Post Office scandal: Hull victim Janet Skinner addresses inquiry

"I lost my house, I lost everything, I couldn't get a job," Janet Skinner told the inquiry

A sub-postmistress jailed after being falsely accused of theft has told an inquiry "it's destroyed my life".

Janet Skinner was jailed in 2007 for nine months over an alleged shortfall of £59,000 from her Hull Post Office.

Ms Skinner, who was cleared last year, said that despite the shame of the imprisonment: "I'm a fighter and I'll fight through things."

She was addressing the independent public inquiry into the failings of a Post Office computer system.

Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses accused of theft and or false accounting based on information from the computer system called Horizon.

The convictions of Ms Skinner and 38 other sub-postmasters were quashed by the Court of Appeal in April 2021.

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The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry is led by retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams.

Ms Skinner, 51, told the inquiry she had loved her job at the Post Office when she joined in 1994, but once the Horizon system came in, the cash at her Bransholme branch "never balanced".

She said she had continued to use traditional paper ledgers at the end of a day's business for a couple of months after the system was installed.

"It was balancing on my ledger but not balancing on Horizon, it was never correct," she said.

Ms Skinner had contacted the helpline about the IT system 116 times in 2004 and 2005, the inquiry heard

"To go to jail you've got to have committed a crime... I couldn't prove I hadn't, they couldn't prove I had, but yet I still went to jail.

"I felt so ashamed, you do the right thing and I went to jail anyway," she said.

Ms Skinner said the stress of the case meant she ended up in hospital for four months after she became paralysed and had to learn to walk again.

She still has chronic back pain and other health problems.

"I can't work, there are days I can't get out of bed, it's destroyed my life," she told the inquiry.

"We will never erase the memories of what's happened over these 20 years, we've got to live with that."

The inquiry hearings are set to resume on 1 March.