When Britain’s Post Office scrutinised a £57,000 hole in Kashmir Gill’s branch accounts, she was interrogated before investigators raided her home. “They followed me home to search the house, look in the cupboards and under the bed,” the former sub-postmaster says. “It felt like they were surprised by our lifestyle, which we had earned honestly.”
The 66-year-old, who moved to the UK from India in 1974, had been wearing gold jewellery when she was quizzed. Many older south Asian women wear similar accessories — Gill was given hers as part of a wedding dowry — but she believes this affected how she was perceived by investigators and meant the Post Office latched on to an idea that she stole to fund her lifestyle.
Gill’s son, Balvinder, another former sub-postmaster, claims there was a cultural disconnect that contributed to his mother being wrongly convicted. She was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters — individuals who run local branches — found guilty of charges including false accounting and theft, based on data from Japanese company Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon IT system.
“The [Post Office] saw south Asians as wealth generators. Initially they saw that as a good reason to go into partnership with us but when the tables turned it was a reason to disqualify us,” he says, arguing that the family’s silver Mercedes had been treated with suspicion.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has described the decades-long sub-postmaster scandal as one of the “greatest miscarriages of justice” in modern British history. Financial shortfalls in local branches resulted in individuals losing their jobs, homes and livelihoods. Others were convicted and sent to prison. Throughout extensive inquiries and testimonies from convicted sub-postmasters, questions have been raised about whether race played a role in convictions and sentencing procedures.
More than two-fifths of all sub-postmasters in the UK network are from an Asian background, according to a survey of 1,300 individuals conducted by the Post Office in 2021.
In March last year an inquiry heard that support staff at Fujitsu had displayed discriminatory behaviour when taking calls from south Asian sub-postmasters. “Shouts across the floor could be heard saying, ‘I have another Patel scamming again,’” Amandeep Singh, a former call centre employee, told the inquiry. “They mistrusted every Asian postmaster.”
Then documents published last May following a freedom of information request by campaigner Eleanor Shaikh revealed that the Post Office’s compliance teams had labelled fraud suspects using racist markers, including “Indian/Pakistani types”, “Negroid types” and “Chinese/Japanese types”.
Following the release of a television drama into the affair last month, fresh testimonies have raised similar issues, refocusing attention on systemic inequalities in the workplace — from pay and career progression to penalties for mistakes. Academics and management experts now say there is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a deeper investigation into the role race and ethnicity played in how the Post Office conducted cases and the broader management lessons that provides.
“White defendants were more likely than ethnic minority defendants to receive a community, rather than custodial, sentence,” says Rebecca Helm, an associate professor of law at the University of Exeter, who has conducted preliminary research into the issue in the past year. “The data also suggested that where custodial sentences were given these were longer for Asian defendants than for white defendants,” she notes. Despite the small sample size of 37 sub-postmasters where ethnicity and sentence information was available, potential differences “are worth following up”.
The Post Office said it had a “zero-tolerance policy towards any form of discrimination” and had made “significant progress to strengthen” diversity and inclusion within the organisation. Fujitsu said it also “did not tolerate racism in any form” and that its UK subsidiary was “providing full co-operation” to the public inquiry.
The scandal has resonated with some management experts and business executives because of the recent backlash against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“When I think about the Post Office scandal, the fact that so many people involved were ethnic minorities is grim, but I think the wider lesson is that it could have been any minority group,” says Tazim Essani, a non-executive board director and executive coach. “The pushback to those less interested in DEI is what sort of society do we all want to live in? What minority group might you be part of and how would you like to be treated?”
Most of the Post Office convictions occurred before a big corporate push into DEI, which gathered pace after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Between 2019 and 2022, the number of chief diversity officer jobs in the US increased rapidly — up 169 per cent, according to professional social network LinkedIn — more than any other C-suite role, as companies were keen to show a renewed commitment to ensuring fair treatment of employees and creating a more inclusive workforce.
But that momentum has slowed, particularly in the US, following pressure from rightwing activists and a Supreme Court ruling last year against affirmative action. A more uncertain economic climate has also prompted some businesses to focus on financial returns.
Opposition has mounted to initiatives perceived to favour one group over another, from quotas for ethnic and gender diversity in hiring to training sessions on race. Many have been deemed performative or linked to identity politics. Last month, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman declared DEI initiatives “racist”, while Elon Musk has said they are “against merit”. Big Four accounting firm PwC dropped some diversity targets in the US.
John Amaechi, an organisational psychologist, says there is “always a level of pushback” against progress and that a change in rhetoric does not necessarily mean companies are reversing tack.
But even proponents of DEI in the workplace have called for a rethink away from tick-box metrics in pursuit of longer-term change. “Organising events and applying for awards aren’t bad, but if they don’t get under the skin of behaviour and culture, they will unlikely lead to the promised better outcomes,” says Rupal Kantaria, who focuses on diversity efforts at consultancy Oliver Wyman.
Amanda Rajkumar, who joined German sportswear company Adidas as head of human resources in 2021 to confront an internal uproar over the company’s handling of racism, diversity and inclusion, says there are lessons to be learnt from the Post Office scandal across the corporate world.
Anyone in charge of people must “take a step back when they see a spate of suspensions or terminations. Questions need to be asked,” she says. Aside from terminations being “fair and just”, HR individuals must do their own due diligence on trends and data to “really see what is happening”.
“There has to be one department that acts with independence and seeks to be the ‘conscience of the firm’ and I firmly see that as HR’s role,” adds Rajkumar, who was part of an exodus of female leaders from Adidas following a change in chief executive last year.
The affair also shows the importance of leadership teams scrutinising data effectively and tackling difficult subjects. “Why did the [Post Office] board not question the level of fraud implicit in all these cases? In corporate life fraud is rare, so why did senior management think this level of fraud was real and not a signal of a different problem?” adds Essani. “What biases were at play that meant this situation was allowed to persist for so long?”
These are questions sub-postmasters themselves are asking. Seventy-year-old Vipin Patel, who was handed an 18-week suspended sentence in 2011 after he was convicted of fraud following an alleged £75,000 shortfall at his Post Office branch, says the state-owned business pursued him even though he made up the alleged losses.
“In the course of the investigation I would think that there was some bias,” he tells the Financial Times. “I’d already paid them the shortfall. I’d made a false confession. I wasn’t a danger to the public. I didn’t think they were going down the road of prosecution.”
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