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POST OFFICE documents containing “utterly abhorrent” racist terms to describe wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters were used internally and updated as recently as 2013, according to an internal investigation.
The company launched the probe last year after documents obtained by Horizon scandal campaigners found fraud investigators were asked to group suspects based on racial features.
Between 2000 and 2015, more than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted based on information from Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon accounting system used in Post Offices.
Lawyers for the company also shared the documents amid an investigation into Horizon as recently as 2019.
A document used by the company’s security team used identity codes, each with language to describe a person’s ethnic origin, for potential suspects.
One description used the term “negroid types.”
Other archaic and offensive terms were used to describe individuals as “Siamese,” “Malaya” and “Chinese/Japanese types.”
Post Office group chief Karen McEwan called the language “utterly abhorrent,” adding: “I would like to reiterate Post Office’s condemnation of its usage.”
The investigation found an email document using this language dating back to 2008.
The language was copied from documentation from 1987, with the review finding that identity coding was first used by British police in the 1970s.
But it added that an employee who worked in the security and investigations department was “linked to the document in 2009 and 2019.”
A document using offensive identity codes was most recently used internally and amended in 2013, the review said.
Barrister Jeremy Scott-Joynt, who was external counsel to the Project May investigation, said he believed it was “unlikely” the use of the identity codes “put people with any specific ethnicity at a particular disadvantage.”
But he added that the fact offensive language survived in documentation “might indicate a tendency to be blind to any ethnic partiality” during investigations linked to the Horizon scandal.
An inquiry into the scandal is ongoing.
