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The Post Office Scandal and the Transformation of a Community

I live on the outskirts of Bangor, in a neighbourhood named Glanadda. It is built around Caernarfon Road, one of the main routes into and out of the city. Glanadda is a residential area bordered by several big box stores - Matalan, B&M, Go Outdoors, Aldi, and the just opened Food Warehouse, to name a few. A couple of minutes' drive away is the Tesco Superstore. The retail parks on Caernarfon Road have gradually replaced the hollowed out High Street as Bangor's shopping centre. If you live in Bangor or its surrounding villages and you need to buy something - providing you can't get it online - this is where you come. But if you require a more bespoke service, such as paying a bill, transferring money, or posting a parcel, then Caernarfon Road has nothing to offer you. These services are often crucial to communities, particularly for residents who can't drive, or who rely on consistent and familiar human assistance such as that you'd find at a post office branch. There are just two post offices in Bangor, and the nearest one for people who live in Glanadda is in the middle of the city, at least a 20 minute walk away for a young, healthy person like me. 

It hasn't always been this way. I learned recently that, until 2011, there used to be a post office right here in Glanadda. This is what it looks like today.

Before it was closed, this post office was run by Damian Owen, a local man who lived in Menai Bridge. Owen was one of over 700 subpostmasters caught up in the largest miscarriage of justice in British history. In 2011, Owen was convicted of stealing £25,000 from the Post Office, and he was jailed for 8 months. Hundreds of subpostmasters faced similar convictions, despite all protesting that they had done nothing wrong. As Nick Wallis - who spent ten years reporting this scandal - shows, these convictions were all based on incorrect shortfalls in local branch accounts calculated by the Horizon IT and accounting system that the Post Office had installed in the late 1990s. The Post Office refused to accept that there were problems with Horizon, in many cases convincing individual subpostmasters that they were the only one facing allegations of theft. Eventually, subpostmasters organised a campaign to challenge these convictions and were able to overturn many. A government inquiry into the scandal is underway, and a compensation scheme is being set up for the subpostmasters who were wrongfully convicted. This doesn't change the life-altering harms these prosecutions caused. Some subpostmasters died before seeing their convictions overturned. Seema Misra was pregnant when she received a 15 month sentence in 2010. 

Damian Owen was one of the subpostmasters who saw his conviction quashed in 2021, alongside Misra and 37 others. He had waited ten years for justice. Owen lost his home, missed his daughter's first Christmas, and ultimately moved away from North Wales. These were the human costs caused by a faulty IT system, and by the contempt and suspicion the Post Office held towards its subpostmasters.

The Glanadda post office branch that Owen ran was closed soon after his conviction, leaving the local community without a vital institution. It's just a coincidence that this loss occurred as Caernarfon Road was being transformed into a hub of retail parks, but the closure of the branch, a small scale community hub, compounded this transformation. 

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