Post Office victim Janet Skinner tells of 'life sentence' from scandal as jail term followed by major health problems

A Yorkshire victim of the Post Office IT scandal said she has suffered a “life sentence” as a result of her treatment after suffering major health problems following being her wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

Janet Skinner, from Hull, told an inquiry into the scandal about the ongoing impact she has suffered after receiving a nine-month jail sentence in 2007 over money missing from the branch she had run in North Bransholme.

The mother-of-two was blamed for a £59,000 shortfall in the accounts by the Post Office which was actually down to problems with its IT system.

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Her conviction was finally quashed last year in the Court of Appeal.

Janet Skinner explains the ongoing impact of her wrongful conviction at the hands of the Post Office.Janet Skinner explains the ongoing impact of her wrongful conviction at the hands of the Post Office.
Janet Skinner explains the ongoing impact of her wrongful conviction at the hands of the Post Office.

She is among more than 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses who were prosecuted between 2000 and 2014, based on information from the Horizon IT system, installed and maintained by Fujitsu.

In December 2019 a High Court judge ruled that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “material risk” that shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.

The inquiry heard Ms Skinner had flagged up the accounting discrepancies at her branch up herself and had rang a helpline relating to the IT system 116 times because of problems with it.

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“When you rang, it was like they were reading from a script. If they couldn’t help you, they would say ‘You need to make it good yourself’,” she explained.

Post Office investigators were eventually called in and Ms Skinner said she was initially “relieved” at their involvement as she hoped they would get to the bottom of the problems.

But she was suspended from work and told she was being charged with theft and false accounting.

Ahead of trial and despite her insisting on her innocence, her solicitor advised her to take the Post Office’s plea bargain to plead guilty to false accounting in exchange for the theft charge being dropped. She said she was told this would help her avoid a custodial sentence.

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But after a meeting with probation officers in which she said she had done nothing wrong, she was sentenced to prison in February 2007.

Ms Skinner said she had not told her children, who were 17 and 14 at the time, about the case before that point and had to ring them from Wakefield Prison.

“My daughter wouldn’t speak to me because she was an emotional wreck,” she said.

“I didn’t want to speak to her - I felt so ashamed. I was supposed to be their protector and show them how to do the right thing. I did and I went to jail anyway.”

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She said she refused to allow her children to visit her in prison as she did not wish for them to have to live with the memory of seeing her in jail.

She was released after three months on a tag and sold her house in order to pay back the £11,000 in costs the Post Office was seeking from her.

But she did not realise that the Post Office had not received the funds from the sale as that money was swallowed up by the penalty from the mortgage company for settling the mortgage early.

Living in rented accommodation, she did not receive the letters about the outstanding money being sent to her old address from the Post Office and only found out about the situation when a friend told her the local newspaper was carrying a story saying a warrant was out for her arrest.

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After handing herself into the courts, she had to borrow money from her ex-husband to repay £1,500 that was demanded immediately.

She told the inquiry that the Post Office had agreed to keep the £59,000 charge from the original shortfall against her as a way of settling the matter - meaning if she ever came into money, they would be able to claim it from her. She said despite her conviction being quashed, it has not yet been confirmed whether that situation no longer applies or if the money is still owed.

Four weeks after the second court case, Ms Skinner ended up in hospital for four months after becoming paralysed from the neck down and being told she would never walk again.

When asked what the cause of her illness was, she said: “It was stress. My immune system was so low, my body attacked itself.”

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While she has recovered the ability to walk, Ms Skinner said she has ongoing health problems and has been unable to work since.

After years of legal battles, Ms Skinner’s conviction was finally quashed in April last year alongside 38 other victims.

She said that day was a special moment, especially as her daughter had accompanied her to the Court of Appeal.

“I was absolutely elated. If I could have bottled that experience that day and the joy it bought, I would have captured it.

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“I had protected my children from it for such a long time, to be able to share that day was just amazing.”

Ms Skinner said that she hopes the inquiry will hold those responsible for the mass prosecutions to account.

“Too many people are involved in what has gone wrong, within the Government, the Royal Mail, the Post Office, the legal system, the legal teams - so many people that have wronged all these people and destroyed so many people’s lives.

“We need answers from it.

“People think we are here because of money and people automatically think all we are bothered about is compensation.

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“The only thing compensation will ever change is our financial stability.

“We have got a life sentence for what has been done. We will never erase memories of what’s happened over these past 20 years.

“We have got to live with that but you get the people at the top who just basically say, ‘I’m sorry, we made a mistake’. You made a mistake by destroying people. What makes them above the law and above everybody else? If we break the law, we get penalised, They are breaking the law and nothing comes of it.”

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