How FOI helped unravel the Post Office Horizon Scandal
Remember the big Post Office scandal? One person played a massive part in uncovering the evidence that eventually brought the extent of the collusion and malpractice to light.
In this lightning talk from FOI Fest, citizen investigator Eleanor Shaikh explains the monumental effects she achieved, with little more than some FOI requests and a determination to bring justice to sub-Postmasters. You’ll be inspired by what you could do, too!
FOI Fest was a one-day conference from mySociety in February 2026.
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Transcript
0:01 [Myf:] This is a lightning talk from FOI Fest, the one day Freedom of Information conference from mySociety. We’re going to hear citizen investigator Elena Shaikh on how she used FOI to uncover hidden facts around the Post Office Horizon scandal,and the effects they had – all in under 10 minutes.
0:25 [Eleanor Shaikh:] I’m not an academic or a journalist, I’m just a customer of the Post Office who began supporting its victims in 2017 when my local branch was hit by an alleged shortfall of £57,000, and I watched the life of the postmaster come crashing down as the burden of proof was cruelly reversed, meaning that innocence rather than guilt had to be proven.
0:47 So the urgent fight to uncover information commenced. The plight of his family was my introduction to the world of the Post Office scandal, the UK’s greatest miscarriage of justice, spanning over a quarter of a century, counting over 12,000 postmasters among its victims, and leaving around 900 wrongful convictions in its wake.
1:08 Having started in my local community, my search for information very swiftly took on a far wider dimension, as I soon discovered, this is a scandal born of the deliberate suppression of vital information by the Post Office, by its government shareholder, and by Fujitsu.
1:26 The task of uncovering the truth is now led by the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, by a national police investigation and a raft of committed journalists, but before they came on board, Freedom of Information was one of the very few tools at the disposal of survivors, and today it still serves in piecing together the hidden narrative.
1:45 The Post Office and its business department shareholders are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as are many other bodies with a tangential connection to the scandal, to whom I’ve also submitted requests: the Cabinet Office, the National Audit Office, Ministry of Justice, Department for Work and Pensions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Attorney General’s Office, and of over 200 requests which I’ve made to help unravel this scandal, some have been game changers.
2:11 The 2023 disclosure from the Post Office of an investigation to compliance document which used deeply offensive racial ID codes provoked outrage and was covered on BBC, Sky and Channel Four TV, as well as featuring in articles in The Guardian, Times, Independent, Telegraph and the Law Society Gazette.
2:31 The coverage caught the attention of the inquiry team: realising this document had never been disclosed to them, they demanded an explanatory witness statement from the Post Office. They summoned its general counsel for a public dressing down and initiated a major disclosure remedial exercise.
2:49 This one single Freedom of Information request exposed deep failings in the way in which disclosure to the inquiry had been handled by the Post Office. It led to over 100,000 new and potentially relevant documents being located, including over 4,700 disclosed hours before the questioning of a key witness.
3:11 It caused a two week suspension of the inquiry’s oral evidence sessions, led to the introduction of targeted disclosure hearings, and prompted a direction statement from its chair, warning that all future requests for disclosure would be underpinned by a Section 21 notice, carrying a custodial sentence for non compliance.
3:29 The Swift Review was another incendiary document, which I located under Freedom of Information in 2022. It formed the focus of a 30 page paper by Exeter University’s Justice Project, long before coming under the scrutiny of the inquiry.
3:45 Completed in 2016, the Swift Review had been commissioned by the Post Office chair, at the behest of a government minister. Hidden from public scrutiny for six years, it conceded that there were indeed significant unresolved issues with the Post Office Horizon system.
4:02 That was two years before the Horizon trial at the High Court, in which the Post Office’s defense hinged entirely on infallibility of its legacy IT.
4:12 The Swift Review also acknowledged the pivotal and long denied potential of Horizon’s remote access, and it criticised the way in which sub postmasters had been pressured into pleading guilty to alleged offenses giving rise to the possibility of multiple miscarriages of justice.
4:27 When the lead counsel for the sub postmasters at the High Court, Patrick Green Casey, learned about my find through journalist Nick Wallis, he commented, “The review is an incredibly important document, and we would have wished to have shown it to the court if it had been made available to us.”
4:43 My first attempt to obtain information on this review in 2020 was dismissed as vexatious; on my second stab, the business department of the Post Office, prevaricated for seven months, finally making the disclosure only hours after I threatened to complain to the statutory inquiry.
4:59 As a prolific user of Freedom of Information, I have learned to navigate my way through the delays, redactions and refusals to disclose, frequently challenging via internal review, more recently, at the level of tribunal.
5:12 During the course of the inquiry, multiple government officials maintained, under oath, that they knew nothing of the existence of the Swift Review until 2020 – but another of my Freedom of Information requests subsequently turned up email correspondence between those same government officials agreeing in 2018 that the Swift Review should not be shared with the National Audit Office, which was probing into Post Office Horizon issues at the time.
5:39 So not only did officials know the review existed in 2018, but they collectively agreed that information which alluded to its existence should be actively withheld. This find was the focus of a 2025 Telegraph article in which barrister Paul Marshall was quoted for saying: “This new disclosure is very important. It tends to confirm a view that I’ve had for a long time, that it is possible that government and civil servants were complicit in a cover up.”
6:06 Further documents I obtained by Freedom of Information, which featured in a 2024 Channel Four News piece, revealed that controversial bonus payments which the Post Office board had awarded itself for cooperating with the inquiry, had in fact been signed off by the Treasury, this despite public condemnation of the bonuses by ministers, including Kemi Badenoch.
6:32 My follow-on request led to the accidental disclosure by the Business Department of sensitive correspondence regarding remuneration from the Post Office chair. Realising its mistake, the letters were withdrawn from the WhatDoTheyKnow website within 24 hours, but not before they’d been downloaded later to be cited in an article in Private Eye.
6:51 Throughout my work, the mySociety platform WhatDoTheyKnow has proved itself to be an invaluable and trusted tool. Through its gateway, information and correspondence with authorities is released directly into the public domain in a way which is transparent and accessible to all. Mainstream journalists have instant access to original documentation and can extend the reach of revelations far beyond the voice of a single campaigner. Without amplification, a scandal may lurk unseen and untouchable. Accountability and change are rendered no more than wishful thinking.
7:21 Freedom of Information can also be used to release government documents held at the National Archives long after the retention period of individual departments has expired. Between 2021 and 2022 I viewed and photographed hundreds of such documents released via Freedom of Information, which evidence the involvement of central government in the developmental years of Horizon.
7:43 These form the basis of my 600 page research paper, Origins of a Disaster, which was submitted to the inquiry and included a 1998 briefing for former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair from his Number 10 policy unit. This referred to problems with Project Horizon. Blair’s handwritten note on the final page, beginning: “I would favour option one, but for GM’s statement that the system itself is flawed.”
8:11 In August 2022, long before the Blair involvement which I’d stumbled across was considered by the inquiry, it was featured in a Telegraph article that in turn came to the attention of a director, whom I was able to assist in his feature-length documentary on the former PM.
8:26 There is some irony in the fact that the government which oversaw the launch of the doomed Horizon project in the late 1990s was at the same time drawing up legislation which granted our right to Freedom of Information. It’s poignant too that Blair, who personally decreed that the flawed Horizon project must go ahead at all costs, was at the same time doing all he could to delay the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act.
8:51 In his memoirs, he revealed his deep regret over the decision which gave us the right to delve into the secretive inner workings of government, fearing information would be weaponised by opponents.
9:01 He reflected: “Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and I feel like shaking my head till it drops off my shoulders,: “You idiot.”
9:11 “What I failed to realise is that we would also have our skeletons rattling around the cupboard. The Freedom of Information Act represented a quite extraordinary offer by government to open itself and Parliament to scrutiny”. He continued, “Its consequences would be revolutionary. The power it handed to the tender mercy of the media was gigantic. Politicians are people, and scandals will happen.”
9:36 Thankfully, many individuals now make full use of Freedom of Information to prise the rattling skeleton of the Horizon scandal from their cupboard. Each disclosure adds to our understanding of how things went so deeply and disastrously wrong, and as some postmasters and campaigners continue searching for information to weaponise along multiple battlefronts.
9:57 Long may Freedom of Information make its contribution to their uphill struggle for justice.
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