The daughter of a Post Office victim who was investigated while fighting terminal cancer says it’s time Fujitsu “took responsibility” on compensation.

Katie Watson’s mother Fiona passed away in 2004 less than a year after being forced to admit to stealing from her branch.

During the investigation she was diagnosed with lymphoma.

Ms Watson described it as “cold” and “heartless” to carry on with investigating her mother instead of giving her “a chance” to rest.

“Even if it was a case of ‘go through your treatment and we deal with this on the other side’, there was none of that,” she told Sky News.

What is the Post Office scandal?

Ms Watson added: “If she had been able to fight it properly then she may have had a bit longer… she declined really quickly…she just couldn’t do it anymore.”

IT company Fujitsu developed the faulty accounting software Horizon – which saw hundreds of sub postmasters wrongfully accused of stealing from their Post Offices between 1999 and 2015.

Ms Watson is part of a campaign group called Lost Chances which was set up after Fujitsu said it was “morally obligated” to help victims and their families in January.

Paul Patterson, Fujitsu’s European head, spoke at the Post Office inquiry saying he would “engage” in conversation with sub postmasters and relatives.

He also appeared at a select committee in the same month admitting that the company had a “moral obligation” to contribute towards compensation.

Ms Watson said: “It’s time (Fujitsu) took responsibility and meant it…so far as yet there’s been no action behind it – [Paul Patterson] actually needs to do something.”

Mr Patterson met with sub postmasters and the children of Post Office scandal victims in August.

At the time he spoke to Sky News stating that Fujitsu “will contribute to redress” but that the company’s “common position” was “when the inquiry finishes”.

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The last phase of the inquiry is now drawing to a close – with final submissions held in December.

At his last appearance at the inquiry earlier this month Mr Patterson insisted that the company still “want to engage” but he was “still unclear” on how to help relatives of victims “other than sums of money”.

He promised not to “stay silent” and would explore if Fujitsu is able to “engage” with Lost Chances “before the end of the calendar year”.

The campaign group say their aim is not necessarily just about financial redress but also getting support from Fujitsu in other ways such as establishing a “family fund” to help with things like educational grants and counselling.

After the death of her mother Ms Watson said she was forced to get her first job at 14 years old to “help put food on the table” after her family lost everything.

“We ended up in a caravan – but the caravan site you could only be there for nine months of the year so for three months we were homeless,” she continued.

She added: “I didn’t end up going to college. I missed out on those opportunities – to go to school and have all that childhood.”

Ms Watson now works two jobs, seven days a week.

She said she would “never get back what we lost” but just wanted Fujitsu “to take ownership”.

A Post Office spokesperson said: “We apologise unreservedly to victims of the Horizon IT Scandal and their loved ones.

“Post Office today is doing all we can to transform the organisation for the future and support those impacted to find closure, as far as that can ever be possible.”

Investigators searching for Joe Lynskey, one of the IRA’s so-called disappeared, have exhumed a grave in County Monaghan.

Sky News understands the remains of “more than one person” were removed from the burial site for formal identification.

Mr Lynskey, 40, a former Cistercian monk who later joined the IRA, was abducted and murdered during a bitter internal feud in 1972.

It was 2010 before the IRA admitted he had been “executed and buried”, at which point he was added to the list of “the disappeared”.

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains confirmed that the exhumation had taken place on Tuesday.

Read more: Investigators search for body of British soldier Robert Nairac

A spokesman said: “The Commission received information concerning suspicious historic activity during the 1970s at a grave in Annyalla Cemetery.

“Both the time frame and the location coincide with the disappearance of Joe Lynskey in 1972.

“The ICLVR did not become aware that Joe Lynskey was one of the disappeared before 2010.

“Following an exhumation, there will be a formal process to establish the identify of all of the remains found in the grave.”

“This process may take some time,” he added.

“The disappeared” are people believed to have been abducted, murdered and secretly buried during the Northern Ireland troubles.

In most cases, the victims were abducted in Northern Ireland but murdered and buried across the border in the Republic.

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains was established by the British and Irish governments in 1999.

Of the 16 people listed as “disappeared”, the remains of 13 have been located and returned to their families for burial.

Joe Lynskey, Seamus McGuire and Captain Robert Nairac, a British Army officer, are the three cases still listed as unresolved.

In a workshop in the far corner of the Styal prison estate, glass, plastic and metal are being smashed to the beat of pumping music.

Women at workstations are dismantling electronics with the energy of gym enthusiasts.

TVs and laptops, discarded at local recycling centres across England, have ended up here, on the edge of Wilmslow, Cheshire.

But amid the whiz of drills, the crunch of screens being separated from their plastic casings and the clatter of electronic boards ripped out and chucked in big bins, something else is being recycled – women’s lives.

“You get a lot of frustration out, because obviously a lot of girls have got a lot of anger, you know,” says Joanne*, who is serving time for drug offences.

She has joined this activity not for the £10 per 70 TVs she breaks apart, but because the programme – called Recycling Lives – could give her the skills and the support to keep her out of jail in the future.

Only 12% of women are employed six months after leaving prison, compared to 25% of men. In the general population employment levels between men and women are 78% to 72%.

Ex-prisoners with a job are far less likely to re-offend. So, women prisoners are at a disadvantage. Often a man is connected to the crime they committed.

“For 90% of the women in prison, there’s always a male involved in why they’ve committed crime, it is the case with me as well,” says Joanne, who tells me she was pressured into dealing drugs by her partner.

Official Ministry of Justice statistics say that at least 60% of women in prison are victims of domestic violence and most will have experienced some form of abuse as a child.

Many, too, are mothers and they feel the guilt of separation every day. Joanne says of her son: “It’s my sister picking him up from school, not me.

“It’s my sister there on Christmas day, not me. Birthdays, all the special occasions. It’s heart-breaking.

“People think prison is easy. You are ripped away from your family and your children. It’s not easy.”

As if in illustration, the glass cracks on an iPad, as she peels it away with her screwdriver.

Official figures say there are around 3,500 women in prison and it is estimated that about half are mothers.

‘I’m trying to give them a future’

The workshop manager Yvonne Grime knows this all too well. A former serial offender herself, she’s the first former inmate at Styal to now hold a set of keys to the prison.

“The biggest thing for me [as a prisoner] was leaving my children,” she says, “and I still carry that guilt round, but I have come through it.”

Part of her redemption is to help the women in her workshop. The Recycling Lives programme transformed her life, and she wants to give back.

She says: “I’m trying to give them a future. I’m trying to give you some hope that they can that they can change.

“Get the children back, find a job, find a home. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Her work is part manager and part mentor. “When I first started, I thought I’m just going to come in and run this workshop,” she said.

“I didn’t realise I had to be their mum, their dad, their brother, their sister, the doctor, the nurse, the everything that comes with it.

“If I had a salary for every one of those professions, I’d be absolutely minted.”

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Ex-prisoner shares what life’s like in a women’s jail

Styal isn’t what you expect a prison to look like.

Inside the high fences and barbed wire are sixteen austere red-brick Victorian houses.

Once an orphanage, they’re now the prison’s accommodation blocks.

Ted the prison cat, wanders from block to block, and has already served several of his nine lives in the compound.

Along with recycling TV sets, women can learn to guide and drive forklift trucks.

They are quick with their tools, spinning through one appliance after another with remarkable and methodical destructive pace.

But the real advantage of the programme is that it continues on the outside. Only 6% of people who go through Recycling Lives go on to commit further crime. The general reoffending rate is 25%.

In a warehouse in Preston, former inmates are involved in recycling food from supermarkets and farms, then sent to foodbanks.

Here we meet Naomi Winter, who – three years since being released from jail – is now a manager at the food distribution depot.

The hardest thing about prison for her too was being separated from a child.

“I was put in prison when my baby is only three months old,” she said.

“So, it was like losing an arm, like losing a piece of my DNA.

“I still woke up for night feeds in the night and stuff like that.”

She says there wasn’t the mental health provision inside of prison to help her deal with post-natal depression, and she spent way too much time alone with her thoughts.

She was in and out of prison for drug offences and violence eight times by the age of 30 and first jailed aged 15, for breaching an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).

She feels even short prison sentences can ruin lives, and says: “You take women who’s robbed a block of cheese to feed the child.

“They put them in prison for 28 days. They take the home, take the kids, they lose the family, and they get out with nothing. You just create a criminal right there.

“You’ve just created a woman who’s got nothing to lose. You’re also releasing them with a sleeping bag in a tent and telling them to go and sleep in the woods.”

Alternatives to custody

The government recognises that prison isn’t working for many of the women who end up there.

It’s why, with women being mostly non-violent offenders and serving short sentences, the government is setting up a Women’s Justice Board to look at reducing the number who go into prison with alternatives such as community sentences and intervention projects tackling the root causes of re-offending.

The Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told Sky News: “For many women, prison isn’t working. Most women in prisons are victims themselves. Over half are mothers, with a prison sentence separating parent and child.

“That’s why I am establishing a new Women’s Justice Board, tasked with reducing the number of women in prison by exploring alternatives to custody for female offenders.”

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Chief Executive of Recycling Lives, Alasdair Jackson says: “There are certain things we all need as human beings: One is a place to live, one is a job to be able to pay for that place to live and then a support network.

“But there are a lot more factors that women have to contend with; there’s children, there is maybe domestic abuse, there’s everything that goes on around that, but when you give people a chance, when you give people the skills that they need, it is life-changing.

“And when you change a woman’s life, you are often changing the family’s life and the children’s life.”

Prison is supposed to be part punishment, part repair job. But there are limited programmes like Recycling Lives, and for many women entering jail currently, the only recycling is back into criminality.

* names have been changed