How poor governance meant Post Office red flags were ignored
March 2024

And still it goes on. Despite the furore that arose as the public woke up to the full scale of the Post Office scandal thanks to a scathing ITV drama called Mr Bates vs The Post Office, little appears to be have changed, or been learned.
And despite the assurances given by the government that they would act quickly to right previous wrongs, many sub-postmasters seem as far away from a resolution to false claims, financial ruin and imprisonment as ever.
At the heart of the issue was poor governance and a disregard for the personal and psychological effects on those accused. So let’s look at what happened from both sides of the bitter dispute.
What happened in the Post Office scandal
In the unlikely event you need reminding, the scandal has been subject of a public inquiry since 2021 after over 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office after being accused of theft and false accounting. In reality, systems provider Fujitsu’s flawed Horizon computer system was at the root of the vast majority of accounting discrepancies.
Damningly, senior management teams at the Post Office and Fujitsu both concealed the known software flaws, instead focusing on the sub-postmasters, which resulted in a hugely drawn out and toxic dispute that some have not lived long enough to see conclude.
The Post Office groupthink
Several psychological elements came to the fore over the decisions to prosecute. Firstly, the head office fell into the trap of an approach driven by groupthink, compliance, obedience to authority and, among certain individuals, a deliberately misleading approach.
While this latter aspect is conscious and unethical, groupthink and compliance/obedience are certainly not uncommon within organisations and this is where a strong governance framework could have acted as a potential buffer. If individuals feel more connected with, and aware of, the ethical boundaries of the business within which they work, they are more likely to raise their concerns.
Because of the rigid hierarchical pressure and the authoritative – and perhaps authoritarian – approach at the Post Office, a collective assumption that the system was not at fault meant that individuals conformed to the established but incorrect organisational mantra, contributing to an aggressively defensive stance.
Governance can play a fundamental role in fostering a culture of leadership and decision-making based on principles and ethics, which should then filter throughout the organisation or business, in turn preventing what happened at the Post Office.
The impact of toxic leadership
The scandal also throws up questions about leadership selection. Organisations should use their governance principles as the backbone of their approach to company culture, because a candidate that brings negative characteristics into a top or influential position can quickly poison a previously strong culture.
A clearer, governance-led approach would not only have raised a red flag over internal actions and the behaviour of certain senior individuals earlier but perhaps would have prevented the wrong people being recruited to the top jobs in the first place.
The isolated sub-postmasters
In terms of the sub-postmasters themselves, many were hit with what proved an unfounded sense of isolation and shame, which appears to deterred many from taking any action against the Post Office until the scandal became more widely exposed.
The Post Office added to this sense by consistently claiming that the individual involved was the only one to have encountered the accounting issues. This was patently untrue but no doubt eroded certainty and self-esteem, making it challenging to fight the accusations. Being shunned socially within tight-knit local communities, plus the potential financial and reputational ruin of taking on an all-powerful organisation must also have created a sense of inevitability about any judicial outcome.
Guilty until proven innocent
One aspect of this may also be the contractual arrangements between the Post Office and the sub-postmasters. While this should not have had any impact, it seems likely that had the Post Office directly employed its sub-postmasters, rather than made them franchisees, then the HR department may have been more protective.
Again, this points to a casual groupthink, or worse an ‘us and them’, corporate view which a stronger governance framework could have avoided. Instead, there was an underlying assumption that the sub-postmasters were guilty until proven innocent and the lack of transparency throughout and the absence of an open, governance-led culture created a scandal that has, quite literally, cost lives.
That stark fact is worth remembering, because if the foundations had been built properly, the walls of the Post Office and the sub-postmasters’ livelihoods would not have crumbled.

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