Investigate miscarriage of justice and quash Post Office Capture convictions, MPs say

The government has been called on by an influential committee of MPs to quash convictions obtained with data from the Post Office's Capture software, the predecessor to the faulty Horizon IT programme.

As well as creating "urgent" legislation to have these earlier convictions quashed, a new report from the Business and Trade Committee (BTC) also called on the government to urgently investigate the scale of this miscarriage of justice. The Capture accounting software had been used by up to 2,500 Post Office branches in the 1990s, just before the infamous Horizon system was introduced in 1999.

Using the incorrectly generated shortfalls from Horizon, hundreds were wrongfully convicted and many more went into debt, lost homes, and became ill as they attempted to plug the imagined financial gaps. A government-commissioned report in 2024 said it was likely that Capture caused accounting errors.

Following this, a state redress scheme for Capture victims who were not convicted opened last year. Sky News uncovered a legal report which showed the Post Office knew of Capture's flaws since 1992.

A legal attempt to overturn a Capture-era conviction is appearing before the Court of Appeal. Incomplete records mean that the current confirmed number of Capture cases may represent "the tip of another iceberg.