Racism affected how we were treated over Horizon, says Post Office victims

Seven Post Office workers of South Asian heritage have told the BBC they believe racism affected the way people were treated in the Horizon scandal.

One of the workers who spoke to BBC Newsnight said: “It felt like they thought that you were a foreigner and you’d robbed them.”

The Horizon scandal saw 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted from 1999 to 2015, with some going to prison.

The Post Office says it aims to get to “the truth of what went wrong”.

A public inquiry began in February 2021, and will resume on Thursday after breaking for Christmas.

While the scandal has been public knowledge for some time, an ITV drama – Mr Bates vs The Post Office – which aired last week, catapulted the issue back into the spotlight.

The seven people spoken to by BBC Newsnight worked as sub-postmasters during the scandal and say they were accused of false accounting, theft, or fraud due to data from the faulty Horizon IT system.

One man from an Indian background said a member of Post Office staff told him: “All the Indians are doing it. They have relatives so they take the money and send it to them abroad”.

Another person of South Asian descent said: “It was like we were dumb because English wasn’t our first language, that we struggled to make sense of basic accounting”.

Another said of the Post Office staff he dealt with: “It felt like they thought that you were a foreigner and you’d robbed them”.

Balvinder Gill told Newsnight his life was destroyed after he was wrongly accused of stealing £108,000 from the Post Office in 2004.

The 45-year-old had a mental breakdown afterwards and was sectioned three times.

In a double blow for his family, in 2009, his mother Kashmir, now a postmistress, was found guilty of stealing £57,000 from the same Oxford branch. Her conviction was overturned in 2021 after being referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Mr Gill said: “My parents were spoken to as if they were idiots because they’re not white. They were made to feel like they didn’t understand the system and that they were stupid”.

He describes his parents’ experience as “an indirect, oppressive kind of racism”.

He said the dynamic felt more skewed than in a standard relationship between an employer and employee.

“It always felt more than that. I know from my parents’ experience that whenever they try to explain something, because their English was broken, they were normally just shut down, and I’m certain that was because of their colour”.

Former sub-postmaster Vipin Patel, 72, was wrongly accused of fraud in 2011, and had his conviction quashed in 2020. He said he felt “spoken down to” by the Post Office helpline because of his race and accent.

In response to these allegations, Post Office said: “We share fully the aims of the public inquiry to get to the truth of what went wrong in the past and establish accountability.

“It’s for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues that it is examining.

“We are doing all we can to put right the wrongs of the past, including providing full and fair compensation for those affected, and offers of more than £138 million have been made to around 2,700 postmasters, the vast majority of which are agreed and paid.”

Warning: This story contains language which readers may find offensive.

In 2022, the Post Office revealed that, of the postmasters it had records for who had been convicted, 316 had provided details on their ethnicity. At least 123 were of black, Asian and minority ethnic background. That’s just under 39%.

The exact number of postmasters from a minority background is not known. A recent survey by the Post Office suggested it was more than 43%, but this only drew from a small sample.

One former Post Office employee told Newsnight that it was unfair to label his former employer as racist when many white people were falsely prosecuted too.

Royal Mail data from 2012 shows there were 1,547 Indian sub-postmasters and agents in England and Wales, 401 were Pakistani, nine were Black African, and 3,220 were white British.

Last year, the Post Office apologised after it was revealed it had used racist terms to describe wrongly investigated postmasters as part of the Horizon IT scandal.

A document showed Post Office had used terms like “Chinese/Japanese types”, “dark-skinned European types”, and “Negroid types”.

The Post Office said the document was historic and that it “didn’t tolerate any form of racism”.

It said: “The language and classifications used in the historical document is completely abhorrent and condemned by today’s Post Office”.