Heaton Moor Post Office has been run by one family for decades. The business is a pillar of the community in the Stockport suburb, with father Anthony Holbert passing the successful shop and postal duties down to his son Jamie.
Like many in their position, despite all their hard work and commitment, they were sucked into a scandal that has shocked the nation following the airing of ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
They have now spoken about how the Horizon Post Office saga put an unthinkable strain on their beloved business – as well as their family… a family at the core of a neighbourhood.
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“Thinking back, when I started working aged 17 and we had all these losses… that would have been going on for so long,” Jamie, now 37 told the Manchester Evening News. “It must have even crossed my dad’s mind that I could have been stealing from him, although he never said anything like that.
“It’s horrible to think families could be forced to believe that about each other.”
Faulty accounting system Horizon, installed by IT giant Fujitsu, led to the conviction of more than 700 Post Office branch managers and sub-postmasters. Some 130 people affected by the scandal have come forward since the drama was aired.
Ministers are under pressure to address the devastating hurt suffered by hundreds of sub-postmasters, as public anger over the stories of scores of dedicated workers saw former Post Office boss Paula Vennells hand back her CBE.
Anthony Holbert, 68, first took over at Heaton Moor Post Office in 1994. Hhe ended up losing ‘more than £20,000’, he says, n more than two decades of running the business. He says he was one of the lucky ones.
“I had 16 years of problems – and I was lucky,” he told the M.E.N. “All my losses I could afford.”
“We’ve had, and still do have, a really good shop and retail side. Heaton Moor has a really good client and customer base. We’re well-supported. But at its worst, I lost around £2,200 in one week.
“Sometimes, you’d have a loss because you had made a mistake and it might come back a few weeks later, but these losses [following Horizon errors] would never come back.
“It was 16 years of not knowing whether we were going to balance or not, asking where the money had gone… how it had gone. By having a good shop and retail side, that could cover these losses, but for those people who didn’t have a good shop side, they had nowhere to turn.”
When Horizon was installed in 2000, Antony was still paying off loans he had taken out to buy the business. He said he’s thankful he had a few years to bank savings before the faulty IT system was introduced.
After that, he started to suffer an increasing number of financial losses.
“I had two really good staff members,” he added. “They were brilliant at keeping information and writing it down, so we’d often find any other losses we made.
“But when it came out that it was Horizon, I didn’t believe it. You get into thinking that you’re losing £50, £100, £200… and you think it’s something you’ve done and that it’ll come back in a few weeks with an error notice.
“Even though the system was digital, we were still adding up a lot of cheques, benefit payments and pay dockets ourselves.”
The problems started being exposed by journalists in the late 2010s, but the family says their losses continued before the Horizon system was finally upgraded and their financial situation improved.
Anthony says his son Jamie took over in 2016. Jamie said: “It was only a year between when I took over and when the system was upgraded.
“Within the first year, I lost around £2,500 – completely unaccounted for. I was so worried it was something I’d done. It’s all money I then had to put in.
“I rang the helpline, they just told me they had no idea what we’d done and that I had to put the money in. Nothing was ever proven.
“I’ve grown up in this Post Office since I was seven-years-old. I’ve been working here for more than 20 years, I know my way around this system. I know how to look for transaction errors and have found them occasionally. But with these losses, there was nothing to be found.”
At the time, Jamie was balancing a mortgage and business loans – and had children on the way.
“It was nothing but stress,” he added. Our balances would be down massively. You’d spend weeks, if not months, hoping that something would come out in the wash and it never would.
“For weeks and months at a time, the shop takings would be reduced because I’d have to put in for minus. Sometimes you’d work for a month effectively for free because of that system.
“On top of that, I had a young family at the time, staff to employ… it was horrible. It was always a worry that at the end of the day, there were going to be more losses.
“If we could have figured out a reason for the problem you could sort it and move on, but the people on the helpline were just oblivious. It felt like they didn’t care.”
When it was revealed that the problems had been stemming from Horizon, Jamie too was ‘shocked’. He added: “We had been told for years that we had been doing something wrong.
“I’m still shocked and hurt now. This has been my family business for more than 30 years, it’s all I’ve ever known.”
Jamie had been working at his father’s Post Office since he was just 17 before taking it over himself. Looking back, he said, the family could have been seriously damaged by the seeds of doubt being sewn by the Horizon system.
“I thought I had done something wrong or cost my dad money. We’ve been here so long that if there’s a genuine problem, we’re usually able to find it – you hold your hands up and move on, but with this you just couldn’t.”
But Anthony said he never suspected his son for the losses. “I never thought it was Jamie,” he said. “You don’t know where the money has gone so you doubt yourself, thinking ‘I’m useless at my job’,” he said.
“I could have started to doubt the staff, but I knew it wasn’t them, they’d been with me for years.”
Now Anthony is fighting for compensation – but said the sum he’s been offered by the Post Office works out at 78p-a-day for the time he spent suffering the monetary losses.
“16 years of not knowing where the money is going, all that stress, and they are offering 78p a day?,” he questioned.
“Some people have been left with nothing… they’ve been taken to court knowing they can’t do anything about it. It’s just a disgrace.”
A Post Office spokesperson said the organisation did not comment on individual cases but told the M.E.N: “We fully share the aims of the current Public Inquiry, set up to get to the truth of what happened in the past and accountability. We are acutely aware of the human cost of the scandal and are doing all we can to right the wrongs of the past, as far as that is possible.
“Both Post Office and Government are committed to providing full, fair and final compensation for the people affected. To date, offers of more than £138 million have been made to around 2,700 Postmasters, the majority of which have been agreed and paid. Interim payments continue to be made in other cases which have not yet been resolved.”
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
