'I was so proud to be the postmistress of Dukinfield'

Della Robinson was one of the many subpostmasters affected by the Horizon accounting scandal. She tells us her story.

Della’s post office was on 131 King Street, a tall red-bricked terrace in Dukinfield. The branch was in the front room, facing out onto the road where the traffic rolled past. Inside there was a small stationery shop and a few counters where her staff served customers. Often her three grandchildren would come in to visit her when she was working, and the “old dears” who were waiting in the queue would give them a pound coin or slip sweets across the counter.

It wasn’t unusual either for people to stick their heads around the door and ask Della if they could leave their shopping inside with her while they nipped to appointments or ran errands. It was a small team — four staff members, including her. Running the post office was hard work — sometimes she’d put in seven days a week — but it was something she loved. “It wasn’t a job, it was a pleasure,” she recalls.

Della Robinson, photographed in Dukinfield earlier this month. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.

Della, 54, was born in nearby Ashton and grew up on King Street in a terraced house similar to the one her post office was in. She sang in a choir at the church, and would go horse riding with the vicar’s daughter. There is a photo of the two of them brushing a palomino pony called Sunny on a driveway.

Dukinfield was the type of place where children played in the street and grew up together. Even now, the town retains that same spirit: caring, close-knit. A few days before we met, Della’s next-door neighbours popped over to her house with food after breaking their Ramadan fast.

All her family are from Dukinfield — ‘Ducky’ as she fondly calls it. Her father Derek “brought the bread home,” working at a concrete firm. Her mother Hilda looked after the children — there were five siblings — cooked and kept the house. Derek loved to play the football pools, religiously ticking off the numbers each Sunday.

The one time Hilda played, she won (Derek was “miffed”) and used the money to buy carpets for the house. It was a working class home and Hilda was the type of person who would “give anyone her last teabag.” “It was a proper family home, with loads of love and care,” she says.

Della and her partner Michael, 55, have been together for 38 years. She knew him from school, but “I didn’t speak to him because he was a snob,” she laughs. “He did all his nice homework.” He’s a private, thoughtful man — in photos he has a flop of blonde hair and a big smile. The first time they met was in The Cavern, a pub in Ashton, where she asked him out for her best friend. He bought their first house together when he was a joinery apprentice aged 18.

Della wanted to be a hairdresser and left school at 16. Before the post office, she worked in various places: at a laundry and in a Vymura factory in Hyde where she’d pull giant crates filled with rolls of wallpaper and wrap them with a machine. After that, she worked at Kay-Metzeler’s, a manufacturing firm that made aeroplane seats.

The couple have two boys, Steven, 36, and Daniel, 28, and Della’s health declined when they were young. One morning she was walking them to school and suddenly had a “really bad” migraine. Shortly afterwards she experienced a seizure. She went to Sheffield for a hospital appointment, and a cerebral angiogram found blood clots on her brain. She takes medication for epilepsy and struggles with pain in her knees because of arthritis.

Della Robinson, photographed in Dukinfield earlier this month. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.

When the building on King Street, with its post office branch, came up for sale, Michael asked her: “How’d you fancy doing it, Dell?” He wanted to turn the upper floors into flats, and the income would go towards their retirement. She remembers replying something like “I’ll give it a go!” She’d been out of work for a number of years because of her health. They took it over in 2006. “I was so proud to be the postmistress of Dukinfield,” she says. “I’d achieved something after all those years of being ill.”

A new system: Horizon

In 2010, four years after Della took over the post office, a new computer system was implemented in her branch, called Horizon. It was meant to simplify accounting in branches and increase efficiency, and was purported to be “the most advanced and secure electronic banking and retail network in Europe.”

When it was installed, the new computers had to be left on overnight. Della was given a booklet to train her staff and someone came in to show them how to use the system. But the new system baffled her. The branch had gone from a computer “that a kid could use”, to a large screen where icons would flash. “Everything completely changed. It was horrendous.”

According to a document produced by Fujitsu, the Japanese technology giant that owned and operated the Horizon system, Della wasn’t the only one who had questions. “Approximately five thousand calls were received each week by the Helpdesk, due to the Counter staffs' lack of computer experience,” the document says.

Della’s post office branch in its new location, 61 King Street. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.

After Horizon was installed, there wasn’t one defining moment that she could pinpoint when things started to go wrong. “It was strange,” she says. Things happened in “dribs and drabs.” More transaction corrections were appearing on the screens, figures weren’t adding up. Sometimes they would be missing £40, other times it was £200. If she was off-shift, her staff would ring her in a panic telling her they were missing money. Horizon was so stressful that one of her employees quit.

When balancing day arrived, “You’d be up at 12 o’ clock on Wednesday and you were in tears trying to find this bloody money,” she says. “Even though you knew you hadn’t taken it.” She would phone the helpline at least “once a week” but they never returned her calls.

Della says she told her area manager that money was going missing. “Don’t worry, it’ll come back,” they told her. She tried to plug the gaps with her own savings and Michael’s earnings. “It was frightening,” she recalls. “It made you physically sick because you knew you couldn’t balance or put the money in.”

An example of a Horizon computer. Photo: Fujitsu

Things came to a head when auditors arrived out of the blue in 2012. It was the first audit the branch had received since she took it over in 2006. They were already in the post office by the time she got there and she says they didn’t talk to her as they carried out their work. It was like “they had more powers than the police,” she says.

She was told that £17,000 was unaccounted for. The auditors took the keys off her and she wasn’t allowed back into the building. Later she was suspended by the Post Office over the phone. The only time she was permitted to go inside was to clear the place out.

Soon the police were involved, and on 30 November 2012, Della was convicted at Manchester Crown Court. Michael came with her, as well as a member of the National Federation of Postmasters. She wanted to plead not guilty but her counsel advised her to plead guilty to false accounting to avoid a prison sentence. “I was scared,” she says. “I was scared I wasn’t going to be home for Christmas.”

She was sentenced to 180 hours of community service and placed in an Age UK shop in Ashton, where she sorted out the clothes. “I’m just helping out,” she’d tell people she knew from Dukinfield if they came in and saw her. Many people who knew her didn’t know about her conviction, and those who did tended not to ask her about it, she says.

Della outside the house where her post office branch used to be, 131 King Street. The post office was in the front room. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.

The family’s finances collapsed. 131 King Street was repossessed, so Della and Michael lost not just their livelihood but their retirement investment too. “We weren’t in control of what was happening,” she says. On the outside, they tried to stay strong, but on the inside “it was tears, worrying where the next meal was coming from.” At times their sons helped pay bills.

‘Put the radio on’

Not long after Della’s conviction, a friend called her up — “Dell, put the radio on!” A former subpostmaster called Alan Bates, who made one of the first known reports to the Post Office about the Horizon flaws, was speaking about losing his own branch in Craig-y-Don, Llandudno. He had helped to set up a campaign group called Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA).

After listening to Alan, she rang him up and realised her experience was far from unique. He had spoken to dozens of postmasters who had been accused of false accounting after massive discrepancies showed up on their Horizon computers. His meticulous notes and correspondence with the Post Office made him confident that it was the system’s fault — not his own. He found lawyers and funders who were willing to help the group bring court action against the Post Office, which finally began in November 2018.

It was successful. In the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Coulson compared the treatment of subpostmasters by the Post Office to the way Victorian factory owners treated their workers. A second trial in 2019 revealed that a “Known Errors Log” showed thousands of Horizon bugs. The judgement was devastating, with the judge describing the Post Office’s evidence as “the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat.”

Last month, on 22 April, Della met some of the other members of the JFSA: people who had seen their livelihood stripped away as she had. “They’re absolutely amazing people,” she says. “It takes a lot of courage for them to fight like they have.” The next day, she and 38 others had their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting quashed by the Court of Appeal.

It means the case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history. It is now thought that as many as 900 subpostmasters may have been convicted as part of the scandal. “As those cleared left the Royal Courts of Justice, some weeping, they were cheered by supporters and other former Post Office workers,” The Guardian reported.

“I was a normal person, but I’d been convicted of something I hadn’t done,” says Della. “I wouldn’t even pinch a Mars Bar.” Unlike other subpostmasters who were ostracized and forced to leave the communities where they had grown up and lived, she and Michael stayed in Dukinfield, carrying on as best they could.

A few years ago Della rescued a scraggly bay colt that was destined for the knacker’s yard. He’s now a handsome pony, with a velvety muzzle and a thick, shiny forelock. “It’s knowing I’ve saved a life,” she says. The past nine years have been “pure hell”, but the pony, along with her family, has helped her get through the bad times. They’ve all stuck together.

Della is in poor health. Walking is painful — she has stage 4 osteoarthritis throughout her body. Because of her epilepsy she doesn’t go out much, but as a lifelong United fan she enjoys watching the football on TV and hopes to get back inside the pubs for the games. She was put on antidepressants, but they turned her into “a zombie.” She remembers thinking: “You’ve got to fight this for yourself.”

Della and Michael find it difficult to talk about what happened. The experience took its toll on them both. When things were at their worst, Michael struggled to get out of bed because of depression. He worked throughout everything to keep them afloat. She thought he would leave her: “Because I lost the post office, I thought was going to lose him too.” But he has never blamed her for what happened.

The experience of being falsely accused has impacted her deeply, and has damaged her mental health. She says she has lost her trust in people and lives with the fear that someone will take things away from her. She hears people banging on the front door at night, when they’re both asleep. “I won’t be a minute,” she calls out, but Michael tells her there’s no one there.