Post Office scandal: 'It makes my blood boil'

A former postmistress whose family lost everything as a result of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal says she is sceptical those responsible will be held to account.

The first report from an inquiry has revealed the suffering caused to hundreds of people wrongly accused of stealing money and false accounting.

It says more than 13 people took their own lives, and that senior Post Office staff "knew, or at the very least should have known," the accounting software was faulty.

Sue Beacock, who ran a post office in Portland, Dorset, said: "We are just small pawns. They won't get the same as we got."

Mrs Beacock, whose branch was in Easton, repaid the money she was wrongly told she owed but about 1,000 postmasters were convicted and hundreds were jailed.

She said: "We lost everything, and for years I thought that was my fault.

"It was horrendous but in some ways a relief that they took it off me - I couldn't lose any more."

MP Liam Byrne, who chairs the Commons Trade and Industry Committee, has called for contempt of Parliament proceedings against senior Post Office figures.

Speaking in the Commons on Tuesday, he said: "At least 160 people in the Post Office knew exactly what was going on and some of them came to this house and misled members of this house, not once, but twice."

Mrs Beacock said: "What's good for one is good for the other.

"If they knew - and these people were in prison and they were innocent - it makes my blood boil."

Mrs Beacock is also taking up the case of her mother and business partner, Kathleen Schofield, who ran the post office in Fortuneswell but died before the scandal was uncovered.

"She took out bank loans and all sorts of things to pay this money back.

"My mum died with £6,000 in her bank - no property - even though they had been property owners all her life.

"She was a very proud woman and, to her, she failed - and I failed her."

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