How the Post Office buried a report that could have saved sub-postmasters

“Pay the money back straight away,” the Post Office investigator tells the dumbfounded sub-postmaster. “If you don’t, you will be prosecuted, and you could go to prison for two years.”

It is 11 October 2017 and Chirag Sidhpura is accused of stealing £57,543 from his Post Office branch in Farncombe, Surrey.

Sidhpura, 40, knows the shortfall is a phantom generated by the malfunctioning Horizon IT system. But he is too scared to argue and so the next day his father-in-law pays off the alleged shortfall.

“My heart was coming out of my body,” he recalls. “I was too frightened to challenge the demand.”

After co-operating with the investigation, Sidhpura was not prosecuted but was suspended and lost his job. He was later interviewed under police caution, though no action was taken. His marriage almost broke down, his relationship with his three children was damaged and today he suffers from depression and anxiety.

Like hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses, Sidhpura has endured years of poverty, stress and persecution. But the disclosure of one document could have prevented this.

It is a secret report completed a year before Sidhpura was confronted by the investigator. The document, drawn up by an eminent lawyer, raised concerns about the Post Office’s treatment of its sub-postmasters and the Horizon software.

The review by Sir Jonathan Swift KC is now at the centre of cover-up allegations as new documents show how it was kept confidential for six years and five months. Lawyers for sub-postmasters who were prosecuted believe it could have made a material difference to their cases.

The report, which was completed in 2016, was critical of the Post Office’s tactic of pressuring sub-postmasters into pleading guilty to false accounting.

“The allegation the Post Office effectively bullied sub-postmasters into pleading guilty to offences by unjustifiably overloading the charge sheet is a stain on the character of the business,” concluded Sir Jonathan, now a High Court judge.

The review also identified vulnerabilities in the Horizon system and suggested Fujitsu, the company responsible for the operation, could manipulate data remotely, contrary to previous denials by the Post Office.

Despite its importance, Tim Parker, then Post Office chairman, did not disclose the report to the Post Office board, Whitehall or to the sub-postmasters before or during their litigation in the High Court.

Its existence only emerged in 2022, after a Freedom of Information request by Eleanor Shaikh, a friend of Sidhpura.

“The report would have been incendiary had it been disclosed to the lawyers representing the sub-postmasters,” Shaikh told The Telegraph.

“It would have yielded the necessary ammunition for them to attack the false premise the sub-postmasters were solely in control of, and therefore responsible for, their own branch accounts. They would have been spared millions in legal costs, their convictions may have been overturned, compensation settled, reputations restored and poverty and stress avoided.”

The suppression of the Swift review lies at the heart of the plight of the sub-postmasters, according to new documents marked “sensitive” and seen by The Telegraph.

They reveal that: Sajid Javid, then business secretary, stated his special advisers “were not convinced there has been ‘wrongdoing’ on the Post Office’s part” before the Swift inquiry began in 2015; in January 2016, Parker told ministers that the Swift report “found no systematic problem” with Horizon. (This was contradicted by a civil servant who emailed a colleague: “I don’t see how, even with rose-coloured spectacles on, anyone would see a green light in the KC’s report”); in June 2016, despite the Swift review’s concerns about Horizon, Parker cancelled extra work being undertaken into whether branch accounts might have been remotely altered.

Unpublished emails in 2020 reveal unease in Whitehall about Parker’s failure to disclose the report.

“It seems neither the KC’s (Swift) report nor the existence or conclusions of the follow-up work were known to the Board or to Beis (Business Energy and Industrial Strategy Department),” one official wrote to the Beis permanent secretary.

Parker, now chairman of Samsonite, told the Government he kept the Swift report secret from the board because the Post Office’s leading counsel advised him to do so in the light of the lawsuit by the sub-postmasters.

“The document needs to be kept confidential because of the upcoming litigation and legal privilege,” the Post Office lawyer said.

When asked to comment by The Telegraph, Parker declined to do so.

Lawyers for the sub-postmasters argue that if the report had been distributed by Parker in 2016, it could have prevented the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.

“The idea that a document of fundamental strategic importance was kept from the Post Office Board and as a result [the Post Office] blundered on its massively expensive and ill-conceived, possibly worse, litigation while defending claims on the basis Horizon was ‘reliable and robust’, raises serious troubling questions about its ‘corporate governance’,” said the barrister Paul Marshall.

For Shaikh, a teaching assistant, the importance of the Swift review lies in its timing – February 2016.

“It highlighted a number of red flags which ought to have been addressed and resolved before the Post Office even considered its high-cost, high-risk litigation,” she said.

“The spectre of litigation materialised just months after the Swift review delivered its findings to Parker. This was the moment the Post Office needed to establish definitive answers based on the review but instead it chose to abandon them.”

Shaikh only learned of the dispute through being a customer of Sidhpura at his post office. Outraged by his treatment, in January 2022, she filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for documents about the Post Office’s decision-making.

Beis stonewalled and delayed disclosure. And so on the morning of 11 August 2022, Shaikh told Beis she would ask the public inquiry for these documents. Five hours later she received the Swift report and documents, which were heavily censored and redacted.

Today, lawyers say the importance of the Swift review cannot be overstated.

Richard Moorhead, a professor of law and professional ethics at the University of Exeter, also criticised the report’s presentation, highlighting discrepancies between its findings and how they were summarised for Parliament.

He argued that while the report identified systemic vulnerabilities in the Horizon system, the summary failed to convey this accurately, potentially misleading Parliament.

“These findings were made clear to Tim Parker in 2016,” said Prof Moorhead. “An important point is Parker chaired the Post Office through the [Alan] Bates litigation.

“In that litigation, the idea that ‘secret’ remote access was possible was denied as a significant element of the defence until mid-way through the second trial, yet Parker was told this was possible in 2016.”

Inside Whitehall, officials argued it was unfair to criticise Parker too harshly because he relied on flawed legal advice. While he made “an error of judgement”, it was decided any action against him would be “disproportionate”.

However, Shaikh claimed this was yet another cover-up.

“Parker and the Post Office chose not to disclose the Swift review to lawyers representing the sub-postmasters because it was damaging to the reputation and commercial interests of their brand and because its lawyers thought they could get away with it.”

When asked about the Swift review, a Post Office spokesman said: “The Horizon inquiry is a statutory inquiry to establish what happened and to question witnesses under oath. It is for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence.

“The Post Office fully supports this process, and it would be inappropriate to comment on related issues outside of this inquiry.”