Ethical Failures in the Post Office Scandal
Our research examines the ethical dilemmas faced by lawyers involved in the Post Office Horizon Scandal, investigating how professional pressures, corporate culture, and systemic failures contributed to wrongful convictions.
The devastating human cost of the Post Office Scandal.
For well over a decade, a faulty computer system called Horizon produced inaccurate financial information that led to the wrongful prosecution of more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses. The Post Office privately prosecuted most of these cases – an average of one person wrongly accused every week between 1999 and 2015. Thousands more had money wrongfully taken by the Post Office. Many were removed unceremoniously from their businesses.
The human cost was devastating as our team’s work on the mental health impacts of unjust accusation have shown. Over 200 were wrongfully imprisoned and tragically, at least six people have taken their own lives. The Criminal Cases Review Commission said the scandal was "the most widespread miscarriage of justice" it had seen. As a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, Professor Richard Moorhead’s experience and expertise has been pivotal in informing policy and driving change adopted by HM Government and the Prime Minister to ensure compensations are fairer and delivered faster.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach.
Professor Moorhead and the team (Dr Karen Nokes, Professor Rebecca Helm, Dr Sally Day and Dr Emily Spearing) represent expertise in areas such as management science, law, psychology, and criminology. They are working with lawyers, Parliamentarians, policymakers, and professional regulators to lead debate and drive real change in attitudes, thinking, and behaviour.
The team’s work on Post Office lawyering was central to the Inquiry lifting legal professional privilege, showing how the work and culture of lawyers is central to the Scandal. Our unique approach, combining social science and legal expertise, gives a holistic view of lawyer decision-making that practitioners can recognise and act on. Robust evidence-based insights delivered in practical terms is central to driving change.
“Our research directly influenced the Public Inquiry, persuading them to examine the failures of lawyers and their contribution to corporate culture, alongside the failures to understand technology and broader mismanagement that is the focus of their work. Additionally, by producing key data from a deep dive into the experiences of the many people who faced plea bargaining decisions, we have impacted on compensation decisions and the Government’s historic decision to quash Horizon-based convictions en masse through an Act of Parliament. Through engaging with lawyers accustomed to practising in high pressure commercial contexts, our research is informing and influencing legal ethics into the future.”
Professor Richard Moorhead
Beyond the Scandal.
This three-year project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), builds on the team’s experiences in professional ethics, miscarriages of justice, criminology, and behavioural approaches to decision-making, and has been nominated for a prestigious research impact award by ESRC.
The team draws on theories of institutional logics and professional pathology, and is working with practising lawyers to build causal pathways and look at the role of lawyers in the professional and ethical failures involved.
As well as widening the scope of the Post Office Scandal Inquiry, the work is championing rigorous approaches to research focused on lawyers and the future of legal practice. Professional regulators and other interest groups have seized on their work as part of a strategic focus on lawyers’ ethics that the research itself helped stimulate.
It’s key to note that this brand-new research into lawyers’ ethics examines the complex interplay between the criminal justice system, an often toxic and arrogant corporate culture, and the capacity of groupthink to draw in junior and senior, sometimes very senior, lawyers.
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Richard Moorhead FAcSS
Professor of Law and Professional Ethics
Professor Rebecca Helm
Professor of Law and Empirical Legal Studies
Richard Moorhead FAcSS
Professor of Law and Professional Ethics
Richard Moorhead is Professor of Law and Professional Ethics and sits on the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board advising the Department for Business and Trade on Post Office compensation schemes. With 30 years of experience researching lawyers and legal services drawing on law, psychology, sociology, management science, and economics, working with governments, NGOs, and regulators, he now focuses on lawyers’ ethics.
Founder of the lawyerwatch.blog, he has recently completed a project on ethics and the rule of law for the Legal Services Board with Steven Vaughan. He is currently working on the Post Office Scandal with Karen Nokes, Sally Day, and Rebecca Helm on a three-year ESRC funded project examining the impacts and causal pathways of ethical error.
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Professor Rebecca Helm
Professor of Law and Empirical Legal Studies
Rebecca Helm is Professor of Law and Empirical Legal Studies, and a UK Research and Innovation Fellow. She is recognised as one of the leading experts in the UK and internationally in applying behavioural science to the legal system, most notably in the area of guilty plea decision-making. She founded and directs the Evidence-Based Justice Lab, whose miscarriages of justice registry has been utilised by hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world since its formation in 2021. Her research has been published in leading outlets in both law and psychology, and has been widely cited internationally by academics and courts, and she has recently published a monograph, How Juries Work, with Oxford University Press.
She is currently working on a UKRI-funded project examining testimony evaluation, as well as collaborative projects focused on examining the Post Office Scandal (with Richard Moorhead, Karen Nokes, and Sally Day), developing more effective models of evidence synthesis and evaluation (with Jon Williamson and Trish Greenhalgh), and utilising compulational modelling techniques to examine guilty plea decision-making (with Tina Zottoli, Vanessa Edkins, and Mike Bixter).
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