Mr Bates vs the Post Office: what’s the real story of the Post Office scandal?
In 1999, the Post Office introduced a brand-new way of cataloguing payments: the Horizon IT system. It was intended to be a way to modernise the organisation, moving it from paper-based records into the upcoming 21st century.
What unfolded instead was a disaster. The Horizon IT system was faulty, prone to glitches which incorrectly exhibited shortfalls of cash that were blamed on the subpostmasters in charge of their branches, leading to twenty years of legal disputes, hundreds of wrongful convictions and untold lives destroyed.
Now the whole sorry affair is being turned into an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, airing on January 1. It's a complex and shocking story, so here’s our handy explainer.
The beginning
When Alan Bates arrived in Llandudno, in 1998, it was with the intention of making a fresh start. Together with his long-term partner Suzanne, the pair had invested their life savings into buying a Post Office branch in the sleepy village of Craig-y-Don.
In 1999 he, along with thousands of other subpostmasters, received training in the new Horizon IT system introduced by the Post Office. It was the end result of a failed experiment – originally, Horizon was intended to be a swipe card system, designed to
