This is a fairly loose thing to say. Firstly no the UK doesn't have a judicial system. There are separate legal systems in England & Wales, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland.
Amongst many other issues, The Post Office has a historic freedom to investigate, pursue and prosecute criminal cases on its own behalf- no need to persuade e.g. the police. This has been shown, for anyone with any doubt, to be a massive conflict of interest. Another repeated occurrence is the discovery that the Post Office claimed, but would not provide evidence and used this 'position' to bully people into accepting plea bargains. Essentially the Post Office dishonestly and deliberately abused its position in numerous cases to bypass the legal system in each of the home nations so that defendants would simply turn up in court to plead guilty and be sentenced. Had these cases been required to meet the standards of a conventional criminal investigation and trial in any of the UK home nations, many more of them would have failed to convict.
The post-office abuse existed in both the civil and criminal courts. Obviously the criminal side generally had more serious consequences, but I don't think you can chalk this up to the fact it wasn't carried out by the police, particularly in that private criminal prosecution exists in England and is quite common.
[It's also not quite clear to me that the criminal consequences were always worse: being incarcerated for a couple months may not be worse than losing your home and everything you spent a lifetime working to earn...]
In my own experience there is an incredible amount of trust in the system there placed on legal professionals-- but given the rarity of serious consequences for misconduct this degree of trust may be misplaced or at least inadequately supervised.
It's not entirely clear to me how it can be fixed however, because if misconduct is handled seriously then that's an invitation to mire every piece of litigation in an impossible maze of misconduct allegations. To make progress there needs to be an assumption that the parties aren't gaslighting about everything -- which obviously means problems when one of them is!
Injustice hiding behind procedure is by no means unique to the UK however. It happens in the US too.
Comments
This is a fairly loose thing to say. Firstly no the UK doesn't have a judicial system. There are separate legal systems in England & Wales, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland.
Amongst many other issues, The Post Office has a historic freedom to investigate, pursue and prosecute criminal cases on its own behalf- no need to persuade e.g. the police. This has been shown, for anyone with any doubt, to be a massive conflict of interest. Another repeated occurrence is the discovery that the Post Office claimed, but would not provide evidence and used this 'position' to bully people into accepting plea bargains. Essentially the Post Office dishonestly and deliberately abused its position in numerous cases to bypass the legal system in each of the home nations so that defendants would simply turn up in court to plead guilty and be sentenced. Had these cases been required to meet the standards of a conventional criminal investigation and trial in any of the UK home nations, many more of them would have failed to convict.
The post-office abuse existed in both the civil and criminal courts. Obviously the criminal side generally had more serious consequences, but I don't think you can chalk this up to the fact it wasn't carried out by the police, particularly in that private criminal prosecution exists in England and is quite common.
[It's also not quite clear to me that the criminal consequences were always worse: being incarcerated for a couple months may not be worse than losing your home and everything you spent a lifetime working to earn...]
In my own experience there is an incredible amount of trust in the system there placed on legal professionals-- but given the rarity of serious consequences for misconduct this degree of trust may be misplaced or at least inadequately supervised.
It's not entirely clear to me how it can be fixed however, because if misconduct is handled seriously then that's an invitation to mire every piece of litigation in an impossible maze of misconduct allegations. To make progress there needs to be an assumption that the parties aren't gaslighting about everything -- which obviously means problems when one of them is!
Injustice hiding behind procedure is by no means unique to the UK however. It happens in the US too.