Lee Castleton - bankrupt and bitter

In the light of the recent article in Private Eye, I got an email from Lee Castleton, whose situation was highlighted back in 2009, by Computer Weekly.


Lee has given me permission to publish his email which has been edited slightly for clarity.

"Hi Nick,

"My name is Lee Castleton. I am a former subpostmaster. I am writing to give you my sorrowful experience of dealings with Post Office Ltd. I believe I am the only person to have defended a civil case (and lost) for losses in my branch - Marine Drive Bridlington. Case number HQ05X02706 in the High Court London. I was taken there in Dec 2006 by Post Office Ltd.

"In Jan 2004 My Post Office branch started to accrue losses. The first of which was £1103.68. This I paid. But I telephoned helpline and explained that I lost £1103.68. They told me to pay it and it would no doubt turn up the following week as a mistake on my part. The following week we again misbalanced. I was £4300 short. Again I made the phone call to helpline but I was given no help. 

"I explained I had paid in a large amount the week prior and I could not afford to pay. I was told they would look in to it. Over the following 10 weeks we misbalanced every week. Sometimes we had too much money but more often we had too little. I was frantic. I received no help and even though I never hid any misbalances, no answers we given. 

"After repeatedly voicing my concerns and begged for help (over 91 phone calls in the 12 week period) I asked for an audit. I knew this would stop the never helping attitude and force some action. I am naive. On the 23rd March 2004 I was audited. I was found to be exactly where I had told Post Office I was with respect to the misbalances (-£25000). 

"I did not expect what happened next. I was suspended. I was told the deficit was against my contract and that I needed to pay the money there and then. I explained that I had told Post Office repeatedly and that I felt the Horizon system was at fault. 

"I was taken through a procedure where my suspension became a termination yet still despite my pointing out faults in paperwork there was no investigation. Post Office now were not paying me and they then started proceedings to recover the supposed missing money. I was able to get representation through a legal insurance. 

"Post Office delayed and delayed with letters back and forth. All the time eating up the insurance money. 

"Finally we went to court in Dec 06. The Post office offered little evidence other than my signed accounts. I lost. From Jan 07 to this day my family and I have suffered far beyond anything I could explain. 

"I had to declare myself bankrupt because the Judge order costs against me to the value of £321000. The Judge told the Post Office that it was unlikely I would be able to pay prior to the case being heard but Post Office wanted to continue. So Post office Ltd paid £321000 to try to recover £25000. Even though they knew I could not pay.

"What is still painful is even more so when new revelations are revealed by others on a daily basis. I always asked for help and explained and reported any losses. It is not reasonable to think that an average working man can just pay ever more money into a system that clearly is flawed. 

"I have documents that prove the system does not work. One of which is the one Shoosmiths refer to - the Horizon records transactions whilst the person whom the Horizon says is operating the system is not even logged on to the system. This is one of the faults from my office.

"Post Office's case against me was argued on the basis that an account stated is an account owned. They argued that I signed of the accounts as a true reflection of the the accounts. Firstly over the 12 week period I made 91 phone calls asking why the system was showing shortages or gains. 

"Secondly I have now found out that Horizon has 3rd party access. Which Post Office deny. How can I own an account that a third party can change?

"Lee Castleton"

Since emailing this letter, Lee has asked Humberside Police to investigate his situation. He is alleging the Post Office:


"withheld the fact that the system has had and continues to have balance problems where transactions are lost. They withheld information during disclosure and still deny that the system has serious flaws with balancing. 


"They have financially gained from the non-disclosure and continue to deny they have a problem with the system. They have sought to criminalise people where possible whilst withholding this information. 


"They have profited from withholding this information. Because they are able to prosecute people without any form of checks with the CPS they have been able to continue to withhold this information to their own benefit in such cases."


Lee tells me the investigating officer at Humberside Police:


"has confirmed to me that he will be investigating the Post Office. He explained that he felt there is clearly a problem that needs to be looked into. 


"Whilst he also felt that it will be particularly difficult to do so he feels that it is certainly something that needs to be investigated."


I ought to point out, just in case any of the Post Office's lawyers are reading this, that the Post Office believes its Horizon interface to be "robust", and no one has ever offered any testable proof that the Horizon system has any faults whatsoever.

Namechecked in the House

I know exactly why Jeremy Hunt MP did this, and so do his sniggering colleagues.

 Jeremy Hunt loves BBC Surrey by nickwallis 


But that doesn't mean it isn't strange and wonderful to have your name mentioned by a Secretary of State in the House of Commons.


He said: "There are numerous examples which we've heard this afternoon, across the country, of where BBC Local Radio has filled a gap that would not have been filled by anything else, and I think in line with what other Hon. Members have said I do need to mention the excellent work done by BBC Surrey, which I visited recently, including the excellent Nick Wallis breakfast show." - Jeremy Hunt MP, Thu 1 Dec, 2011.


The mention, whilst extremely welcome, was gratuitous. Members of Parliament know that if they namecheck a specific local newspaper in the House of Commons there is a 99.9% chance they will appear in the paper they have mentioned (probably with a photo), and the coverage of their mention will almost certainly be favourable. 


I haven't heard the full debate on BBC Local Radio that led to Jeremy Hunt mentioning my name, but as he infers in the above clip, his parliamentary colleagues were almost certainly queuing up to mention their local radio station because they knew by doing so, they would make the bulletins on the radio stations they mentioned. Hence the knowing laughs in the background when Jeremy Hunt mentioned BBC Surrey.


It's not a conscious or pre-meditated "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours", nor does the extended coverage of the mention come from any pathetic sense of gratefulness on behalf of the publication or media outlet which gets its brief moment in the spotlight. It's just the way these things work. 


If someone who has a high profile endorses your work it is likely that people who already like you will be interested in it. Report it. Make a trail using it. Put it on the cover of your book or your billboard, RT it on twitter. Write an article about it. Anyone in this situation who gets all bashful is a fool.


The important thing to note is why my name was mentioned by a Secretary of State in the House of Commons. Although it may have been done for cynical reasons, it didn't happen spontaneously.


The debate in the chamber was about the future of BBC Local Radio, and it was called by the veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell. He has concerns about the scale of cuts an internal BBC review (called Delivering Quality First or DQF) is going to impose on BBC Local Radio. Where did his concerns come from? Not out of thin air.


Since I started doing my show, I have been in regular contact with an extraordinarily committed listener who goes by the name of Darcy Sarto. He is passionate, articulate and very funny, and he cares an awful lot about BBC Local Radio. In his spare time he is involved with a group called the BBC Local Radio Forum, which has lobbied incessantly to get all the people who say they care about BBC Local Radio to do something about it. He is very well aware of the potential implications of DQF for local radio, and he sees it as his business, as a licence-fee payer and listener, to be an advocate for BBC Local Radio.


Whilst chatting (off air) with Darcy about DQF, I suggested the biggest problem that BBC Local Radio had was not enough movers and shakers listen to it. For many and varied reasons, a lot of influential people listen to BBC Radio 4 and/or 5live.


If there were a "Listen to BBC Local Radio Day", which simply asked everyone to try their local BBC station for a few moments, whether it be MPs, local councillors, charity bigwigs, NHS chief executives, police chiefs, business owners, shop workers, commuters, schoolteachers, mums, kids, celebrities, whoever - then it would raise the profile of BBC Local Radio, prove to people who'd never listened what a vital job BBC Local Radio does and it might even get us a few more regular listeners. It would also be something that the BBC hierarchy could get behind - why wouldn't they support a listener-generated campaign to ask everyone to tune in to BBC Local Radio?


Darcy agreed and suggested the date - Thu 1 Dec - the birthdate of the founder of BBC Local Radio, Frank Gillard. Poetically resonant and conveniently within the timescale of the current BBC Trust consultation into DQF. Perfect.


I am ashamed to say I did very little thereafter. Darcy and his friends did all the running - they got to enough MPs to get the debate called, and they ensured that the biggest news story coming out of DQF was the effect it may have on local radio. It won some significant public statements from people within the BBC, not least Mark Thompson, the Director General, and Caroline Thomson, the Chief Operating Officer who told the Voice of the Listener and Viewer group that the BBC had been "surprised" by the response to the Local Radio proposals.


Before we go any further, I need to state, for the record, that I have no opinion on DQF, nor on the way the BBC chooses to go about setting its budgets. I know that if there is a reprieve for BBC Local Radio, some other department will lose out. It's not my place to pontificate even if I did have an opinion.


If, however, you have a view on BBC Local Radio, and you want that view to count, please contact the BBC Trust. They are reviewing the proposals in DQF, and as a licence-fee payer, what you have to say will make a difference.


Here's the link. You have until 21 Dec 2011 to make your contribution. Please spread the word.


In the event, not many MPs attended today's debate, but the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, given his brief, was more or less obliged to do so. I have no idea of his real feelings on BBC Local Radio. Although he says I'm "excellent", I have no idea how many hours (minutes? seconds?) of my show he has listened to.


But he knew he would hear lots of other MPs talk passionately about their radio station, and so he made sure, at the very least, that he knew my name. 


And please be in no doubt that however cynical I may seem, it was rather thrilling to hear it said in such a rarified setting.

It was 20 years ago today

This rather small and badly-cropped picture is of John Terrett. His was the first voice, and he was the first breakfast show presenter, on BBC Radio Surrey, when it launched on 14 Nov 1991.

I spoke to John on air this morning. I was in the same studio he was sitting in exactly 20 years previously. He was in Washington DC, where he now works as a US correspondent for Al Jazeera.

My former colleague at Five News, Brian Ging, tracked John down. Brian moved to "Al Jazz" as we call it in "the" "trade", and worked with him before he moved to the US. A few quick emails later and John and I were having a natter on the phone, sorting out this morning's interview on the BBC Surrey Breakfast Show.

John is a perfect gentleman and could not have been more helpful. Bearing in mind the 5 hour time difference, he very kindly agreed to stay up until 1.20am his time to talk to us live on the radio.

Speaking to John on air brought all the stories out of the woodwork. I asked people what they were doing in 1991 and as well as personal histories, I was bowled over by the number of people listening to the radio station this morning who started listening to BBC Radio Surrey in 1991.

As well as the birthday wishes and reminiscences from listeners, my news editor Angus Moorat came on air to tell me that when BBC Radio Surrey launched, he was running a student radio station at the University of Surrey.

It's name? Radio Surrey. When Angus got wind of the BBC's plans he went up to Broadcasting House in London (by appointment) with a fellow student to tell the BBC they couldn't call their new station Radio Surrey, as it would clash with their student station.

They met with a nice man at the BBC who sat behind a large desk in a wood panelled room. He listened to their concerns and then told them there was no chance of the BBC changing its mind, so thanks very much for coming and goodbye.

The student Radio Surrey is now called GU2 radio - and it is doing rather well - taking home two silvers from last week's Student Radio Awards.

Peter Stewart, my newsreader, and author of an excellent book on radio, told me in 1991 he was busy applying to be a journalist at BBC Radio Surrey. He still has the rejection letter.

BBC Radio Surrey lasted two years before becoming part of BBC Sussex and Surrey. Then they both became BBC Southern Counties, for a long time. 

In 2009, BBC Surrey was born. I heard about the launch of this new station, and was delighted there was finally a BBC station representing my home county (I never knew where or what Southern Counties was supposed to be). 

I went along to meet the Managing Editor responsible for this name change. One conversation led to another... and here I am.

Two years in the job

Just over a year ago I wrote "One year in the job", a review of my first year presenting the BBC Surrey breakfast show.

A year and a half ago, I wrote "A day in the life", a fairly extensive blow-by-blow account of my daily routine.

Here's an update.

There have been three significant changes to my routine in the past 18 months.

1) I no longer regularly make programme pieces for my show.
2) We have shifted the programme back an hour, so it is now broadcast between 6-9am.
3) I have taken on the Saturday breakfast show.

Stopping doing regular pieces for my show happened during the summer of last year. The time commitment was too much. I was leaving the office more or less straight after finishing the programme, going to a job, and then spending two hours at home putting the edit together.

After travel time, I often wouldn't file the piece until 2.30-3pm, making it a difficult working day. I was getting more and more tired, and whilst it was nice having three minutes of good quality audio on the show, it was affecting my performance during the other 177 quite considerably.

It also meant that I often wouldn't be around for the morning meeting, which is an essential debriefing and planning session. Here we get an early idea as to the likely stories in the next day's show. We also get to discuss those stories, and try to think creatively about how we could bring them to air.

These meetings can throw up some brilliant ideas, and can turn a weak story on paper into something very vivid when you hear it. It can also flush out the duff stories - ones which look good on paper, but are much harder to develop or execute on the show.

By the end of the planning meeting we will all have some idea of what should be happening the next day.

Then it's off home, or on to any other work commitment that might come my way. Recently I've been working with the BBC South Inside Out team again, which has been great. I have also had the enormous satisfaction of working with a Private Eye journalist to get a story about the Post Office into print, and I'm pleased to say there may be another broadcast piece to be made about the latest developments there.

More often than not, though, I will head home to have lunch, go for a run, sleep, do my share of childcare, or all of the above.

Since we have moved the show to 6-9am (it used to be 7-10am), I get up at 3.45am. I remember Nicky Campbell saying his alarm call was 3.45am when he used to start at 6am, and that's good enough for me.

It means I have less time to prep the show in the office. Some days, if a cue isn't quite right, or the producer, newsreader and myself think we need to make significant changes, it can be challenging.

The upside is: I'm not exhausted by the time we get to air, and I still get to listen to the excellent Morning Reports on 5live (and BBC Surrey!) on the drive-in, which gives you a full briefing on the day's news agenda.

The lack of prep time in the morning means it is more essential than ever to speak to the day producer at the end of their shift to discuss the next day's stories. I'll usually get a call between 6pm and 7pm, and we'll have a chat about everything. I think the producer finds it helpful too. They've spent all day with their heads inside the various stories, changing them, writing them, finding guests and working them up into something worth broadcasting; now they have to brief me verbally. Given that's what I'm doing for the audience the next day, it's a neat test of whether or not they've got the "tellability" of it right.

It doesn't matter how good the story or guest is, or how much work you've done on it, if I can't tell the listener what is going on in a simple, accurate and engaging way, everyone's hard work is wasted.

Whilst talking to the producer on the phone I can obviously ask questions that immediately occur to me. If any changes are needed (or have time to be made) the producer will make them, and I will use the basis of our conversation for some kind of approach on air the next day.

Once the scripts have been finalised, the producer sends them through to me on email, and I will read through them before I go to bed, making notes as to any further changes I think might need making, and absorbing the briefing notes which sit below the cues.

So the my current routine is:

3.45am Alarm goes off. Take phone off charge, stagger downstairs and make breakfast.
3.50am Watch last night's BBC1 Ten o'clock news on PVR whilst eating breakfast. Also check twitter feed on phone. If anything comes up on there, I'll forward it to my colleagues and to my work email to watch/read on a big computer screen.
4.20am Shower. Get dressed.
4.50am Get in car, listen to paper review on LBC.
5am Switch car radio to BBC Surrey to listen to 5live's Morning Reports.
5.20am Arrive BBC Surrey in Guildford. Discuss stories with producer and newsreader. Make any changes to cues as necessary. Get weather, write show introduction, choose 6-7am quiz question.
6am On air. The first hour has a relatively gentle start with a quiz and 4 songs before 7. But we have a top story, there is a full news, weather, travel and sport service, plus a rather enjoyable entertainment fix, and the papers.
7-9am All speech. Full on, full service breakfast show.
9am Decompression.
9.30am Morning planning meeting.
10.30am email and other admin. Occasional meetings with management.
11-11.30am Leave the BBC Surrey building.
11.30am Sleep or eat or work or carry out family-related duties.
6-7pm Producer phone call (10 - 25 mins)
8.30pm Read scripts
9pm Lights out.

Since taking on the Saturday breakfast show, I will also spend some of the post-show production time at the office thinking about what should go into Saturday. I'll talk to the news editor on a Friday and stay in regular contact with my weekend producer throughout the week. He comes in on Friday to set up the show and will studio produce on a Saturday morning.

We've only been doing this for four weeks, but I think already we've started to push the show in the direction we want to take it. It is a bit more relaxed than the weekday breakfast show - we have music running throughout the 3 hours we are on air, and it is a Saturday. So whilst we are geared up to take on breaking and important news, I think there should be a weekend feel to things.

So that's me. It's a reasonably punishing routine, but nowhere near as wearing as looking after three small children, which is what my wife does when I'm not around to assist. I also love doing it, which helps.

The main thing I have learned over the course of the last two years is that whilst good journalism is essential, the show is a performance. As a presenter, my responsibility is as much to the performance as it is to the journalism within it. Most of what I've been doing over the past year is working on my performance, and shaping my daily schedule to give me the best chance of doing it well.

To extend the point I made earlier in this post, the material I work with has to be simple, accurate and engaging, but unless I can do something extra with it, to put a smile on someone's face, or really connect with a story, everyone's hard work is completely wasted.

.

The Post Office Horizon story grows legs

This is the new issue of Private Eye (no 1299). The last issue (no 1298, amazingly) carried an article about possible problems with the Post Office's Horizon IT system (see my blog post about it, which includes the text of the first Private Eye article and links to further information).

I am pleased to say the initial article provoked a response. The above issue contains three letters about it on p.15, and a follow up article In The Back (p.31) where it is leading the section entitled "IT cock ups".
If you would like to read them, please buy the magazine.

I also need your help. If you have high level experience of working on banking/high volume/legacy IT systems and you think you may have something interesting to say about Horizon, please get in touch. If you are prepared to go on camera about it, that would be nice too.

Post Office story in Private Eye

UPDATE: New blog post on the 2nd Sight interim report 14 Aug 2013.

OLD POST:

I have been working with a journalist at Private Eye magazine over the past few weeks, and a piece on the Post Office Horizon system leads the investigative section "In the Back" in this fortnight's issue (No 1298 30 Sep - 13 Oct p.28).

To read the original story in full and watch the TV piece I did about it in February, click here, but if you have a chance, please buy the magazine. It's an excellent read, and the Post Office story deserves wider public attention.

If the link above expires, here is the same article copied and pasted.

COMPUTER SAYS NO...

AS Britain’s multi-billion pound public IT programmes hit the next stage in the lifecycle of botched computer projects – malfunction – alarming repercussions are being felt in the nation’s post offices. In recent years the Horizon system that 11,500 sub-postmasters are forced to use has thrown up a rash of apparent financial “shortfalls”.

These have prompted dozens of prosecutions and financial ruin for businessmen and women with previously spotless records. Fifty-five of them last week launched a “class action” against the Post Office, arguing that their troubles owe more to computer error than dishonesty.In a standard week a sub-post office performs thousands of transactions – many such as pension payments and lottery and foreign currency purchases, in cash. When the computer says the till is short, the sub-postmaster (or mistress) has to cough up the difference; and the computer is always right apparently. If the sub-postmaster or mistress can’t pay up, the Post Office’s fraud investigators swiftly descend.

No sign of any missing cash

Typical is the case of Jo Hamilton from South Warnborough in Hampshire, who one week was £2,000 down. After the helpdesk told her to press a few buttons the total doubled, and the Post Office took £4,000 off her.

When the problem kept repeating, her mistake was to claim that everything was fine so she could at least keep trading in the hope that the errors would correct themselves and she’d get her £4,000 back. Then the total hit £36,000, the auditors swooped and she was convicted for false accounting (without ever being accused of taking any money) and forced to pay the £36,000 back with the help of supportive villagers.

Others have been jailed for theft simply on evidence from a computer system that seems to be misfiring, with no indication of what they are supposed to have done with the money. One, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was found guilty of stealing £75,000 even though no trace of the cash could be found and the judge at Guildford crown court, according to supporters present, appeared to instruct the jury that the evidence was very limited. She was sentenced to 18 months.

Since her case, others have pleaded guilty simply for more lenient sentences. Many more have coughed up thousands of pounds from their own pockets in desperate attempts to retain their livelihoods. The Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance reckons the total affected could run into the thousands.

A law unto itself

The Post Office remains the only body in the UK to run its own prosecutions and campaigners think that if it had to use the Crown Prosecution Service, many cases would not have made it to court. The last organisation with such powers, Customs & Excise, was stripped of them almost a decade ago when it was found to have over-stepped the mark in several high-profile cases.

Mrs Hamilton’s MP, James Arbuthnot, expresses a widely-held view when he says: “I find it very difficult to believe that all these sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses are suddenly found to be dishonest, if the alternative is that it may be a public sector computer system which has gone wrong. We’ve heard of that before.” But postal services minister Ed Davey is washing his hands of the problem, simply re-directing MPs’ questions to the Post Office itself.

Lost Horizon

There is no shortage of visible problems with Horizon. One sub-postmaster explained to the Eye how when selling stamps, for example, his terminal often either registered no stamp sale or not the class of stamp keyed in. And in July the entire Post Office banking system was shut down by a “Horizon online issue”. Even the 370 large “Crown” post offices managed centrally are not immune from glitches. Latest known figures show shortfalls there of £2.2m in a year, although mysteriously these haven’t produced any criminal sanctions.

These are just the latest episode in Horizon’s inglorious history. It originated in 1996 in a joint Department of Social Security-Post Office PFI deal for an automated benefits payment system with Pathway, part of ICL (now Fujitsu) on the back of a cheap but technically flawed bid. Four years and £1bn later it was ditched by the government, with the Post Office left to convert it into the Horizon automation project. Fujitsu still runs the technical side of things.
The lengthening list of “shortfall” cases, many in odd geographical clusters, has received little attention beyond diligent investigation by BBC South TV hack Nick Wallis and Computer Weekly magazine. This could be about to change, though, as solicitors Shoosmith begin action on behalf of the 55, with another 150 cases pending.

The Post Office, fearing immense further cost if its computer system is found wanting, has its head firmly in the sand. There are, a spokeswoman told the Eye, “no issues” with Horizon (which is nonsense given the ones already admitted). To say anything else would be to admit that the computer on which it depends is a pig in a poke that has not only wasted billions but might now be dispensing miscarriages of justice as well.

When politicians *really* don't want to answer the question

You might like this. The Conservative leader Dr Andrew Povey sacked his deputy (David Hodge) and then announced he was resigning. But wouldn't tell me why. Well, he wouldn't tell me really why.

 NICK POVEY by nickwallis

We just happened to have an interview with a different cabinet member (Peter Martin) booked for the same morning, so I asked him what was going on. He wouldn't tell me. He really wouldn't tell me.

 NICK MARTIN by nickwallis