Inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal faces five-year delay without extra funding

The police criminal inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal faces a five-year delay unless it is handed millions in extra funding and nearly 100 more staff, according to the chief officer in charge. The Metropolitan police commander Stephen Clayman said he needed to nearly double the number of investigators to 210 to meet a deadline of late next year or early 2028 for submitting files to prosecutors. The Home Office recently gave a special grant of £2.8m to the investigation but Clayman said its projected budget was up to £19.3m, leaving a £16.5m shortfall. More than 900 post office operators were prosecuted by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 because of the faulty Horizon accounting software from the Japanese technology company Fujitsu that made it look as if they had committed fraud. The scandal has been described as the worst miscarriage of justice in British history , and was the subject of the acclaimed ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which aired in January 2024. Ministers introduced legislation later that year to exonerate people who had been wrongly prosecuted . The police investigation has previously been described as unprecedented in size and scale, and is the first to examine potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice by those who made key decisions on Post Office investigations. …