The NFSP has refused to apologise for blaming its members for accounting deficits caused by faults with the Post Office’s Horizon till system.

Court documents show the NFSP had “privately expressed its concerns” about the system. However, at a House of Commons Select Committee in 2015, the NFSP’s then general secretary, George Thompson, publicly told politicians: “I do not believe the system is systemically faulty. A lot of this is down to people making errors.”

Thompson explained at the time: “There are one or two issues where money went missing and postmasters have felt it had to be Horizon, while in a lot of cases it could have been errors or members of staff misappropriating money.”

Judge refers Post Office staff to prosecutors over alleged Horizon cover up

Oppositely, the judge in a court battle about the issues ruled last month that glitches were responsible for missing money “on numerous occasions”, leading to retailers being wrongly bankrupted and even imprisoned.

Asked twice by Better Retailing if the NFSP would apologise for blaming its members instead of supporting their claims that Horizon was responsible, the organisation did not respond. 

A statement by NFSP chief executive Calum Greenhow claimed the Post Office had “misled the NFSP for years about the reliability of the Horizon system”.

Greenhow said the NFSP was “extremely disappointed by the Post Office’s behaviour”.

Read more about the ongoing Horizon scandal