The Great Post Office Trial · BBC Radio 4

12. Nowhere Near Over

June 27, 2023·28 min·2 clips

As Wendy Buffery walked toward the place she planned to end her life, a fellow wrongly-convicted sub-postmaster called her and talked her out of it.

Wendy Buffery had reached a breaking point. In late October 2010, the former sub-postmaster from Up Hatherley in Cheltenham had been convicted of false accounting after a Post Office prosecution. She believed the data was wrong. The Post Office told her that was impossible, leaving her to think she alone was to blame. The isolation nearly killed her. As Wendy walked toward the place where she meant to end her life, Jo Hamilton rang and pulled her back into the world. The episode then opens out. Paul Marshall, a barrister for wrongly imprisoned sub-postmasters, describes the lopsided fight between defendants and the Post Office's lawyers. He is blunt. He says the same habits still show up inside the compensation schemes, even after the widest miscarriage of justice in modern times. The host asks the question sitting under all of it: if the Post Office has admitted the damage and still has not changed, maybe it cannot. Then a document makes the problem uglier. On Friday 26th May, the host opens an email from Eleanor Shake, a campaigner using Freedom of Information requests to force records out of the Post Office and government. She found a Post Office security team compliance form that told investigators to classify suspected postmasters by race, using offensive, archaic categories. The form was undated. The Post Office accepted it stayed in use until at least 2011, while security investigators were recommending sub-postmasters for prosecution. Public anger follows. The episode closes with Parmod Kalia, ill, registered blind, and still asking people not to give up hope.

As heard by us

A careful, damning account of how one wrongful conviction opened onto a much wider institutional scandal.

This chapter of The Great Post Office Trial tracks how one wrongful conviction sat inside a wider scandal, and how the damage spread into families, jobs, and private grief.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the scandal traced from Wendy Buffery's conviction to the wider Post Office scandal.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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