Here’s What You Won’t Find in the Post Office Inquiry Report: Any Explanation from the Defence Lawyers.

The Post Office scandal marks a festering sore across the British justice system. On 8 July 2025 Sir Wyn Williams published Part 1 of the Post Office Inquiry which focuses on the impact on the victims of this nationwide miscarriage of justice.

Between 1999 and 2015 1,019 postmasters or those closely linked to them were prosecuted on dishonesty charges. These prosecutions were primarily founded on evidence from the Post Office ‘Horizon’ accounting software, operated by Fujitsu. Almost 80% of all these prosecutions were brought by the Post Office itself.
Three key points are already beyond doubt:

1. Horizon regularly encountered bugs which then triggered accounting errors,
2. Individual Horizon accounts could be remotely accessed and altered by staff at Fujitsu, and
3. There were staff at both the Post Office and at Fujitsu who deliberately concealed points (1) and/or (2).

The outcome was a miscarriage of justice on an industrial scale, whereby neither the existence of Horizon’s bugs nor the practice of remote access, were ever acknowledged by the Prosecution. This meant that even if the case went to trial, the jury would only have heard that Horizon was unreliable from one person - the very postmaster accused of defrauding it.
Sir Wyn’s report contains 14 extremely moving Case Illustrations, para 3.46 to para 3.194, each one a summary of tragic miscarriage of justice with the devastating consequences on an unfair conviction. By a clear majority these individuals, hailing from all four corners of the United Kingdom, pleaded guilty rather than proceeding to a trial.
This much, we knew already. But how is it that hundreds of lawyers, operating across the United Kingdom, represented so many innocent people as they were convicted? Even at this late stage, the figures are still surprisingly vague, but Para 3.25 of the Inquiry Report found that only 50-60 people are thought to have been found ‘not guilty’ after a trial. This means that up to 1,000 people were either convicted after a trial or pleaded guilty. It is believed that the significant majority pleaded guilty despite knowing they were innocent. We can therefore conclude that several hundred people admitted dishonesty offences that they did not commit. Their convictions led to terms of imprisonment or bankruptcy, being shunned by local communities, addiction, depression and in at least six tragic cases, suicide. How did the protections of British justice fail so many people?

The Prosecutors

By ‘The Prosecution’ or ‘The Prosecutor’, we infer an umbrella term of the investigating officer as well as the Prosecuting lawyers in each case.
Many of the Prosecution teams worked in-house for the Post Office, but some worked externally at independent firms contracted by the Post Office. A very small number of cases were brought by the Crown Prosecution Service. Whatever their terms of employment, what matters is their duty of disclosure to the defence. These prosecutions all hinged on the Horizon data in each individual case being accurate and reliable. Any Prosecutor therefore had a duty to disclose to the defence any material in their possession that suggested otherwise. In each case, the Prosecutors are very likely to have given the following reassurances to the Defence and the Court:

- That Horizon was not subject to multiple complaints (when in fact it was), or
- That any such complaints were not indicative of a systemic problem with Horizon and therefore had no relevance to the way the software operated for the particular defendant standing trial, meaning that it did not have to be disclosed.

In this way, during some 1,019 cases the Prosecution teams are likely to have not revealed key information i.e. information that tended to undermine their own case. Whether this failure happened through bad faith, or through a simple lack of understanding or enquiry, is yet to be determined. Common sense suggests that practices are likely to vary through the various investigators and prosecutors across the United Kingdom over a 16-year period.
Either way, this was a monumental disclosure failure by multiple qualified investigators and lawyers tasked at the time with ensuring rights to a fair trial. At best, they failed to insist on a comprehensive and independent review of Horizon’s reliability. At worst, they deliberately withheld evidence of Horizon unreliability due to instructions from their clients and/or their managers.
It is very concerning that a common tactic seems to have been to prosecute the defendant on theft or fraud charges (deemed likely to incur a prison sentence) but then offer to drop those charges if:

- The defendant pleads guilty to charges of false accounting instead, and
- The defendant agrees not to publicly criticise the reliability of the Horizon system.

It seems that this ‘deal’ was almost a routine alternative to standing trial, with several hundred innocent people of no previous criminal record pleading guilty and saying nothing adverse about Horizon.
In fact, at para 3.176 - 3.178 in the Inquiry Report, one postmaster Maureen McKelvey was persuaded not to criticise Horizon even immediately after her acquittal.
How could this happen? Whose job was it to stop this happening?

The Defence Lawyers

The responsibility to ensure a fair trial does not stop with Investigators and Prosecutors. What were the several hundred defence lawyers doing when their clients told them they wanted to plead guilty despite being innocent? The fact that an alternative offence was proposed does not make this question any easier. Just like theft and fraud, false accounting is a dishonesty offence. The clue is in s17(1) Theft Act 1968 which defines it as “Where a person dishonestly, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another…”
This wording is very clear. For example, it is not false accounting for a postmaster to try to correct accounting errors thrown up by the Horizon system. One postmaster, Jo Hamilton, was depicted doing exactly this in the ITV Drama Mr Bates versus The Post Office

Obviously, Ms Hamilton was not ‘dishonestly trying to cause a loss or a gain’ - she was just trying to restore the true balance to the system, having called the Horizon Helpline to report the errors. Yet it seems her defence lawyer advised her to plead guilty. Ethically, there is no space for a postmaster to admit to false accounting on solely the basis of an honest mistake and/or trying to ‘correct’ errors on the system. The result is that several hundred people of previous good character from across the whole United Kingdom admitted to dishonesty offences when they knew they had acted honestly throughout. In fact, many of them had repeatedly called up the Horizon Helpdesk to report errors, but several months later found themselves admitting to false accounting.
Notwithstanding the Prosecutors’ role - what exactly were all those defence lawyers doing?

Defence Lawyers Advising on Guilty Pleas & Credit

It is well-established that a defendant who pleads guilty to their offence will receive a theoretical reduction in their sentence. This reduction is theoretical only in the sense that no one ever knows, in the alternative reality, what the sentence would have been had the defendant been convicted after trial. From the very start of a prosecution, the standard wording on a postal requisition (charge sheet) is as follows:

“The Court, when passing sentence on you, will consider giving you a lower penalty if you enter an early guilty plea. The amount of any discount will depend on how early you indicated your plea, as well as the circumstances that made you plead guilty.. (there follows a section about how a defendant is welcome to contact the Prosecutor or the Court about pleading guilty at any time). Nothing stated here is intended to persuade you to plead guilty”

That final sentence will only make sense if the reader has faith in the system being fair i.e. if you believe that because you are innocent you have nothing to fear. Most people do not have this faith. In this way, the whole purpose of credit has perhaps been fundamentally misunderstood.
The Sentencing Council's Definitive Guideline both before and after 2017 on Reduction on Sentence introduces the topic in a similar way:
“Key Principles: The purpose of this guideline is to encourage those who are going to plead guilty to do so as early in the court process as possible. Nothing in the guideline should be used to put pressure on a defendant to plead guilty”.
The phrase “Those who are going to plead guilty” is an odd one, which of course cannot be defined in advance of the guilty plea being entered. In determining those who ‘Sentence Reduction’ is properly meant for, there is no reference to the strength of the evidence, nor any reference to the accused person agreeing that they in fact committed the crime alleged.
The purpose of the Guidance seems to simply be to encourage ‘Those who are going to plead guilty’ to do so as soon as possible. A theoretical one third discount is given if the guilty plea is entered at the first Court hearing. This discount reduces to one tenth if the plea is entered on Day 1 of trial, but before the testimony has started. It is essentially as simple as “If you are going to plead guilty, then the sooner you enter your guilty plea, then the bigger your discount”. This also means the less likely it is that you will have discovered anything helpful from the Prosecution in disclosure. Indeed, the Guideline is not concerned about testing about whether what you’re admitting to is true. The message is virtually “Just get on with it, enter your plea now and mimimise your chance of getting locked up”.
We can conclude that being guilty is not a pre-requisite for a sentence reduction.
It is likely that variations of this Guidance were repeated across the country between 1999 and 2015 to the innocent postmasters. Sir Wyn Williams says as much at para 3.16:

"From the evidence I have heard, it seems very likely that many of those prosecuted were charged with offences of theft and false accounting. I have little doubt that many accused persons were advised by their lawyers to plead guilty to the offence of false accounting when charged with that offence. Setting aside, at this stage, the propriety of charging the offences of theft and false accounting as alternatives, I have no doubt that most barristers skilled in the practice of criminal law would have advised their clients that a conviction for stealing from a Post Office would, almost inevitably, carry a more severe sentence than a conviction for false accounting. They would also have advised that a conviction for theft would probably carry with it a sentence of imprisonment to be served immediately whereas a plea to false accounting which was accepted by the prosecutor would probably mean either a suspended sentence of imprisonment or a community sentence. Discussions about these issues would inevitably result in very significant stress and worry for an accused who had never before had to consider such life-changing consequences. In essence, an accused would have known that they were engaged in a decision which might involve the difference between retaining their liberty and losing it. Those who decided to plead guilty, I heard, may have done so in the hope, or even the expectation that they would avoid an immediate sentence of imprisonment. Until sentence was passed, however, there would always be nagging doubts as to their fate".

Whatever the noble intentions of the sentence discount scheme, its effect here was precisely to put the postmasters ‘under pressure’ to plead guilty. Once they had done so, there was absolutely no process for the Court to examine the reliability of that plea. This means no one involved in each case (not the Prosecutor, the Judge, the Defence lawyer or the Probation Officer) prevented these factually incorrect guilty pleas from being entered. Remember, this happened several hundred times.

Defence Lawyers at Trial

Where a contested Post Office trial took place, the situation is rather different for the defence solicitors and counsel. In fairness, even an experienced and creative defence team is just one half of the adversarial contest. A criminal trial is not like asking a surgeon to conduct your heart bypass operation. Rather, it is like asking a surgeon to conduct a heart bypass when there is another surgeon actively trying to clog up your arteries at the same time.
Also, due to what we now know about Post Office disclosure, imagine holding that contest between two surgeons when the latter is hiding all your medical notes from the former. Of course, whether each defence lawyer in each case made all the correct applications for disclosure is another matter.
Intricacies of trial aside, the sheer number of guilty pleas entered by postmasters should trouble the criminal defence community. In fairness, the hundreds of lawyers concerned may have long since forgotten the details of these cases. Also, they cannot discuss case details without their former clients waiving confidentiality, which makes defending their own conduct almost impossible. It is appreciated that this might cause a real degree of professional frustration.
However, many of these lawyers had a defendant of previous good character who told them:
- They have not been dishonest or stolen anything from the Post Office, and
- The Horizon accounting software showing these shortfalls was routinely faulty, and
- They actually reported these faults but nothing was done.
When such a client suddenly decides to plead guilty, deafening alarm bells should be sounding. Such a decision infers exactly the sort of ‘pressure’ deemed inappropriate by the Sentence Reduction Guidance.

The Question All Criminal Defence Lawyers are Asked

Without exception, every criminal defence lawyer will attest to being asked this question, at least once, by a curious friend or relative:
“Do you sometimes defend people when you know they’re guilty?”
Sadly, this sleuth-like curiosity rarely seems to extend to the question:
“Do you sometimes advise people to plead guilty when you know they’re innocent?”
And if these inquisitors ever meet a Prosecutor, they will never ever be overheard asking:
“Have you ever prosecuted someone who you know is innocent?”
Indeed, the public assumption is generally that all those charged are guilty as charged, and that defence lawyers are an entourage of cunning, creative Houdini-type characters forever finding the way out of a room with no doors.
On the evidence so far arising from the Post Office scandal, it seems that the opposite might be closer to the truth. As a professional group, criminal lawyers should not blithely accept that several hundred innocent people were advised to plead guilty to offences of dishonesty – a decision which essentially ruined their lives. Nor can we deny that all those guilty pleas might have emboldened those who maintained that the Horizon software was a reliable source of evidence: “It must be true, look they’ve admitted it”.

You’re a Defence Laywer - So Defend!

Whilst not being the focus of the Post Office Inquiry Report, the reality is that defence lawyers were partly responsible for this debacle. Perhaps the lesson is that taking better care of our clients means presuming their innocence, listening to what they’re telling us, and then thinking about ways to bolster it. We should do this work before we start advising on how a theoretical set of instructions might theoretically reduce a theoretical sentence.

If you are facing police investigation involving technical evidence or expert analysis, please feel free to contact our Crime and Regulatory team here