If you’ve not seen ITV’s excellent Mr Bates v. The Post Office, I can thoroughly recommend it: www.itv.com/watch/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office/10a0469
It’s not a drama - it’s a dramatisation of something that’s really happened and has even affected the lives of people in our own area, including the remarkable Betty Brown who turns 91 today and who popped by my Consett Office on Friday.
I first met Betty just a few months after being elected. She was never imprisoned - thank god - but she was forced out of her livelihood, humiliated, and made almost penniless in the mid-2000s by the Horizon scandal at the post office. She and her late husband had served people in Annfield Plain for decades and were cruelly blamed by the Post Office for issues in the Horizon system they were forced to use.
Betty had been left being told she was a fraud, even when it emerged she had been innocent all along, without compensation and waiting for years to clear her name. I met with her and her family multiple times since our first meeting in 2020 and have lobbied on her behalf since I first became aware of her case writing to many departments, ministers and fighting her corner and those of the other victims.
She is a lovely and truly remarkable woman and we’ve seen significant progress since we first met with some compensation being paid, the court cost battle covered and recently a government announcement that convictions would be overturned.
It was only in 2019 that the Courts finally found the Horizon system “faulty” after prosecutions of hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses from 1999-2015. The Public Inquiry then launched by the Government is ongoing and details can be found here >> https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/about-inquiry
If you were affected by Horizon and haven’t come forward or would like assistance, please just drop me a message via www.richardholden.org.uk/contact