Post Office ‘Horizon’ Appeals

2 Bedford Row’s Brian Altman QC, Simon Baker QC, Jacqueline Carey, Charlotte Brewer and Helen Jones, instructed by Nick Vamos and Hannah Laming of Peters & Peters, appeared on behalf of Post Office Ltd in the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, in relation to the 42 cases referred by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in what was the largest conjoined appeal ever heard by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division.

The appeals all related to individuals who had been prosecuted by the Royal Mail Group and post-2012 by Post Office Ltd between 2000 and 2013 relying on evidence from the Horizon accounting system which has since been found to suffer from bugs, errors and defects.

Leading a team of over 60 review counsel (including many from 2 Bedford Row), the counsel team oversaw an enormous post-conviction disclosure review exercise (with over 4 million documents subjected to review and substantially over 300,000 pages of material disclosed) to enable the Appellants to advance their appeals.

Following advice from the counsel team, the appeals of 39 of the 42 Appellants were conceded on grounds of limb one abuse of process (with four of those 39 appeals conceded on grounds of both limb one and limb two abuse of process). Three of the 42 appeals were opposed on all grounds.

The counsel team have also been advising the Post Office on the reviews of hundreds of further convictions in cases prosecuted by Royal Mail Group and the Post Office since 2000.