Family talk of Post Office Horizon scandal impact

The family of a former sub-postmaster falsely accused of stealing £25,000 has spoken of the deeply personal impact the scandal has had.

Lee Castleton was one of hundreds of people wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office after a faulty IT accounting system showed money was missing from branches of the service.

Daughter Millie was only eight in 2004 when her father was accused of stealing from his branch in Bridlington but said she still remembered the crisis hitting the family hard.

"You start to think about how you can change or reduce yourself in a way so that you're not asking or putting any strain or anything," she said.

Millie explained that although she wasn't aware of the full picture as a child, she "learned a lot by just listening into conversations" on the staircase.

"You do notice little things when it comes to just the way you're living - it's like 'we're not doing as much together as a family', Dad's away more often," she said.

"Everything's a little bit more conservative about in general activities, and you start to pick up on those things.

"It starts to change your behaviour in terms of what you're prepared to ask for or do personally."

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses based on information from Horizon, a computer system.

The scandal has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice the UK has ever seen.

Castleton, who now lives in Scarborough, and said his close family bond had been a "coping mechanism", after the legal battle with the Post Office left him bankrupt.

"We were just annihilated really, and the impacts to the family reached so much deeper than just financial," he said.

"At 35 years old, we owned a three-bedroom detached bungalow without a mortgage - by 45, we had nothing."

"The wider thing than that was really the public interactions which were very difficult to take."

In 2024, Castleton was appointed OBE in the King's New Year Honours, in recognition of his fight for justice on behalf of other victims.

His story was part of ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which came out the same year.

Castleton is currently pursuing a civil case against the Post Office and Fujitsu.

Looking to the future, wife Lisa said she would love to "get up one morning and never think about the Post Office again".

"I'm just tired - because it's gone on for over 20 years. So it's a very long time," she said.

"You just don't realise how difficult, even the very simple things became," Castleton added.

"And I'm just glad that we don't have to do anything like that again ever, because it was so terrible."

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