Taxpayers paid one legal firm double the amount in fees to represent the Post Office in the Horizon scandal statutory public inquiry than they paid for the actual inquiry.
The publicly owned Post Office paid Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) £86m for services related to its representation at Post Office scandal public inquiry between 2000 and 2025. Meanwhile, according to the public inquiry’s financial statements, the total cost between 2000 and 2024 was around £48m. The public inquiry financial statement that covers 2025 has not yet been published.
A response to a freedom of information request from campaigner known on X as Monsieur Cholet revealed that from 2020 up to and including 2025, the Post Office spent £83m with HSF for support as the legal representative of the Post Office at the public inquiry, and £3m on its support for Post Office witnesses with their statements to the inquiry.
Campaigning former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates said: “It is utter madness that a publicly owned corporation is allowed to waste so much public money on trying to justify its years of incompetence and mismanagement and cover the backs of its executives who all seemed to be suffering from corporate amnesia.”
He called for a government investigation into the spending: “It should now be a matter of urgency for the Public Accounts Committee to investigate all, and especially the legal, costs associated with the Horizon Scandal from when Post Office first started to cover up the truth, i.e. the day they signed the first contract with Fujitsu.”
For comparison, while HSF was paid £86m for its services to the Post Office to support the public inquiry, in the entire public inquiry to date the professional fees and the salaries of inquiry chair and assessors, secretariat, legal team and counsel cost £18m. Scandal victims, who are core participants in the inquiry, had legal fees paid, which added up to about £10m.
The public inquiry began in 2021 and has seen seven phases of evidence gathering. In July, when publishing his first report inquiry, chair Wyn Williams said he could not rule out the “real possibility” that 13 people took their own lives as a result of their treatment by the Post Office.
Computer Weekly asked The Department of Business and Trade, which owns the Post Office, whether the taxpayer funds paid to HSF for its work on the inquiry are justified. It said it would not comment because this is a matter for the Post Office.
The Post Office was also asked whether the level of funding was justified, but it had not responded when this article was published.
In total, the Post Office paid HSF £188m from Sept 2014 to March 2025. This included £72m for its involvement in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, which was set up to compensate subpostmasters affected by the scandal.
Separately, last month it emerged that the Metropolitan Police lead investigation into the Post Office scandal, Operation Olympos, will cost around £50m.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).