office Scandal (which you can find at the end of this article) with more disturbing information:

• At least 13 suicides have been linked those affected by the scandal, far higher than the 3 or 4 originally thought. In addition, 59 people had suicidal thoughts connected to their experiences related to the scandal. 10 attempted to act on them.
• At least 10,000 people are seeking financial compensation for being wrongfully targeted during the scandal, and this number is likely to rise by the hundreds in the coming months. While over GBP 1,000,000 has already been paid in compensation, there are still around 3,000 cases lefto to resolve.
• The previous estimates for wrongful convictions stood at around 900. The new report estimates that the figure is over 1,000.
• Lastly – and crucially in the context of governance –  The report’s author, retired high court judge Wyn Williams said that “although many of the individuals who gave evidence before me were very reluctant to accept it … a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error.”

William’s report comes on the back of a horrific 17-year saga that exposed serious governance shortcomings taking place consistently, often without reason, and certainly outside the scope of what we’d consider acceptable for senior leaders in any organisation, let alone one with such a high profile in British public life.

First and foremost: where was the curiosity? It’s a board’s job to act on serious information, such as employee malpractice or faulty systems, and it’s the senior executives’ job to provide this information to the best of their ability. The fact that this case ran for so long means there were no serious probes by the board and no effort to get to the bottom of the issue by executives until the pressure mounted to unacceptable levels. There was a culture of ill-thought acceptance at best, and genuine intent to ignore the problem at worst. If regional post office workers became casualties, they became casualties.  

The most worrying part was that this combination of malicious intent and lack of curiosity went on for years. You cannot hope to govern correctly with such a distorting rejection of reality. 

Baffling information we know to be true is that executives in one of the UK’s most important organisations knew key pieces of information for years:

• The same accusation of financial mismanagement surfaced against hundreds of workers who were unconnected, showed no evidence of collusion, and similar degrees of shock at being accused of a crime. 
• Thousands of them raised concerns about the system they were using.
• There were doubts about the integrity of the Horizon system from the beginning. 

It’s a simple question: How could responsible professionals know all this and continue their conviction that the people were at fault?

It makes it worse when we remember that as these workers raised their concerns in their thousands, they were told – individually – that no one else was having the same problem. That’s not lax governance; that is deliberate, cut-throat manipulation of honest people – an international shame on those who lead businesses. 

It suggests the Post Office was so obsessed with its own brand integrity (or at least avoiding a major PR headache) that it became the very thing it publicly spoke out against. Caught in the crossfire were dedicated workers with neither the knowledge nor the finances to defend themselves. 

They were individuals up against an employer boasting all the powers of a civil service giant with strong values, government backing and international recognition.

Horizon was the same software that sparked this governance disaster. From humble beginnings to pages of official reports, red flags had been raised about it since the beginning. 

Alan Bates –  who years later became the protagonist of the 2024 ITV documentary Mr Bates vs the Post Office – described his own experience of going through his own office’s accounts, finding duplicates, and raising the issue, only to find it would never be taken seriously. Right here is the start of an incredibly unsound corporate culture – encouraging ignorance, arrogance, and blind belief in a system that has gone on to ruin many lives. 

This continued right through to the tenure of former CEO Paula Vennells, whose legacy will forever be a botched handling of important information about Horizon’s faults. Multiple reports confirmed these faults, but she and other Post Office officials “refused to accept to publish them” – according to Second Sight, the firm responsible for writing them. 

While it’s difficult to understand how governance personnel could let this culture persist, it’s easy to see how ordinary workers would find it nearly impossible to fight against. 

Even Bates himself has argued that the workers’ fortunes only began to change when the British courts, where the Post Office had no control, got involved.

Williams report makes it abundantly clear how many lives have been changed by the scandal. It also hammers home the fact that as the revelations continue (the report was only Volume one of two), the scope of the tragedy will increase.

How will a brand as well-known as the Post Office overcome this and rebuild trust? We don’t know. But we should expect it to take years if not decades.

• How long did the scandal last? It started in the late 1990s, and it’s still going. 
• The main point: Hundreds of former post office workers were wrongly convicted of stealing money amid accounting discrepancies at branches across the UK. It later emerged that faults with the Post Office’s computer system Horizon are to blame for most if not all of the discrepancies. 
• How were the accused affected? It has varied. Some were falsely imprisoned. Others have lost their life savings to the point of bankruptcy. Some died before their names could be cleared. Williams’ report suggests 13 people took their own lives for reasons connected to their time at the Port Office. Dozens more entertained thoughts of self-harm. 
• Have all the falsely accused been cleared? No. 
• Has compensation been paid? In many cases, yes. But there are thousands more to go, according to Williams’ report. Where compensation has been paid, it has frequently been found to have been less than the legal fees incurred by the defendants. 
• Horizon’s developer – Japanese company Fujitsu – continues to win UK government contracts for service provision.