Mr Bates vs the post office.

HS2's cost report by Deloitte and Touche was also shredded. This style of management is more commonplace than we are told about.

Well said.

I watched the four episodes and am absolutely angered by the actions of the Post Office against the people running the local Post Offices. I think it is ridiculous that the former CEO of the Post Office was awarded a CBE while numerous people were being victimised by the company she was in charge of! Most were forced to pay "back" money that was "missing", some were imprisoned and a few committed suicide.

If you feel that she is not worthy of the award, please sign the petition. Below is a link to it. It is nearing the goal of 700,000 signatures, so help it reach that goal: SIGN NOW
 you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/strip-paula-vennells-of-her-cbe

The fifth part of the series - where they cover what happened and talked to some of the real people involved - revealed what had happened. Basically it was as I thought. Fujitsu designed the system as a centralised hub where all the data was held at this hub (presumably at one of Fujitsu's locations). So all the post offices were connected to this hub via a vast network of communications lines and computer nodes. (Which is exactly what the NHS tried to do with their own aborted system).

The problem with this type of system is that you have to be able to recover from the vast number of communications errors you get (because of computer failures, line glitches etc etc). You can either do this by designing a "Rolls Royce" system that implements end-to-end acknowledgment and can automatically recover from any error on any line - like what is used by the banks with their SWIFT system, which can recover from virtually any failure you throw at it. But of course this system handles vast amounts of money and it needs to reliable.

What Fujitsu has done (as they said in the program) is to attempt to recover MANUALLY from any comms errors. They showed reams of reports on comms errors that Fujitsu used to try to correct for by manual intervention - despite their claims that they didn't do ANY manual intervention. This was OBVIOUSLY where the discrepancies arose. Discrepancies will always occur with simple systems like this and they require full-time manual back up (from a skilled team) to correct errors that occur regularly. It can be done - in fact the UK banks' own "Faster Payments" system relies on manual correction procedures and it seems to work OK.

The puzzling thing is that it must have been blatantly obvious to the people at Fujitsu what was going on. They KNEW very well that they were manually intervening to correct for comms errors and that their team were getting it wrong. And the Post Office should have had technicians who understood how the system worked and could liaise with Fujitsu to correct the errors. It must have been obvious to many people that this was NOT user fraud yet they just went ahead and prosecuted people.

I just wonder what they've done to correct the computer problems. It's quite difficult to correct systems that have been designed wrong from the start.

Its wishful thinking. No leftie woke would ever behave like that. 
Leftie wokes are like  Alan Bates who turned down an OBE as Paula Vennells, the woman in charge of the Post Office through the Horizon Scandal, retains her CBE and refuses to give it back,"

Now that's woke. 

To be fair, Rachel Reeves said a future Labour government would concentrate on compensation for the victims rather than stripping Vennells of her CBE.

They ought to do both.