Post Office Horizon IT system concerns: FOI release

Information requested

Any documentation in any form which details when any official or politician was first made aware of any concerns around the Post Office Horizon IT system.

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested.

Management of the Post Office is a reserved matter for the UK Government, and the Scottish Government has no role in the investigation of miscarriages of justice, which is a matter for the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The first record the Scottish Government has of any official or politician being made aware of any concerns around the Post Office Horizon IT system is from 23 January 2020. On that date an email was received from a member of the public by the then First Minister drawing her attention to the litigation between the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and the Post Office Limited, the campaign for a UK Government instituted public inquiry, and engagement with Scottish MPs in relation to these matters.

This email was passed to an official in the Scottish Government Justice Directorate to deal with, and was subsequently withdrawn from the Scottish Government's correspondence system without being answered, on the basis that both management of the Post Office and the creation of a Post Office Inquiry are matters reserved to the UK Government.

The Scottish Government was first formally made aware of any concerns around the Post Office Horizon IT system by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on 2 July 2020. I enclose the relevant extract from the minutes of that meeting. Please note that the minutes are erroneously headed as 16 March 2020 (which was the date of the previous quarterly meeting) and are signed as 2 December 2020 (which is the date of the following quarterly meeting at which these minutes were agreed). I can however confirm that they are the minutes of the meeting on 2 July 2020.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to some of the information you have requested. Some of the information contains personal data of third parties, and this information has been redacted from the information provided. This exemption is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

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The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202400393280 - Information released - Annex

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