Court of Appeal to decide if Post Office Capture conviction of Blackpool subpostmaster was 'unsafe'

A Blackpool man convicted of theft and false accounting in a Post Office prosecution in 1998 has had his case referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).

Stephen Marston, now 70, lived in Westmorland Avenue in Blackpool, but served as the sub-postmaster at Heap Bridge Post Office in Bury in the 1990s after taking it over from his father.

In 1996, he was put under pressure by a Post Office area manager to adopt a new piece of software known as the Capture system. This system was adopted before the notoriously faulty Horizon system saw more than 700 subpostmasters wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud, and false accounting between 1999 and 2015.

Shortly after Capture was installed, Mr Marston, then 42, experienced large and unexplained shortfalls ranging between £5,000 and £10,000.

Evidence has now been uncovered that Capture could also generate errors.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has now referred Mr Marston’s case to the Court of Appeal for them to decide if his conviction was ‘unsafe’.

Mr Marston’s conviction is the second to be referred to the Court of Appeal after the new evidence was uncovered surrounding the faults with Capture.

Believing the software to be reliable, Mr Marston assumed the errors were his own fault. He exhausted personal savings of around £23,000 to cover the apparent losses and resorted to inflating the cash figures in his weekly reports to balance the accounts.

After auditors unexpectedly arrived and closed Mr Marston’s branch, they excluded him from the audit process, contrary to what he understands was standard practice. He was informed that the issue was solely his responsibility.

Mr Marston has spoken publicly about about how the auditors took his keys to the Post Office and drove him home to Blackpool and watched him enter his home to confirm where he was living.

Mr Marston was advised that pleading guilty could prevent a custodial sentence. He followed this advice and pleaded guilty to false accounting, theft, and concealing valuable securities. He received a 12-month probation order.

Mr Marston has never exercised his right of appeal against conviction. Whilst he maintained that he had not committed the offences, he was unable to account for the inaccuracies in the accounting figures and, for a long time, believed that he must have made an error.

Following concerns raised about Capture during the Post Office Horizon IT Enquiry, the Government engaged Kroll Associates UK Ltd to conduct an independent investigation into Capture, which found a reasonable likelihood that it could create accounting shortfalls for sub-postmasters.

A second report by the computing consultancy MFC Partnership, commissioned on behalf of sub-postmaster Patrica Owen by her solicitors in 1997, identified several faults with the software that would not be necessarily apparent to users. In October 2025, the CCRC referred Mrs Owen’s theft convictions to the Court of Appeal on the grounds her prosecution was an abuse of process.

Mr Marston applied to the CCRC in November 2024. Following a review of his case, the CCRC has found that, in light of the Kroll and MFC reports, there is a real possibility the Court of Appeal will conclude that it was an abuse of process to prosecute Mr Marston and will quash his conviction.

The CCRC said they continue to review cases from other sub-postmasters who were convicted of offences before and following the introduction of Horizon. So far, they have received 37 pre-Horizon applications.

Eight of these cases were determined by a committee of three Commissioners not to raise a real possibility that the conviction would be overturned, which is the CCRC’s statutory test for referral, and so they will not be referred to the Court. Three have now been referred. One case turned out to be a Horizon case, and so was already covered by legislation. The other 25 cases are being reviewed.

CCRC Chair Dame Vera Baird KC said: “Mr Marston’s conviction meant not only the loss of his business but the loss of his savings; he suffered significant reputational damage and had to relocate his family to another area all because of what appears to be flawed accounting software that he was under pressure to adopt.

“It will now be for the Court of Appeal to decide whether Mr Marston’s conviction is unsafe.”

The Post Office Horizon scandal was the most widespread miscarriage of justice the CCRC had ever seen, and it represented the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in UK legal history.

In January 2024, ITV released a four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office which brought the Horizon scandal to public attention.