‘He died because they took his Post Office away’: Tragic Telford case prompts call for action on pre‑Horizon scandal
The heartbreaking story of a Telford subpostmaster whose life unravelled after he was wrongly blamed for losses caused by a faulty Post Office IT system has been raised in the House of Lords.
The Post Office Horizon scandal has dominated local and national headlines for years, but in Telford the fallout from a lesser‑known predecessor is now coming into focus.
During a recent House of Lords debate, Telford's Lord Kuldip Sahota recounted the story of his friend and former Ketley subpostmaster Kuldip Gill, whose life was devastated long before Horizon became a byword for injustice.
Now Lord Sahota is hoping to raise awareness of a scheme to compensate former subpostmasters and their families who were made to repay shortfalls caused by an IT system pre-dating Horizon.
In recent years Horizon made headlines around the world as the IT system at the centre of the British Post Office scandal.
In what was described as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, between 1999 and 2015 more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data.
But, following the transmission of ITV's 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office' and at the height of public outrage over the scandal, complaints began to surface about Horizon's predecessor system Capture.
In a report published in 2024, forensic accountants at Kroll Associates determined there was a "reasonable likelihood" Capture had resulted in similar false shortfalls in Post Office branches.
