The Court of Appeal has rejected the Post Office’s request for an extension to the time in which it must respond to an appeal against convictions made based on its Capture software.
The Post Office’s request for a two-month extension before it delivers its formal response to the appeal of former subpostmaster Steve Marston was heavily criticised by campaigners and has now been rejected by the appeals court. But the Post Office could also appeal against this decision.
According to Marston, as it stands, the deadline is 13 May, and if the Post Office does not appeal successfully, there will be a directions hearing on 20 May for three Capture-based cases.
Marston told Computer Weekly: “I’m over the moon that the court is following this route rather than allowing the Post Office to further delay proceedings. I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to be exonerated. We’ve waited for nearly 30 years, so we just want to get on with it now and get the chance to put this episode in our lives to an end.”
The Post Office had not responded when this article was published.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred Marston’s appeal to the Court of Appeal on 27 March. Marston, who was a subpostmaster in Bury, Lancashire, used the Post Office’s faulty Capture system to do his accounts. He was convicted in 1997 for theft and false accounting, following an unexplained shortfall of nearly £80,000. Marston said he had never had any problems using the paper-based accounting system, but that changed when his branch, which he ran from 1973, began using the Capture system.
In October 2025, an appeal against the 1998 conviction of Patricia Owen, who died in 2003, was the first Capture case to be referred to the Court of Appeal. She pleaded not guilty to the theft of £6,000, but was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, at Canterbury Crown Court.
Another case has been referred since Marston’s.
More waiting
There are currently about 30 prosecutions under review by the CCRC. Unlike convictions based on the Horizon system, which were overturned en masse through legislation, those based on Capture have to go through the CCRC.
The Post Office said it was treating each appeal on a case-by-case basis.
Capture, which predates Fujitsu’s Horizon system, was used in Post Office branches in the 1990s to replace paper-based accounting. As with the controversial Horizon system at the centre of the Post Office scandal, which saw subpostmasters blamed for unexplained losses, some Capture users were prosecuted for financial crimes.
The controversy over Capture emerged in January 2024, after ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office told the stories of subpostmasters who had suffered at the hands of the Horizon system.
In the same month, Kevan Jones, an MP at the time who now sits in the House of Lords, highlighted evidence of injustices triggered by Capture losses.
This led to a campaign and, by December 2024, the government promised financial redress and justice for subpostmasters affected by Capture problems. This followed an independent investigation by forensic experts at Kroll, which found there was a “reasonable likelihood” the Post Office Capture software had caused accounting losses.
Marston has been a central figure in the campaign for justice for former Capture users.
The controversy over Capture is part of the Post Office scandal, which Computer Weekly first exposed in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered as a result of the Horizon system.
