In what’s been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history, hundreds of Post Office branch managers were wrongly accused of false accounting due to faulty software. One of the victims, Wendy Buffrey, 64, describes how the scandal drove her to the brink of suicide
On a sunny mid-autumn morning in 2010, Wendy Buffrey parked her ancient Volvo in the car park near her home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and walked towards her favourite thinking spot. Driven to despair, she had decided to take her own life.
This moment was the culmination of a two-year living nightmare Wendy had found herself in after being accused of fraud. Back in May 2008, Wendy had been running the Up Hatherley Post Office in Cheltenham as a sub-postmistress. After closing her shop one evening, she processed a routine cash and stock check and got a shock. When she typed her figures into the Post Office’s touch-screen Horizon IT terminal, it calculated she had £9,000 worth of stamps in stock. Wendy had never held anything like £9,000 worth of stamps in her tiny premises. Figuring she might have miskeyed, Wendy decided to reverse the stock input out of the balance and try again. On doing so, the Horizon terminal calculated she now had an £18,000 cash ‘loss’. Panicking slightly, Wendy reversed the calculation again. Horizon doubled the cash loss figure once more, to £36,000. What on earth was happening?
Terrified of pressing any more buttons in case the sum doubled again and fearful of being suspended if she reported it, Wendy spent hours going through her transaction receipts. A high value error of this nature should be easy to spot, but Wendy couldn’t see a problem in her own figures. She kept checking her printouts every morning before the Post Office opened and again every evening once it had closed.
The monthly accounting period came to an end. Instead of closing her branch, raising her hand and asking the Post Office for help, Wendy, frightened of being sacked, made what she calls ‘the single biggest mistake of my life’. She agreed the Horizon cash and stock figures were accurate and electronically submitted them to the Post Office, which allowed her to roll over into the next accounting period. Wendy had just taken legal responsibility for a £36,000 hole in her accounts.
‘I felt ashamed and stupid for not finding where the loss was,’ she tells me. ‘I’d spent hours and hours, night after night, going through the paperwork.’ Wendy didn’t tell her husband Doug, now 75, about the discrepancy. He was very ill at the time with a serious lung disease. Wendy felt telling Doug their livelihood was at risk could make him anxious. The idea the error could be something to do with Horizon didn’t cross her mind. Instead, she fretted endlessly about the discrepancy, developing kidney
