The Post Office runs around 11,500 branches across the UK, selling postage and handling banking, bill payments, passport applications, driving licences and foreign currency. In many villages it is the only shop, and in a great many more it is the only place to draw cash since the banks closed.
Not the same as Royal Mail
A distinction most people still get wrong. Until 2012 they were one organisation; they were then separated.
- Royal Mail collects, sorts and delivers post. It was privatised in 2013.
- The Post Office runs the counters. It remains government-owned.
Most branches are not directly operated. They are franchises run by subpostmasters — self-employed people who typically run a village shop or newsagent with a post office counter inside it, taking a commission on transactions.
The Horizon scandal
Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office prosecuted more than 900 subpostmasters for theft, fraud and false accounting, on the basis of shortfalls shown by its Horizon accounting system, supplied by Fujitsu.
The shortfalls were not real. Horizon contained bugs that generated phantom discrepancies, and the Post Office knew the system was capable of error while insisting in court that it was not — and while denying that its own staff could remotely alter branch accounts, which they could.
What it did to people
Subpostmasters were told they were the only one having problems. Many remortgaged homes or emptied savings to cover shortfalls that did not exist. Some went to prison, including a pregnant woman. Marriages ended, businesses were lost, people were shunned in their own villages as thieves, and at least four took their own lives.
How it unravelled
Subpostmaster Alan Bates organised a group of victims and brought a civil case, which succeeded in the High Court in 2019, with the judge finding the Horizon system had not been remotely robust. Convictions began to be overturned from 2021, and a statutory public inquiry followed.
Progress remained slow until January 2024, when ITV broadcast the drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Public reaction was immediate and enormous, and within days the government announced primary legislation to quash the convictions en masse — an extraordinary constitutional step, taken because the courts could not move quickly enough.
Compensation is still being paid, and many victims died before receiving any.
Closures
The network has shrunk by thousands of branches since the 1980s. Government subsidy has been repeatedly cut, transactions have moved online, and subpostmaster commissions have fallen to the point where many franchises are not viable.
Each closure lands hardest on rural and elderly customers. With bank branches disappearing even faster, the Post Office has become the last place in many communities where cash can be withdrawn or deposited — a role it now performs for all the major banks under a shared agreement.