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Europe|At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office
Scandal, Report Says
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/world/europe/
uk-post-office-scandal-report.html

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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal,
Report Says

A public inquiry into the wrongful prosecutions of about 1,000 postal
workers has uncovered more victims than previously known, according
to a report.

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A view of the Houses of Parliament in London from across the Thames.
Thousands of postal workers were wrongfully accused of crimes over
more than a decade in the British post office scandal, according to a
report.Credit...Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock
Aishvarya Kavi

By Aishvarya Kavi

Published July 10, 2025Updated July 11, 2025, 1:28 p.m. ET

At least 13 postal workers in Britain died by suicide amid a post
office scandal in which about 1,000 postal workers were wrongfully
prosecuted for theft and other crimes, according to a report released
this week as part of an inquiry into the scandal.

Wyn Williams, the retired high court judge who is leading the
inquiry, wrote in the report, published on Tuesday, that by his
estimation, more than 10,000 people were eligible for some kind of
redress and that he expected that number to grow.

The victims range from postal workers held liable for tens or
hundreds of pounds in financial discrepancies to those who were
wrongly tried, convicted, imprisoned and made to pay back tens of
thousands of pounds. They were all blamed for apparent shortfalls at
their postal branches across Britain that, it turned out, had
actually been caused by a flawed information technology system.

More than 1,000 people were prosecuted from 2000 to at least 2013,
but thousands of others were blamed and held responsible, according
to the report.

The 166-page volume, the first from the inquiry, which began in
September 2020, focuses on the victims, including exasperating
efforts to get compensation from the postal service.

The scandal burst into the public eye last year after an ITV
television series, "Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office," dramatized the
stories of the victims. Soon after, the British Parliament passed a
law quashing the convictions.

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