The decision by the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE marks an ignominious end to a career that will be remembered for her organisation’s relentless run of wrongful prosecutions against more than 900 post office operators.
Last year, Alan Bates, the operator who led the campaign to expose the Horizon IT scandal and whose story has now been told in an ITV drama, turned down an OBE, making the point that it would be “inappropriate” while victims still suffered and Vennells retained her accolade.
She was awarded her CBE for services to the Post Office and charity at the start of 2019, shortly before she stepped down – ending a seven-year period as chief executive during which she collected more than £4.5m in pay.
About £2.2m of those earnings were performance-related bonuses, mostly linked to a strategic plan to make the business sustainably profitable, and amassed while many of those the Post Office was pursuing were being made bankrupt and suffering unfathomable personal ordeals.
Vennells’ exit came just before a damning high court judgment ruled that the Horizon accounting system used by post office operators was not “remotely robust”, had “bugs, errors and defects”, and that there was a “material risk” it had caused shortfalls in branch accounts.
In December that year, 10 months after Vennells’ departure, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants to end a long-running series of cases over the Fujitsu-developed IT system, admitting it “got things wrong”. This marked the first turning point for victims.
The Conservative peer James Arbuthnot has described the Post Office’s actions under Vennells’ tenure as “cruel and incompetent”.
Vennells, a former parish priest, joined the Post Office in 2007 as a network director, having held marketing roles at Dixons, Argos and Whitbread, and two years later became involved in developing the defence of Horizon.
This was a time when questions were being raised about the system by a campaign led by a small group of MPs, the then-fledgling Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance set up by Bates, and Computer Weekly, which published the first media investigation of the issues.
In 2009, Vennells sent a company-wide “Horizon defence piece” email containing a “written rebuttal and position that the business was adopting”. This was the start of an aggressive pushback by bosses in the face of evidence the software had faults.
In 2012, when Vennells was promoted to chief executive, an external review of Horizon was carried out by the forensic accountancy firm Second Sight. Its interim report found evidence of flaws and bugs. On two occasions, “defects” in the system had resulted in a shortfall of about £9,000 at 76 branches.
Second Sight’s final report described the Horizon system as “not fit for purpose” in some cases, and said it experienced 12,000 communication failures a year. The report’s authors warned of “potential miscarriages of justice and misconduct by prosecutors acting on behalf of the Post Office”.
The Post Office maintained there was “absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system”.
As the scale of the miscarriage of justice has become increasingly apparent – and public – Vennells’ career since stepping down as chief executive has cratered.
Shortly after her departure she took up a post as the chair of Imperial College healthcare NHS trust, which runs several London hospitals; was appointed as a non-executive director at the Cabinet Office; joined the board of the furniture firm Dunelm, and retained a seat in the boardroom at the supermarket chain Morrisons.
She has since quit all those roles, leaving Morrisons and Dunelm in 2021 just days after the court of appeal quashed the convictions of 39 post office operators, saying the Post Office knew there were faults in Horizon.
At the same time, she announced she was stepping back from her duties as a minister at the Church of St Owen, near Bedford, in the diocese of St Albans, because of the “distraction” of the scandal. She also stopped being a member of the Church of England’s ethical investment advisory group.
