Alan Bates (subpostmaster)

Sir Alan Bates (born 1954) is a former subpostmaster and a leading campaigner for victims of the British Post Office scandal, in which thousands of subpostmasters were accused of dishonesty when faulty Post Office accounting software created shortfalls in their accounts. After the Post Office terminated his contract in 2003 over a false shortfall, he sought out other subpostmasters in the same position and went on to found the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance in 2009. The group took the Post Office to court and, following two favourable judgments in Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd, accepted a settlement of £57.75 million, which left the 555 claimants with little money after legal fees were paid. Bates has continued to campaign for fair compensation for subpostmasters. He was knighted in June 2024 for his campaigning and the following month received an honorary degree from Bangor University.

Alan Bates was born in 1954 in Liverpool. He studied graphic design in Wrexham.

As a project manager in the heritage sector, he worked on the installation of electronic point of sale systems for castles in Wales and for the Eureka! museum in Halifax.

In the late 1990s, Bates and his partner Suzanne Sercombe, a special needs teacher, decided on a career-change and began looking for a Post Office branch to run. In May 1998, they took over The Wool Post, a post office and haberdashery shop in Craig-y-Don in Llandudno, Wales, investing £65,000 in the post office side of the business. Bates was appointed subpostmaster after undergoing security checks and producing a business plan.

In the early 2000s, the Post Office rolled out Horizon, new accounting and point-of-sale software developed and maintained by Fujitsu, to all its branches and sub-post offices. It arrived at Craig-y-Don in October 2000 and problems emerged almost immediately. By December 2000 the system was showing an unexplained £6,000 shortfall, which was eventually reduced to about £1,000. Bates complained repeatedly to Post Office management that the Horizon system was unreliable, that its reporting facilities did not allow tracing of events behind shortfalls, and that it was wrong that operators were obliged to make good on shortfalls caused by the software. Over a two-year period he and his staff made 507 calls to the Post Office helpline, 85 of which related to Horizon. His contract was terminated with no reason given in November 2003. Although he was not prosecuted, he lost the £65,000 which he had invested in the business. In April 2024, when giving evidence at the Horizon IT public inquiry, Bates was shown internal Post Office documents in which his termination was said to be due to him being "unmanageable" and which referred to him as someone who "struggled with accounting".

Bates told Radio New Zealand that he and his partner Suzanne were luckier than many of the other subpostmasters:

Even though the post office was taken away, we still had the retail side of our business, which we ran for a few years… We were fortunate enough to come out with enough to buy outright a small property for ourselves… We both had basic jobs and also I went back to college to [study] more on computer sciences and stuff of that sort, which was very useful going forward. It did help once we started to get into court and on the technical aspects of all of this.

After his contract was terminated by the Post Office, Bates sought to highlight his concerns. A letter to his local newspaper was published in October 2003 and led to an article in which he was quoted as saying that he would fight for as long as it takes to right the wrong done to himself and the people of Craig-y-Don. He set up a website called Post Office Victims, inviting subpostmasters who had had similar experiences to come forward. In May 2009, Computer Weekly broke the story of the Post Office scandal, featuring the cases of Alan Bates and six other subpostmasters. The story was taken up by BBC Wales's current affairs programme Taro Naw, which included an interview with Bates and was broadcast in September 2009. Bates then decided it was time to organise a meeting with other subpostmasters who had experienced similar difficulties with Horizon. He chose the village hall in the Warwickshire village of Fenny Compton as the venue of the November 2009 meeting, picking a place in the middle of England at random. About 20 to 25 former subpostmasters attended, many bringing partners, and discussed ways to seek redress from the Post Office. The group decided on the name Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA).