Justice versus conscience

Noel Thomas was sentenced to nine months in prison after being wrongly convicted in the Post Office IT scandal currently being highlighted in a new ITV drama – here he tells how it still affects him and his family to this day as their fight for justice continues.

A postmaster whose story was highlighted in new ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office spent his 60th birthday behind bars after being wrongly imprisoned in the scandal.

Noel Thomas was one of more than 700 people whose lives were ruined between 1999 and 2015 when they were falsely accused of theft and false accounting by the Post Office after the Horizon computer system they installed in thousands of branches caused cash to vanish from tills.

As part of their contracts, postmasters were expected to make up the shortfall themselves or risk losing their jobs. Noel, now 77, had worked for the Post Office since the 1960s and recalls how his trauma began in 2003 when he noticed sums of money inexplicably began disappearing from his books at his shop in Gaerwan on the island of Anglesey in Wales.

He was in regular contact with Post Office management, who reassured him they would “sort it out”. But one morning in October 2005, Noel’s life changed forever when two auditors knocked on his door at 7.30am and began to investigate him for an alleged £48,000 loss.

The true story of Noel Thomas and other victims is being told in ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office

To this day, Noel remembers every detail. He said the auditors came back with two policemen who he knew. They were then instructed to “cuff him” and take him into custody. The events of that morning would kickstart a gruelling 16-year-long ordeal for Noel, the ramifications of which are still impacting him and his family to this day.

Though he was innocent, Noel – like many others in his position – pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of false accounting to avoid a more serious charge of theft in the hope it would keep him out of jail. But this plan backfired and Noel was sentenced to nine months in prison, he would later describe as being like “hell on Earth”.

He even spent his 60th birthday behind bars. In the end, he only served 14 weeks of that sentence, but was wrongly sent to HMP Walton where he claims he was locked up for 24 hours a day for more than a week straight.

Noel told The Mirror : “I started in paradise and ended up in hell. For the first three years after getting out of prison I was on my arse, I had lost everything. I was a county councillor and a postmaster, earning around £45,000 a year between the two. It was a real fall from grace. They made me bankrupt and I had nothing. When I came home I didn’t like having the bedroom door shut. I have to get out and go for walks as much as possible. Even now I don’t like being shut up in the house or to be in one room too long.”

The repercussions of what happened extended beyond the postmasters to their families and Noel’s daughter Sian revealed she “still has nightmares about the day he was taken away”. She said: “I remember standing outside Caernarfon Crown Court holding his coat and his wallet and crying because it felt like he had died, not just gone to prison. I’ve put my life on hold for 16 years while I have been a secretary for him helping him fight this. They had to move in with me because they lost the house, we lived hand to mouth because we were surviving on just my income and my mother’s pension. He’s not a greedy man, he doesn’t want anything more than what he is owed.”

Unbeknown to him at the time, Noel was one of many postmasters and postmistresses caught up in the scandal – but all were told they were the only ones so the computer system couldn’t be to blame. Noel said: “Horizon was a beast, it was uncontrollable and the people behind it had no control, so they decided to defend it.”

It was only when Llandudno postmaster Alan Bates, who lost his shop and life savings but refused to accept responsibility or pay up, started a campaign for a public inquiry and encouraged other who had been affected to come forward that their voices began to be heard. But it would take years for those convicted to clear their names, which eventually happened at the Court of Appeal in 2021.

By this point many had lost their livelihoods, gone bankrupt and had their reputations left in tatters. Others, including Noel and a pregnant woman, were sent to prison. Tragically four took their own lives after failing to see a way out and some died before they could clear their names.

Though he had lost everything himself, Alan continued to push for justice and was instrumental in establishing campaign group Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) in 2009. This organisation, made up of former sub-postmasters, then began a legal battle against the Post Office that is still continuing to this day.

It was around this time that Noel, now living in a council bungalow after being forced to sell his house and working for parcel delivery service Yodel after he lost his job, caught wind of there being something larger amiss after watching an S4C report into the issue. He said: “From that, I realised that there were more people than myself. We started meeting in Warwickshire, and there were only about 30 of us in the beginning.”But the community “steadily grew” and momentum began to build.

Tragically, whilst battling to free his name, Noel and his family were dealt a heavy blow and lost one of his three children to cancer at the age of 51 in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

Mirror