Thirteen people may have killed themselves and at least 59 thought about taking their own lives as a result of Britain's Post Office scandal, a public inquiry has revealed this week.
The inquiry said hundreds of British Post Office workers were wrongly prosecuted and convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting due to incorrect data in an information technology system called Legacy Horizon, developed by Japanese firm Fujitsu.
Many thousands of people have been held responsible wrongly for losses, according to the report.
In the 162-page first volume of his report, Inquiry chair Sir Wyn Williams detailed how some people became seriously ill, struggled with mental health problems including alcohol addiction and faced financial impacts such as bankruptcy.
He also outlined how some people experienced reputational impacts or died before receiving compensation.
The chair noted in the report that "the scale of suffering endured by those claimants was extremely wide-ranging".
"It is almost impossible to ascertain, with any degree of accuracy, the number of persons who have suffered as a result of the misplaced reliance upon data produced by Horizon," Sir Wyn said.
"I can say, however, with a degree of confidence, that there are currently about 10,000 eligible claimants in the [compensation] schemes providing financial redress and that number is likely to rise at least by hundreds, if not more, over the coming months."
Sir Wyn added he was satisfied that "a number of senior or not-so-senior employees" of the state-owned post office knew, or should have known, that Legacy Horizon "was capable of" producing false data, but they maintained that "its data was always accurate".
Sir Wyn has also criticised the lack of legal advice available to applicants of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, which provides compensation to current and former subpostmasters who experienced shortfalls due to the faulty Horizon system.
He said anyone claiming compensation through the scheme should be entitled to legal advice funded by the UK Department of Business and Trade.
In a statement, Sir Wyn said he expected the British government to provide a written response to his recommendations in the inquiry by October 10.
'One of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history'
The British Post Office rolled out the Horizon information technology system in 1999 to automate sales accounting. A completely rewritten version of Horizon was introduced in 2010.
Soon after the introduction of the original system, called Legacy Horizon in the inquiry, local post office managers began finding unexplained losses that they were responsible to cover.
The post office took Fujitsu's side, claiming that Horizon was reliable and that the branch managers were lying.
It took three more years for the High Court in London to rule that Horizon contained a number of "bugs, errors and defects", and that the post office "knew there were serious issues about the reliability" of the system.
After a failed mediation scheme, more than 500 subpostmasters collectively sued the company in 2015.
ABC/wires
