Of course those still alive must receive full and fair compensation as the whole Commons, including the minister, agreed. But the Wyn Williams inquiry must also establish who knew about the flaw at the heart of the Horizon system, and when. It was not a case of a hidden software bug in an obscure sub-routine, it was a basic system design fault: not ensuring that the accounts at post offices and HQ were in sync. Independent IT management experts must be called. Against a background of a government machine wanting to run down the post office network, it seems to me that nobody wanted to correct the system while sub-postmasters and postmistresses were being driven out of business. The following question from that Commons debate raises suspicions:
We know that civil servants were non-executive directors on the board of the Post Office, and that they were principal accounting officers for UK Government Investments. We know that civil servants told Ministers to come to this place and to tell MPs that there was
“nothing to see here.” Those civil servants are not on the list of the core participants giving evidence to Sir Wyn Williams. How can those civil servants be held to account by Ministers for their failure to act in this case for so many years?
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