Marston, Stephen

Stephen Marston served as the sub-postmaster at Heap Bridge Post Office in Bury in the 1990s. In 1996, he was put under pressure by an area manager to adopt the Capture digital accounting system. Shortly after installing it, he experienced large and unexplained shortfalls ranging between £5,000 and £10,000.

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 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 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 found that, in light of the Kroll and MFC reports, there was a real possibility the Court of Appeal would conclude that it was an abuse of process to prosecute Mr Marston and would quash his conviction.

The CCRC referred the conviction in March 2026.