The statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal cost less to run than the money paid by the Post Office to one company for legal representation during the four-year process.
In its latest financial statement, the public inquiry reported spending of £26m for its most recent financial year.
Inquiry costs include the salaries of inquiry chair and assessors, secretariat, legal team, and counsel cost. Scandal victims, who are core participants in the inquiry, had legal fees paid by the inquiry, and then there are costs including hiring event locations.
The latest figures added to the total cost of the inquiry between 2000 and 2024, around £48m, still comes to £12m less than the £86m the Post Office paid Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) for representation at the inquiry.
As revealed by Computer Weekly last month, a response to a freedom of information request from a campaigner known on X as Monsieur Cholet revealed that from 2020 up to and including 2025, the Post Office spent £83m with HSF for support as the legal representative of the Post Office at the public inquiry, and £3m on its support for Post Office witnesses with their statements to the inquiry.
This figure also dwarfs the £50m cost of the Metropolitan Police-led national investigation into the Post Office scandal, known as Operation Olympos. “Accounting officers need to be accountable,” the campaigner said.
When told the figures last month, campaigning former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates said: “It is utter madness that a publicly owned corporation is allowed to waste so much public money on trying to justify its years of incompetence and mismanagement and cover the backs of its executives, who all seemed to be suffering from corporate amnesia.”
He called for a Public Accounts Committee investigation into the spending.
Evidence gathering
The public inquiry began in 2021 and has seen seven phases of evidence gathering. In July, when publishing his first report, inquiry chair Wyn Williams said he could not rule out the “real possibility” that 13 people took their own lives as a result of their treatment by the Post Office.
Last month, when Computer Weekly asked The Department of Business and Trade whether the taxpayer funds paid to HSF for its work on the inquiry were justified, it said it would not comment because this was a matter for the Post Office.
In total, the Post Office paid HSF £188m from Sept 2014 to March 2025. This included £72m for its involvement in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, which was set up to compensate subpostmasters affected by the scandal.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
Read: Everything you need to know about the Post Office scandal.
