Betty Brown, the oldest surviving victim of the Post Office scandal, has revealed that King Charles III personally condemned the injustice during her investiture ceremony.
The 93-year-old received her OBE at Windsor Castle on Tuesday, where she said the King told her the scandal was “a dreadful thing” and “should never have happened.”
Brown said she used the moment to urge the monarch to speak with the prime minister about ensuring those responsible for wrongful prosecutions face police investigation and justice.
She described receiving the honour as “lovely”, adding she “never ever dreamt that this would happen” and dedicated the award to “all the sub postmasters that we have lost.”
“The reason that I’m here is very sad and I don’t forget that. All the heart ache of the families that this has destroyed, the heart ache of children left with nothing, that still hurts, it’ll always hurt,” she said.
Brown was one of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing or false accounting between 1999 and 2015 after a faulty IT system called Horizon made it appear money was missing from branch accounts.
The scandal has been described as one of the widest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, affecting postmasters across the country over more than a decade.
Brown was forced out of her County Durham Post Office in 2003, despite her late husband Oswall having paid more than £50,000 of their savings to cover non-existent shortfalls.
She and her husband had run the branch together since 1985, and it had been one of the most successful in the region before she was ultimately forced to sell it at a loss.
Brown told the BBC the King was “very knowledgeable all about Horizon” and recounted what she told him directly during the meeting at Windsor Castle.
“I said to him…would you tell your prime minister and your ministers that justice has no cost…There is no cost to justice. Doesn’t matter what it costs, justice must be done,” she said.
Last week, police chiefs warned the criminal investigation into the Post Office scandal could be delayed by five years without millions of pounds in additional funding.
The commander leading the national police inquiry, Stephen Clayman, said the investigation team would need to double in size to meet its timeline of submitting files for potential prosecutions by late next year or early 2028.
A government spokesperson described the scandal as “an appalling injustice” and said it was “considering requests for further funding” to support the ongoing police inquiry.
Brown was appointed OBE for her services to justice following years of campaigning on behalf of sub-postmasters affected by the scandal and was among the original 555 victims in the landmark group legal action against the Post Office.
She said she was “honoured and humbled” by the recognition and was pleased to have “been heard by the system” after decades of fighting for acknowledgement.
“A lot of them think we’ve had compensation, we haven’t had a penny compensation. We’ve had what they call redress, which means they’ve given back the money to us that they stole from us,” she said.
After receiving her payout in November 2025, Brown told the BBC: “At last, after 26 years, they’ve recognised justice,” adding it was a “pity they took so long.”
The latest government data indicates that more than £1.5bn has been paid out to over 12,300 claimants across the various Post Office redress schemes.