Post Office stripped of crime reporting status in Scotland over Horizon scandal

The Post Office has been stripped of its status as a specialist reporting agency to Scotland’s prosecutors in the wake of the Horizon IT scandal, the country’s most senior law officer has announced.

Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC said the Post Office would “no longer be able to investigate and report criminal allegations directly to the Crown”.

In a statement to MSPs, she said the Horizon scandal showed it was “not fit” to hold the status and it would instead have to report allegations of crimes to the police.

Ms Bain, who both heads the Crown Office and is a Scottish government minister, also denied that she had previously suggested she did not support legislation that would automatically quash sub-postmasters’ Horizon convictions.

Her statement came after SNP ministers unveiled emergency legislation earlier this week to quash “relevant” convictions and give victims access to the UK Government compensation scheme.

Documents published alongside the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences (Scotland) Bill estimated around 200 convictions would be quashed – double the previous Crown Office figure of 100.

However, the documents said the total could be as high as 300, and noted there was a “significant degree of uncertainty” around how many convictions would meet the legislation’s five criteria.

Unlike south of the border, where the Post Office has the power to bring its own prosecutions, the Crown Office brought all the cases against Scottish postmasters. Control over Scotland’s separate legal system is devolved to Holyrood.

The Lord Advocate told MSPs: “Because of its fundamental and sustained failures in connection with Horizon cases in Scotland, I’ve decided that Post Office Limited is not fit to be a specialist reporting agency.

“It is therefore no longer able to investigate and report criminal allegations directly to the Crown and it should now instead report any allegations of criminality to Police Scotland for them to investigate.”

Opposition parties have said the Crown Office had suspicions about the Post Office in 2013 but did not pause prosecutions until 2015.

However, Ms Bain rejected any suggestion that the Crown Office “should have been more suspicious of the Post Office and should have conducted a review and convictions involving Horizon.”

She said: “The state of knowledge as it then was is not what we know it to be now” and added that the full extent of the Horizon problems only became clear after civil litigation in 2019.