Post Office Scandal And Private Prosecutions
In a recent article for the legal press (Reputation or a life?) I expressed the view that in some organisations, even where lives are at risk, the powers that be think it is more important to preserve the reputation of that organisation than to protect the health or even the life, of those they should be caring for. Examples: the infected blood scandal, Lucy Letby, many other scandals of atrocious “care” in hospitals (Morecambe Bay?) and even the topical scandal of the teenage sex grooming gangs, though that had strong overtones of social cohesion, of revealing that the perpetrators came almost exclusively from one section of society. Enough said.
But by far the best example of the preservation of the organisation’s reputation has to be the Post Office scandal, where subpostmasters went bankrupt, committed suicide, were jailed when pregnant, and so on. This is a scandal which will run and run; the actions of the Post Office management were truly horrendous and egregious, and there will still be more to be said even after Mr Bates has received his compensation (along with his knighthood, well earned).
Today I want to talk about another aspect of the Post Office, the fact that they were empowered to carry out private prosecutions.
Sir Keir Starmer, the son of a toolmaker, and scholarship pupil at (the private) Reigate Grammar School, was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service when some of these ill-based prosecutions took place. Several of them were authorised and pursued by the CPS, so Sir Keir must have known about them, and there was perhaps a lack of curiosity, but they were only a handful. Most of the prosecutions were conducted by the Post Office itself.
How can that be so? Well, the Post Office or its predecessor the GPO has been handling their own prosecutions ever since it was founded by Charles II in 1660, and in general they have managed those cases very well. Remember the Great Train Robbery in 1963? A private prosecution. So it seems the process did not suffer from the weakness of the Post Office acting as investigator, prosecutor, jury and judge all in one.
Other organisations do their own prosecutions, too: National Trust, the railway companies (though recent pursuit of minor fare dodgers doesn’t impress), Civil Aviation Authority, RSPCA. And it seems to work very well.
There has to be a place for private prosecutions and, indeed, any individual may prosecute any other. There is also the question of money (what a surprise!) since, due to budget cuts at the CPS and in the justice service generally, it has been said that the test of a successful prosecution by the CPS has been stiffened as funds have become tighter. It surely can’t be right that more criminals should be allowed to escape prosecution because the CPS is short of funds.
So private prosecutions can work well, but what happens if those in authority at organisations which can do these prosecutions are malign? The Post Office has it all, and rules will be bent if, returning to my theme, those in charge think it is essential to preserve the good reputation of the organisation even at risk of bankrupting or killing those they should be caring for.
The Post Office case has so many examples, so many “lessons to be learned”, and they keep tumbling out. It is years since I read The Great Post Office Scandal, the book written by Nick Wallis, and things were bad enough then, but a great deal more has come out in the public enquiry. I have listened to some of the closing addresses at the public enquiry, and to revisit what happened to Lee Castleton, to Seema Mistra and to many more, in full knowledge of the senior people at the Post Office, is truly shocking.
I am very much looking forward to the report in a few months’ time, to what Sir Wyn Williams has to say about the shocking things he has learned.
But this is all unique to the Post Office; it is not a justification for the abolition of private prosecutions. The frequency of private prosecutions by those who have a triable case must not rely on the funds available to the CPS.
