Whistleblowing failures in scandals such as the Post Office Horizon IT failure have cost taxpayers more than 400 million, a report has found.
The report, by the charity Protect, calculated that the failure to act on whistleblower reports in three big scandals — Horizon, the collapse of the outsourcing group Carillion and the Lucy Letby case — cost the government at least 426 million.
With Carillion, the report calculated that there were 192 million in avoidable costs, which included 148 million paid by the Cabinet Office to help finance its liquidation and 42 million spent terminating private finance initiative contracts.
It noted that Emma Mercer, who worked at Carillion and raised concerns in spring 2017 about the state of its finances, was effectively ignored. By the time she was appointed as the company’s finance director in September 2017, the construction group’s fate had been sealed.
There were also 17 million in costs from the fallout of its collapse, mostly in delays to building hospitals and other public buildings.
Regarding the Post Office Horizon failure, fallout costs included the 138 million spent on compensation payments and the 21 million spent so far on the public inquiry. Avoidable costs included more than 4 million spent imprisoning sub-postmasters and about 5 million paid by the Post Office to prosecute them.
A large number of whistleblower reports regarding Horizon, dating as far back as 2009, were ignored by both Fujitsu, which supplied the IT...
She says the book reflects a real journey - where they walked the South West Coast Path - from despair to hope The author of The Salt Path has described enduring some of the "hardest days" of her l...