British Post Office used racist slur to describe black, Asian suspects in Horizon IT scandal

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted based on information from a faulty accounting system

The company condemned the ‘abhorrent’ language investigators used to group suspects based on racial features

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Many sub-postmasters in the UK were wrongfully prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting, theft and fraud. Photo: Reuters

Published: 3:03pm, 27 May 2023

Britain’s Post Office prosecutors tasked with investigating sub-postmasters in a notorious miscarriage of justice involving a faulty IT system used a racial slur to classify black workers, according to documents obtained by campaigners.

Fraud investigators were asked to group suspects based on racial features and used a racist term for staff from the colonial era of the 1800s which refers to people of African descent.

The Post Office Horizon scandal, which has been described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”, saw hundreds of innocent postmasters convicted.

The information came to light through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request obtained by Eleanor Shaikh, a supporter of the more than 700 branch managers who were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 on theft, fraud and false accounting charges.

The document, thought to have been published in 2008, asked investigators if the suspects were “Negroid Types”.

Other categories on the document include “Chinese/Japanese Types” and “Dark Skinned European Types”.