A FORMER postmistress who lost everything due to the Post Office’s Horizon IT system says she wants to bring a legal case after seeing the ITV drama on the scandal.
Grandmother Cheryl Shaw fulfilled her dream of owning a branch and became a well-loved local shopkeeper.
CHERYL SHAWFormer postmistress Cheryl Shaw fulfilled her dream of owning a branch and became a well-loved local shopkeeper before the Horizon system ‘ruined her life’[/caption]
ITV drama Mr Bates vs. The Post Office has brought back the pain Cheryl felt throughout her ordealITV
But it turned into a nightmare when her shop’s dodgy Horizon machine began stating that she was short in her weekly count-ups.
Errors in many of the machines’ software led to financial losses in the company’s accounts and a devastating impact on staff.
What began as £100 here and there snowballed into £400 and higher, leaving Cheryl, 73, feeling that she was going mad.
She topped up the massive losses with her own salary – and when she told the Post Office – they said it was only her fault.
In a shocking new series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, screen star Toby Jones captures the scandal in heart-wrenching detail.
Cheryl told The Sun: “I’ve just watched an episode of it and it’s made me cry. It’s so difficult with everything coming back.
“When you see them lying on the television show, saying you’re the only one, it makes me feel absolutely furious.”
Cheryl sold the shop in Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex, in 2008 after five years following losses of tens of thousands of pounds.
As her debts worsened, she sold her home and began moving into smaller properties and was forced to take a job as a carer.
Cheryl said: “I was a company director for a building firm, I worked there for 27 years until they went bust in a recession.
“The firm went bust and I saw a friend of mine who used to work at the Post Office – I bought the business for £65,000.
“I loved it, I absolutely loved it. But I lost everything.
“I did my weekly accounts. It started being £200 or £300 short, sometimes £400.
“You would ring this helpline. Everything that I told them was correct, but the money was short. It continually came up short.
“I used to ring up the Post Office and they sent people down to see me. I said I want you to go through the accounts for me and show me how I’m doing it wrong.
“This chap would come down and say what he told all the others on the television show – nobody else has got this problem.
“And that’s what they used to say to me.
“It was dreadful, I used to think that I was going mad. Like they all [postmasters] did.
“I used to go bezerk – I knew I wasn’t that short – you can’t just make those mistakes continually. It just used to go on and on and on.
“I suppose because I got a good salary I could put money back in it, but it meant I wasn’t earning a lot.
“It was thousands and thousands of pounds. Thousands of pounds.
“I lost my house, my lovely house. When I left I couldn’t afford to keep it, I had taken out loans.
“First of all I had to move out of the house, I moved again, I kept moving downwards because I didn’t make any money.
“Most of the time I try not to think about this. For years it affected me and I didn’t particularly like the jobs I moved on to. I ended up being a carer in Worthing.
“I just used to love the job at the Post Office, there were so many nice customers.”
It was only in 2014 when she read about a report calling Horizon “not fit for purpose” that she realised she was not alone.
Cheryl continued: “I had a lot of local people that I knew. I used to go and see them after work. I knew all of their names.
“It was very sad. I loved that job, but in the end I hated the Post Office because I couldn’t believe I made those mistakes.
“I absolutely trusted my staff, it was awkward, did they think I thought they were stealing?
“You didn’t hear about those other people. I thought it was my problem alone, I used to say somebody else must have these mistakes.
“You think it must be the machine that was wrong. I only found out after the report was covered in the press.
“It was a relief when I found out – it was a difficult burden to shoulder at the time.
“There was no investigation into my Post Office because I used to make the money right. Because I paid I can’t prove anything.
“In the end I couldn’t stand it any more. I fell out with them and said it wasn’t my fault.
“I left the Post Office and never said goodbye to anybody, they probably thought I was chucked out, they never knew what was going on behind the scenes.”
Cheryl, who now lives in Cyprus with husband Philip, wants the world to know the impact of the Horizon scandal.
The new ITV show tells the story of the “greatest miscarriage of justice in British history”.
Some workers lost their livelihoods, homes, and life savings as a result of paying back the money the Post Office claimed was missing.
Four workers even took their lives as a result of the stress of the accusations.
It comes after a petition demanding ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells be stripped of her CBE gathered more than 100,000 signatures within days.
The former boss was in charge of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, during which more than 700 sub postmasters were prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting.
In 2021, she apologised for the “suffering” caused after 39 subpostmasters’ convictions were overturned.
Tory Minister Hollinrake has also called for Vennells to hand back her CBE.
The business minister, whose brief includes postal services, said: “Paula Vennells got a CBE for services to the Post Office.
“Ultimately you’ve got responsibility for what happened here, you’re the chief executive, if I was Paula Vennells I would seriously consider handing that back voluntarily at this point in time.”
Eventually, the Court of Appeal decided to overturn the criminal convictions of dozens of former sub-postmasters and postmistresses.
A public inquiry into the scandal is still ongoing.
A Post Office spokeswoman said: “We fully share the aims of the current Public Inquiry, set up to establish what went wrong in the past and the accountability for it.
“We are acutely aware of the human cost of the scandal and are doing all we can to right the wrongs of the past, as far as that is possible.
“Both Post Office and government are committed to providing full, fair and final compensation for the people affected.
“To date offers of compensation totalling more than £138 million have been made to around 2,700 Postmasters, the vast majority of which have been agreed and paid.
“Interim payments continue to be made in other cases which have not yet been resolved.”
Judges quashed the convictions of 39 former postmasters after the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice following a lengthy campaignRex
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