Police say Post Office inquiry needs double staffing to meet timeline
Police warned the Horizon inquiry could slip by five years unless staffing doubles, as 8 million files and an aging victim base raise the cost of delay.
The national police inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal said it would need to almost double in size to keep to its current timetable, warning that a five-year slip would push accountability further out of reach for elderly victims who have already waited decades.
Commander Stephen Clayman, who leads Operation Olympos, said the investigation was “hugely complex” and now held eight million documents, with more still expected. Police said investigators must forensically review the material to establish what happened, who knew what, and what role individual suspects may have played in the alleged wrongdoing around wrongful Post Office prosecutions and the presentation of the Horizon IT system as reliable.
The team currently stands at 111 officers and staff, but police said it would need to grow to 210 to deliver files for charging decisions in late 2027 or early 2028. Without that extra resource, they warned, the timetable could slip by as much as five years. The projected budget has risen to £19.3 million for 2026/27 and beyond, while the Home Office has already provided a special grant of £2.8 million, leaving police with a significant funding shortfall.
Operation Olympos has run since 2020 alongside the statutory public inquiry, which began in February 2022. It is focused on potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice in connection with the wider Horizon scandal, in which faulty accounting software made it appear as though money was missing from Post Office branches.
Police said they had completed 13 suspect interviews under caution, including seven more this year, out of 53 people currently under investigation. The case has drawn on four regional investigation teams, with support from police forces across England and Wales, Police Scotland, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the National Crime Agency.
Clayman told victims that many had been living with the scandal’s impact for 24 years, some had died, and many more were elderly. His warning underlined the stakes of delay in a case widely described as one of the largest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015, and just over £1 billion has now been paid in compensation to more than 7,300 claimants up to 2 June.
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