Mr Bates vs The Post Office

[Warren]

The Police and Crown Prosecution Services need to be cut some slack. These are complex individual cases of wrong doing. Also both organisations are compromised where they have been involved in wrongful convictions. They are going to need investigation of themselves. Plus they are going to need clearly independent officers to take forward new actions. Oh what a mess. 

The victims should have money belonging to them or owed to them returned. There should be interest and compensation for financial losses and wider damages for suffering etc. So I have some problem with the concept of a simplified compensation scheme that works as quickly as possible. That includes the need for legislation to carry it out and the avoidance of more payments which could be ultra vires. 

We've been here at least once before. That was the local authority swaps litigation of the 1990s. The outcome in law was to reverse all the transactions that had occurred and to put the accounting records back to how they would have been before the unlawfulness / irregularity occurred. That was a mighty task for the whole of local government in England and Wales!

But once that is done, every further action to be considered can flow reliably from a solid platform. 

[Warren]

I've got a bit of a problem with the TV series. I expect it's very good etc. However, after 20 million people have watched it, getting together juries whose perspectives are neutral and ready to receive evidence in courts open minded will be more difficult. That said, I guess this issue has happened many times before and court procedure can deal with the risks etc. 

[Warren]

4 hours ago, robf said:

Yeah, I think legislation would be a slippery slope. It gives any government a bit of a free hand to add laws that suit then when it comes to legal cases. 

I don't know enough about the legal system to know what's possible to get this fast-tracked but I would hope it takes months rather than years to resolve. 

Off on a bit of a tangent here but... I'm sad enough to listen to a whole day's worth of the hearing (available on YouTube folks). I listened to an IT expert who was asked to check out the Horizon system. His findings were just breath-taking. The system was absolutely unfit for purpose. Here's a summary of what he found:

• There was no project plan or scope
• There was no mapping out of how the various modules would interface with each other
• The project manager was basically absent from the office
• He was reporting to someone who had no IT/project management experience and had no idea how to implement a project of this size and complexity
• There was no consistency in coding conventions (i.e. in multiple projects you usually have a naming convention so someone else can pick up your work easily)
• Bug fixes were not documented (so there was every chance that an old bug fix would be removed in order to correct a new bug fix)
• Code was badly constructed with things like - hardcoded values, parts of the script that would never be invoked (i.e. the parameters to make that routine work would never happen), reams of code could have been cut down to reduce the size of the script etc...
• The number of bugs was continually increasing not decreasing
• He identified the problem as being one particular part of the system which if rewritten with the better programmers in the building could have resolved the majority of issues. This proposal was rejected and he was basically swiftly moved onto another project. 
• In essence, he was brought in to give his view and then his view was completely ignored

The poor guy wasn't to blame - he had highlighted all the failings and expressed his deep concern but as a contractor he was basically sidelined and moved on. During the hearing you can just see his bemusement that such an important project was basically handled by a bunch of poorly trained coders with no-one managing them day to day.

 

That sounds like a complete absence of recognised project management and programme management. For example, Prince2, MSP and PRAM. I am lost for words. 

Taking another perspective. An effective internal audit service should review project and programme management by way of its annual and longer term clyclical plans using qualified auditors in the fields.

Hence they should have been all over this and reporting deficiencies to directors and the audit committee. They should require responses to recommendations,  record actions agreed and follow up if actions are taken effectively with times agreed. In other words, no matter how rubbish project management starts up, it should get corrected fast. But it didn't. This is symptomatic of widespread corporate governance and senior management failure in the Post Office.

Incompetence is a pain when it comes to criminal prosecution for wrong doing. Incompetence, or negilgence, is not always criminal where the prosecution needs to show intent. So this all adds to the messy prosecution of the wrongdoers. 

Also a well managed project using say Prince2 will have excellent records of decision making. But a badly managed project will be a shambles including the post project review stage. It will have missing records, confusing records or no records at all of decisions. It is easy to show incompetence then. But harder to prove beyond all reasonable doubt criminal actions.

However, if you have managed a project badly surely you should recognise and correct this. Not rely on unreliable information to victimise Post Masters etc. 

[Old School]

The Police and Crown Prosecution Services need to be cut some slack.

 

Warren,

Sorry, but what you are suggesting quite simply amounts to allowing them to kick the can down the road until they finally kick it into the long grass and forget about it forever. However complicated it may be they have had 20 years to sort it, and failed dismally. There is no such thing as justice in this country anymore.

 If there ever was.