Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

14/1/24 Edinburgh Live: Edinburgh mum died alone in homeless hostel in 2009, age 47, after 'Post Office scandal' killed her. Fiona McGowan was accused of stealing £30k from the Post Office due to faulty software. Now 15 years on, her children want justice. edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh…

Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

8 hours ago

Bless her. Yes I believe so. A terrible tragedy and a stain on our Nation. It must be answered with accountability. Never be allowed to happen again.

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@CastletonLee 14/1/24 Edinburgh Live: Edinburgh mum died alone in homeless hostel in 2009, age 47, after 'Post Office scandal' killed her. Fiona McGowan was accused of stealing £30k from the Post Office due to faulty software. Now 15 years on, her children want justice. edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh…

14/1/24 Scot Daily Rec: PO/Fujitsu Horizon IT cover up+management +lawyer conduct scandal: 2004 SPM Fiona McGowan of Parson’s Gn Edinburgh accused of £30k theft. She paid but family +life were ruined. Children taken into care +she died in homeless hostel. dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-…

Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

8 hours ago

Bless her. Yes I believe so. A terrible tragedy and a stain on our Nation. It must be answered with accountability. Never be allowed to happen again.

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@CastletonLee 14/1/24 Scot Daily Rec: PO/Fujitsu Horizon IT cover up+management +lawyer conduct scandal: 2004 SPM Fiona McGowan of Parson’s Gn Edinburgh accused of £30k theft. She paid but family +life were ruined. Children taken into care +she died in homeless hostel. dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-…

7/2/24 Youtube: In 2001, Fiona McGowan in Scotland became one of the 1st Horizon victims but was not prosecuted due to insufficient evidence. PO still demanded £30k. Her 2 young sons were taken into care & she died in a homeless hostel aged 47. youtube.com/watch?v=x-pZP6…

Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

8 hours ago

Bless her. Yes I believe so. A terrible tragedy and a stain on our Nation. It must be answered with accountability. Never be allowed to happen again.

5 8 30 1K 0

@CastletonLee 7/2/24 Youtube: In 2001, Fiona McGowan in Scotland became one of the 1st Horizon victims but was not prosecuted due to insufficient evidence. PO still demanded £30k. Her 2 young sons were taken into care & she died in a homeless hostel aged 47. youtube.com/watch?v=x-pZP6…

6/2/24 ITVX: Fiona McGowan in Scotland died at 47 in a health spiral after PO charges of false accounting. She had previously run successful businesses, until she opened a PO in 2001. "Losses" mounted to £30k. She was shunned & children put into care. itv.com/news/2024-02-0…

Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

8 hours ago

Bless her. Yes I believe so. A terrible tragedy and a stain on our Nation. It must be answered with accountability. Never be allowed to happen again.

5 8 30 1K 0

@CastletonLee 6/2/24 ITVX: Fiona McGowan in Scotland died at 47 in a health spiral after PO charges of false accounting. She had previously run successful businesses, until she opened a PO in 2001. "Losses" mounted to £30k. She was shunned & children put into care. itv.com/news/2024-02-0…

#PostOfficeScandal #Accountability ⚖️📩🔻📩🔻📩🔻📩🔻📩⚖️

Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566

17 hours ago

POST OFFICE SEARCHED HIS HOME FOR £85K You fight off an armed robber and get an award. Then you get home and strangers are searching your house. They work for the @PostOffice and they are hunting for £85K. Meet Tom Brown, a postmaster from Stanley in County Durham with 30 years

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Bless her. Yes I believe so. A terrible tragedy and a stain on our Nation. It must be answered with accountability. Never be allowed to happen again.

Humpty Bumpty 🇬🇧🇺🇸 @RealHumptyB

13 hours ago

@CastletonLee Aged 47? Do you know how Fiona McGowan died, Lee? #PostOfficeScandal

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It’s certainly not a journey I would wish on anyone. Certainly one that should never be allowed to happen again. Let’s hope change is coming. Never Give In

Humpty Bumpty 🇬🇧🇺🇸 @RealHumptyB

12 hours ago

@CastletonLee Apologies for non-response, Lee. Seems I was denied access to your tweet. 🤔 'Justice' at this stage will be no more than financial compensation, I'm afraid. At a level which, for most SPMs, will sadly never cover the full extent of damage they suffered. Currently bringing to

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POST OFFICE SEARCHED HIS HOME FOR £85K You fight off an armed robber and get an award. Then you get home and strangers are searching your house. They work for the @PostOffice and they are hunting for £85K. Meet Tom Brown, a postmaster from Stanley in County Durham with 30 years of service. In 2008 he ran the North Kenton branch in Newcastle. A branch audit said £85K was missing, and the Post Office decided he had taken it. For over a year he rang the Post Office helpline 2 or 3 times a month about missing cash. The helpline told him it would come back by itself. It never did. The Post Office suspended him the next day and sent a team to search his house. Tom Brown told them a man about to lose everything has no spare £85K lying around, and invited them to look. He was arrested too, then charged with false accounting, which is a posh way of saying fiddling the books. Picture strangers going through your home for cash you know you never took. Then picture your name splashed across the local papers next to the word stealing. Tom Brown later told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry that the shortfalls carried on after the Post Office put its own staff into the branch. He took that as a sign it was not him. Fair guess. In 2013 the Post Office dropped the case at Newcastle Crown Court and offered no evidence. It took nearly 5 years to notice it had none. The judge told him he would no doubt take it further. By then he had lost his business and his home and gone bankrupt. Reports put the total loss at around £500K. He ended up in social housing with his son and grandchildren. Tom Brown died in late 2023, weeks before the @ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office put the whole scandal into every living room. His compensation was still not finalised. All he asked for in his Inquiry statement was proper compensation and for someone to take accountability. His MP Kevan Jones told Parliament he never lived to see the compensation he deserved. That is how the Post Office says thank you. Sources @ChronicleLive @ComputerWeekly and others.

SIGN OR FACE PRISON, THEY SAYS A single dad of three phoned his mother to borrow cash. @PostOffice had given him a few hours, which is how it likes to describe a payment plan.. His name is Peter Worsfold. He ran Muirtown Post Office and a convenience store in Inverness from 1997 to 2002, and he says Horizon, the Post Office computer system built by Fujitsu, left him paying over £37K of his own money for shortfalls he could never trace. He alleges his training was two days in a cold conservatory behind a pub, with about 10 people including the trainers. A warm welcome to the digital age. He says Horizon gave him no way to look back at anything he had entered and held its data for only 42 days. Error notices then arrived weeks or months later with no evidence, and he was expected to cover the gap. Receipts are clearly for amateurs. The shortfalls became so regular that he began to suspect his own staff. He sacked two of them and says he still feels guilty. He has apologised to them, so at least one party in this story has manners. In September 2001 a £20K shortfall appeared. He says the Post Office told him in November, he had no way to check it, and repayments came out of his pay. The police could shed no light on where the money went. The Post Office had already chosen who would pay, a rare burst of efficiency. In February 2002 an audit showed a further £2K to £3K gap. He says the auditors started before the lottery takings were counted and would not let him take part. He was suspended, which is one way to end a discussion. Then two men from Post Office Security came to his home. He says they told him they had the same jurisdiction as the police, cautioned him, and refused him a solicitor. A silent friend was welcome, because every interrogation needs a plus one. He says they warned him of charges for false accounting, fraud and theft, and of prison, while he was raising three children alone. Their offer, as he tells it, was to sign a statement admitting false accounting and pay the shortfall, and the other charges would be dropped. He had a few hours. His mother and her partner lent him the cash, he handed it over and signed, and he says he was never given a copy of what he signed. Paperwork clearly flows in one direction at the Post Office. He says he was told no further action would follow if he admitted and paid, and the Post Office ended his contract after he repaid, citing false accounting and fraud. He says it never took him to court and only threatened to, so credit for restraint. He had bought the post office and shop in 1997 for £65K and says he spent about £30K refurbishing them in 2001. When the post office closed, the footfall dropped. He says he borrowed about £43K on credit cards, paid about £27K in interest, remortgaged his home and later sold £30K of stock for £6K. A restructuring, in corporate language. He says he worked from 6am until 11pm or midnight, driving a taxi, running newspaper rounds and keeping the shop afloat, while his eldest daughter looked after her younger twin brother and sister. He has never been on holiday with his children. He says passengers in his cab asked why he never went to jail, and friends cut him off. The Post Office brand really did look after his reputation. He says his managers and the helpline told him he was the only one affected. In early 2015 he read a @DailyMail article and learned otherwise. Another 554 only ones had joined the group case against the Post Office, and he joined them. Because he was in that group case, he was shut out of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme. The government says much of the 2019 settlement went to the firm that funded the litigation, leaving the group worse off than peers in the shortfall scheme. Winning turns out to be a risky business. On 11 May 2022, aged 77, he gave evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry in Glasgow and called for full compensation with interest, plus compensation for 22 years of hardship. It took 22 years for anyone to take notes. In September 2023, aged 78, he told the Press and Journal @pressjournal that he lives on the state pension and is scared to spend money. He said small interim payments get frittered away, so he wants a lump sum he can invest, and he said more of the group die each year. Full and fair redress was promised, with the delivery date left as a surprise. Sir Wyn Williams, who chaired the inquiry, reported in July 2025 that the Post Office kept pretending its data was always accurate, and that a number of Fujitsu and Post Office employees knew Horizon Online had bugs, errors and defects. He called the Post Office approach to settlement offers unnecessarily adversarial. Fujitsu said it welcomed the report and is talking to government about a contribution to compensation. How kind of Fujitsu to welcome the findings. His group has its own compensation scheme, run by the Department for Business and Trade @tradegovuk, which Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds @jreynoldsMP now leads under a new name. In April 2026 the minister said nearly 90% of claims had settled, final applications closed on 31 July 2026, and the scheme formally closes on 31 December 2026. I found no public record showing whether Peter Worsfold has received a final settlement. I also found no public response from the Post Office to his account of the visit to his home. Silence, apparently, is still a premium service. The Post Office says it is sincerely sorry and wants victims to get justice and redress as swiftly as possible, and says it has not brought private prosecutions since 2015. Post Office chair Nigel Railton, the floor is yours. Sorry is a wonderful word and it posts for free. Peter Worsfold has been on hold with the Post Office for over 20 years. His call is important to them. Sources @InvCourier @pressjournal @LBC @PA

@CastletonLee @EmpowerInnocent @Lewislegal2024 @seanbwparker

A lovely chat on the phone with a very nice lady from Howe & Co this morning, about Network Transformation. As the call ended, she told me that she is going to buy my book, despite I had offered a comp. copy! Old schoolpal's copy arrived yesterday, Sunday - not via RM, obviously!

POST OFFICE SEARCHED HIS HOME FOR £85K #postofficescandal #postofficeinquiry linkedin.com/pulse/post-off…

Thank you. Very kind.

Hope and Fear 🍎🍏 @terryrea56

2 days ago

@CastletonLee So disgusted in those that continued to deny that there were issues and watched decent people like you Lee and Fiona suffer How they live with themselves is beyond comprehension

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#PostOfficeScandal #Horizon #MeBatesVsThePostOffice

Lee Castleton OBE @CastletonLee

3 days ago

The heartbreaking effects of false accusations. No one can go forward without accountability to those that knew. They knew these accusations were false and the system was faulty. Fiona can never be brought back to Her family. There must be accountability.

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There is nothing wrong in asking for change Mark.

mark kelly @mkiceburnmarko

2 days ago

@CastletonLee Are you surprised I am 100% not surprised. I be more surprised if this didn't happen

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And going by the wrutten answer by @CalvinBailey this week we desperately need it.

Ste Purse - Actor/Campaigner @StePurse

3 days ago

@AnonNowar22 @LazeeLeftEye63 If all goes to plan Hillsborough Law should be on the statute books in spring 2027. 😎

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