The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Corporate Governance: Lessons from the Post Office Scandal

The Institute of Directors (IoD) called the British Post Office scandal, also known as the Horizon IT scandal, ‘a failure of governance’ and ‘one of the worst  scandals in UK corporate and legal history’.

This year’s IoD Guernsey Annual Convention will explore how over 900 subpostmasters were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting due to faulty data. This miscarriage of justice highlighted the organisation’s many governance failures in decision-making, judgement and ethics.

Hear from Lee Castleton OBE, a former subpostmaster who was sued and subsequently bankrupted by the Post Office due to the faulty Horizon software. He helped to break the pivotal Computer Weekly story and went on to campaign for other victims of the scandal.

Lee’s story was featured in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office and the BBC documentary, Surviving the Post Office. Earlier this year, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for service to justice.

There will also be insights on governance failings highlighted in The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry from a governance expert. Attendees will hear some of the lessons for directors, such as the need for proper training, a need to be IT literate, the importance of asking the difficult questions and breaking out of the board bubble.

Glen Tonks, IoD Chair and host for the evening said: “The Post Office scandal highlighted the very ugly consequences of corporate governance failure. It caused immeasurable personal suffering and has undermined trust in existing frameworks of governance and business leadership.

“Our 2025 Annual Convention will lift the lid on the ‘bad and the ugly’, but we will also turn our attention to the ‘good’, focusing on the improvements to corporate governance that business leaders must now embed to ensure nothing of this magnitude can happen in the future.”