‘I’m a pain in the backside ... an awkward sod’: Alan Bates on love, justice and the Post Office scandal

Sir Alan Bates is at home in Llandudno with his wife Suzanne. Or, as he puts it, Lady Suzanne. You might know him better as Mr Bates from the Post Office scandal. He is the man who refused to give up when the Post Office told thousands of subpostmasters that they were inept or corrupt rather than acknowledging they were victims of flawed Horizon computer technology and managerial mendacity. It resulted in the biggest miscarriage of justice Britain has known – more than 900 people convicted of theft or false accounting, 236 jailed, numerous family breakdowns and at least four suicides.

For 20 years, few of us knew about the scandal. But gradually his campaign built up steam, thanks largely to his tireless work. In January, ITV turned it into a gripping docudrama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He was played by Toby Jones, and overnight the 69-year-old campaigner was a household name and we all knew about the scandal.

Congratulations on a great year, I say via video call. “Well, I don’t know whether I would say it’s a great year because we haven’t actually achieved our key aim, which is obtaining the money for the people. There’s been a lot of noise this year, but none of it has achieved what we set out to achieve, which is final resolution for the victims.” It’s classic Bates – measured, realistic and goal-oriented.

He’s telling me about the outstanding claims of most of the group he represents, the 555 post office operators who brought the original action to court. Mid-sentence, he bursts out laughing. “Sorry, I’m just watching our cat Missy knocking everything off the mantelpiece. She’s determined to get to the far end.” He is every bit as pedantic and resilient as the fictionalised version played by Jones. But he’s also different in significant ways – less nerdy and funnier. “Ah yes,” he says, when I point this out. “I couldn’t have done this unless I had a sense of humour. I couldn’t have kept going all these years. There’s been an awful lot of sadness and suffering in all this, but you’ve got to find funny moments. Most of them are when the Post Office carries on lying about this stuff when the rest of us all know differently.”

We whiz back a quarter of a century to the start. He and his partner, nee Suzanne Sercombe, had enjoyed significant careers in different professions before they opened their post office – he as a project manager in the heritage sector, she as a special needs teacher. The couple followed their work all over the country – Newcastle, Hampshire, Winchester, north Wales. By 1998 they fancied a life change and invested £65,000 in a post office that doubled up as haberdasher and craft shop in Craig-y-Don, Llandudno. In 1999, the Post Office rolled out Horizon, accounting and point-of-sale software developed and maintained by Fujitsu, to all its branches and subpost offices. Alan believed it would make life simpler and more efficient. “I thought it was great when it came in. We revamped our premises and built a huge extension.” But problems emerged from the off. The sums rarely added up. “Within weeks of the system going live, I had a £6,000 shortfall. And the system was so badly designed you couldn’t interrogate it easily.” The Post Office told subpostmasters that any shortfalls would have to be made up out of their own pockets. That’s when so many of the others panicked – putting their own money back into the accounts to make the figures balance.

Bates was more pragmatic. He went through everything manually, account by account, and found more than £5,000 of that money in duplicated transactions. “That was proof to me there was something not happy with the system.” He kept a record of all the inconsistencies in a suspense account and refused to pay back the shortfall. He wrote to regional officers to explain his problems, and never heard back. Over a two-year period, he and his staff made 507 calls to the Post Office helpline, 85 of them about Horizon. “I refused to accept the liability because I knew as soon as I accepted it, then boom! On 5 August 2003, I received a letter giving me three months’ notice and then they were just going to terminate me. For no reason.” Even now, 21 years on, he seems astonished by the letter. His voice rises disbelievingly as he spells outs the injustice for me. “They. Would. Not. Give. Me. A. Reason. For. Terminating. My. Contract.”

For the next three months, he and Suzanne explained to customers what was happening and asked them to sign a petition. Alan started a “Post Office victims” website and made a banner promoting it that hung it from the front of the shop. He was convinced that if he was having problems, other subpostmasters would be too, and he wanted to hear from them. In November 2003, his contract was terminated. He later discovered in Post Office notes that he was referred to as “unmanageable”. “We had paid £65,000 for the Post Office element of our business, so when they closed us down they basically walked off with that £65,000 and the earning potential we had.” Unlike many other subpostmasters, he was not charged with theft or false accounting.

How did he keep going after he was terminated? “I thought: ‘How are we going to survive financially and what do we do business-wise?’ If something’s thrown at me, I normally attack the problem. I like problem-solving.”

Suzanne is talking in the background. “Come and say hello to Simon,” he says. She joins us and I ask how she felt. “I was like most people. I found it frightening, and I found it more frightening because it was so unreasonable. We’d done nothing to deserve it. Quite the opposite. I wasn’t scared for him. I knew he had a lot of backbone and he would somehow get us to survive out of it. I didn’t know how, but I knew he would.”

Did he ever feel the Post Office was in danger of driving him to the edge? No, he says, because he knew he was in the right. “I was always annoyed with them. Don’t get mad, get even, innit!” He tells me of a time years before the scandal when he had been sold a holiday deal, and when he got to the airport he discovered the flights on offer never existed – it meant that rather than flying at a respectable time of day, they’d have to fly through the night. It was an inconvenience and an annoyance, but little more. “I took it to the trading standards. That case took five years. The company got fined a couple of thousand pounds. Then to recover the costs of the flights we had to go to another court, and they fought it again at that place. But I wouldn’t let go of it. And this was just to get back £100. It was just the principle of it. So if I was going to be like that for five years over £100, the Post Office had no chance!”

“He did it like a project,” Suzanne says. “Like he did in his previous career. Project managing.” How would she describe him? “Very tenacious,” she says.

Alan: “Pain in the backside.”

Suzanne: “Doesn’t get low.”

Alan: “Awkward sod.”

Suzanne: “A bit mocking at times if he thinks you’re not being so clever about something.”

Alan: “Sarcastic.”

I ask if he annoys her sometimes. “He sometimes does, yes. If he doesn’t back down I use an expression: ‘If you say so.’ And that annoys him.”

After setting up the website, they discovered that other subpostmasters were suffering far worse than them. Over time, they learned about those who had been charged and jailed. In some ways, it was easier for them to fight than others. “Many have family and dependants and it’s really hard to abandon family to focus on something like this. Whereas it’s just us two and a cat,” Bates says.

They never worked full-time again after losing their Post Office contract. Bates barely had time to focus on anything else but taking on the Post Office; Suzanne did shifts at an after-school club and worked as a cleaner. “We ended up scraping along financially, which wouldn’t have been the case if it hadn’t been for the Post Office.” Yet compared with many others, they were relatively wealthy. “We were fortunate in that when we sold the business we got out with enough money to pay for a little end-of-terrace house,” Bates says. The part-time work was mainly to subsidise the campaigning.

Did it affect their relationship? “On and off,” Suzanne says. “I got fed up that he was having to tuck himself away so much in this little office, speaking to lots of people except me. There were times when I felt left out. But when I thought of the suffering of all the others, I thought: I’ve just got to bite the bullet.”

Suzanne is horrified by what others have been through. She talks about Martin Griffiths, who took his own life. “Some of the things the Post Office did were thoroughly evil. There is so much stuff that couldn’t get in the drama, like the way the Post Office turned up at Martin’s inquest to monitor it. Then visiting his widow and giving her a day to agree to a settlement. They visited her at home, which they weren’t supposed to do … Totally evil.”

Bates nods. “The drama showed one person getting sectioned. What it didn’t show was the Post Office turning up at the hospital with their own doctor because they didn’t believe it was true.”

The only thing the Post Office cared about throughout, he says, was saving money and reputation. “They were thugs in suits. All they care about is the bottom line – whether it’s the bottom line for the Post Office or the bottom line for their bonuses. They don’t give a stuff about us.”

Earlier this year, Bates was offered an OBE. He said he would not accept it until the former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells was stripped of her CBE. “It was for her services to Post Office.” Again his voice rises incredulously. “That was so wrong after everything that had been exposed there.”

In February, Vennells was stripped of her CBE. Three months later, Bates was offered and accepted a knighthood for services to justice. “I suppose it’s recognition not just of me but of all the victims. And the fact that we’ve been recognised as a major embarrassment for the country, and people – well, some people! – are thankful that we’ve managed to expose it. Not the Post Office!”

In September, Bates and Suzanne got married after 34 years together. The ceremony took place on Richard Branson’s private Necker island in the Caribbean and was officiated by the Virgin tycoon. How did that come about? Bates laughs, and tells me about an interview he gave a few years ago when he said the couple had only had a couple of camping holidays in 20 years. “At the end I said offhand, I wouldn’t mind a holiday if Richard Branson fancies throwing one our way.” Sure enough, Branson got in touch.

When they set off to Necker, he didn’t tell Suzanne he was planning to propose and for them to get married there. What if she’d said no? “I checked it out. Ever since I’ve become a sir, there’ve been an awful lot of hints dropped!” He puts on a meek, lost voice that sounds nothing like Suzanne. “‘Oh, what am I then? No one knows what to call me,’ she said. I kept fobbing her off. I said, ‘I’ll sort it out after the holiday.’”

What was Branson like as an officiant? “Richard’s great. He’s so natural, such an easygoing person, you feel like you’ve known him for years. He was there with his friends and his family and it was just really relaxed.”

Has anybody accused him of getting grand with the knighthood and the marriage on a private island? “Most people have been extremely positive about the fact that we needed a break, and something like that was a super bonus. We know it’s a one-off.”

In the October budget, the Labour government announced it had put aside £1.8bn for victims of the scandal. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? “We don’t know what it’s for,” Suzanne says. “Is that another £1.8bn or does that encompass the £1.2bn the previous government mentioned? Does that cover legal fees and all the rest of it? Does it cover the cost of the inquiry? We know they’ve spent nearly £700m on lawyers so far. It’s utter madness. The only people who aren’t getting anything out of this are the victims.”

But they soon will be, hopefully. All the claims have now been submitted, and Bates has given the government till the end of the year to sort them out. However much victims get, he says, it will never make up for the lost years, the torment, and in some cases the loss of life. Bates and Suzanne know they got away relatively lightly, but it still robbed them of 20 years.

“I’d like to know what we would have done otherwise,” Suzanne says. She looks at Bates. “I think we would have grown strong together, but I don’t think we would have been public.”

“Oh God no,” Bates says with a wince.

Since the TV drama, they often get stopped when they are out, something they never bargained for or wanted. But there have been highs – the knighthood, the wedding, moving a step closer to a settlement. Most importantly, he says, the drama led to a tidal wave of support from the public. “What it was really successful in doing is getting across the human misery caused by a major British institution that was out of control. I know that if I want to fund a court case, I could go out now and ask the nation and I’m sure we could find that funding.” He’s right. There is possibly nobody with as much soft power in the country as the dogged former subpostmaster.

Does he think that come 31 December, he and Suzanne will be able to raise a glass and say it’s been a good year? “That will happen when the financial redress has been paid to all of the group. And we hope that will be in the early part of next year, after which we’ll look at celebrating with the rest of the group and reminiscing about those we have lost along the way and commiserating with their families.” Both are clearly desperate for that day to come. “That’s when we’ll really be able to have a break,” he says.