Paula Vennells finishes her testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
That is the end of Paula Vennells’ appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Here are our reports from the three days …
Day one: Paula Vennells breaks down as she tells Post Office inquiry she was misled
Day two: Paula Vennells ruled out Post Office review that ‘would be front-page news’
Day three: Paula Vennells names five executives she blames over Post Office scandal
Here is the moment today Vennells gave a tearful reply to a question from Sam Stein KC on her final day of testimony, saying: “I loved the Post Office. I gave it … I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK.” Stein responded at the end of her answer: “That’s absolute rubbish”
Thank you for reading. You can find our ongoing coverage of the scandal and inquiry here: Post Office Horizon scandal
Paula Vennells’ legal representative has no questions to put, and lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC says he has no questions to put arising from today’s proceedings.
Chair Wyn Williams says he is grateful to Vennells for her “extremely detailed witness statement and for giving evidence to the inquiry over three days” and that is the end of today’s hearing.
The inquiry adjourns, and will resume after a week’s break at noon on Monday 3 June to hear from Ben Foat, who has been group general counsel at the Post Office since May 2019.
Tim Moloney KC is now talking about a specific incident when head of communications Mark Davies responded on the BBC Radio 4 programme after a piece about the difficulty subpostmaster Jo Hamilton had faced after she was accused “I’m really sorry people have had to face lifestyle difficulties and lifestyle problems” minimising the suffering.
Paula Vennells says it was “extremely insensitive”, and Davies was forced to issue an apology. She says she would have never have used those kinds of words.
Moloney asks were the comments “not just reflective of the dismissive attitude, that post office had to campaigning postmasters at this time?”
Vennells says no, she did not lead a culture like this.
Moloney then pulls up an email from Vennells after she had seen an item about subpostmasters on the BBC’s One Show that same year in which she absolutely excoriates the participants, saying:
Hype and human interest. Not easy for me to be objective, but I was more bored than outraged. The MP quoted – who? – was full of bluster and inaccurate. Joe Hamilton lacked passion and admitted false accounting on TV. James Arbuthnot was nowhere to be seen, and the bulletin was too long.
The KC then pulls up an apology for this email from Vennells’ witness statement, and highlights the fact that she apologises for the “bored than outraged” comments not the personal attacks.
He asks the loaded question that you regret those remarks now, but did you regret those remarks on 18 December 2014, the day after you wrote them, or where they “triumphalist remarks” and “you regret them now because you’re here?”
Vennells attempt to completely defuse this by saying she completely agrees with him:
So I completely agree. I completely agree that the pressure we were under at the time to try to manage the what we genuinely felt was an imbalance of media coverage and representation about what was happening in the Post Office.
I have no excuse for what I wrote. Other than as I say I was under pressure and I think I was relieved that the programme hadn’t been perhaps as bad or as hard hitting as I’d expected it to be, and I’m just sorry. It was a terrible thing to write. There is simply no excuse. And it wouldn’t matter because we were wrong.
Moloney won’t let it go, and ties it back to his earlier line of questioning about legal privilege, saying to her was the real leadership example she set was that her staff were ordered not to write down anything they wouldn’t want to hear read out in court, and in this case “the mask slipped.”
As a measure of how difficult it is becoming to get answers out of Paula Vennells, she has just been asked by Tim Moloney KC the very straightforward question “Now in 2014, a degree of damaging publicity about concerns over the reliability of Horizon began to emerge.”
She replies “I’ll take your word for that. I’m sorry, I can’t recall the detail now.”
She is talking about a year after the publication of the Second Sight interim report, long after MPs have begun to get involved in cases, and five years after the Computer Weekly article about Lee Castleton first began to blow the whistle. He was just asking whether by 2014 there had been bad publicity about Horizon and she couldn’t give a straightforward answer.
Tim Moloney KC says he wants to move on to address the moment earlier in the inquiry when it was revealed that Paula Vennells had emailed the Post Office chair to say she had “earned her keep” by getting a reference to the Horizon IT system removed from the privatisation prospectus for Royal Mail.
She did not put anything about this in her nearly 800 pages of written witness statement. Earlier at the inquiry today she said she had “no involvement” in the prospectus about from that “late intervention” and didn’t remember anything much about it.
Moloney has just shown her that she listed it at the time as a key achievement in her yearly personal appraisal and review, which draws laughs from the public gallery.
This social media post from John Hyde, deputy news editor for Law Society Gazette, shows how people at the Post Office were changing the subject line of an email to attempt to bring it under legal privilege.
Fascinating insight into how worried Post Office was about legal issues.
— John Hyde (@JohnHyde1982) May 24, 2024
On the left, an email from Vennells to colleague Lesley Sewell. On the right, Sewell's reply, copied into lawyers and with the subject changed to 'legally privileged and confidential'. pic.twitter.com/oekYiI6Nk0
Paula Vennells had sent the email to the wrong person, and there is some debate about how angry her tone seems, and whether she had to backtrack because she thought she was sending it to someone she could regularly use a “domineering” tone to. Tim Moloney KC asks “has the mask slipped?”. She says no it hadn’t and that she didn’t operate that way.
Tim Moloney KC is asking about legal documentation from 2011 to do with a potential class action. Paula Vennells has pointed out she wasn’t CEO then, but was managing director, and that this was before the Royal Mail and Post Office split.
She is shown a document from 2011 by Emily Springford that says “It’s very important that we control the creation of documents which relate to any of the above issues” and goes on to say “Your staff should therefore think very carefully before committing to writing anything relating to the above issues.”
There is a lot of legalese essentially telling staff to go out of their way to make every document as likely as possible to be covered by privilege, meaning it would not have to be disclosed in court.
Vennells says she never saw this document. Moloney appears a bit flustered here as he doesn’t seem to be able to tie this document to Vennells, and she wasn’t in charge of the Post Office legal services when it was issued.
He is now asking her “as a person, not as a lawyer” what she thinks of the advice. She says the whole thing in the document is “odd”.
Moloney is arguing that the mantra in the document became standard practice in the Post Office and asks Vennells to comment on it.
But maybe Moloney has laid a trap here, because he is now showing an email chain where Paula Vennells in October 2011 was writing about a Horizon independent assessment and at one point she says “We have had lawyers advice re how mails etc are now handled”, suggesting she had read it.
Angela van den Bogerd, in her evidence to the inquiry, said that legal privilege was used to “cloak” messages.
Tim Moloney KC says he has three topics to tackle:
the importance of legal professional privilege to the Post Office
Paula Vennells’ involvement in the Royal Mail prospectus that Henry asked about this morning
some of the media coverage in 2014
Updated
Paula Vennells begins final session of evidence at Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
The inquiry has resumed after lunch, and Paula Vennells faces questions from Tim Moloney KC, who represents victims of the scandal. On Wednesday, the inquiry published her written witness statements, which run to nearly 800 pages and can be found here and here. This is the last session across the three days that she has been appearing this week. You can watch it here.
Before we resume for the afternoon, some reaction from Lee Castleton. He has told PA Media he wishes Paula Vennells would have recognised a decade ago that what happened to him and his Post Office colleagues was “unforgivable”.
“It’s a different world for me now. It’s 20 years on and we have had to fight so hard. I just wish she would have recognised that in 2013 – it would have made such a difference to a lot of people,” he said.
“It would have been so much better for everybody had the Post Office not done what they had done. There have been so many people punished for nothing.”
Castleton was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004 and was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office.
Post Office Horizon IT inquiry breaks for lunch
The inquiry has now broken for lunch and will resume at 2pm with an hour of questions from Tim Moloney KC, representing victims of the scandal.
There may be further questions from Paula Vennells’ own legal representative and from lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC after that, but only if required.
Paula Vennells is asked “How would you reconcile that despite your knowledge of issues with the reliability of Horizon evidence, criminal prosecutions based on such evidence continued in Scotland up until 2015?”
She replies that as far as she is aware those cases did not proceed on the basis of Horizon data alone, adding “I’m afraid my knowledge of the legal system in Scotland isn’t sufficient to be able to answer any more than about.”
She is informed that the Crown Office in Scotland has uncovered four cases prosecuted between 2013 and 2015 which relied on Horizon evidence.
Vennells then agrees that it has been “a very appropriate response” that the Post Office has been stripped of prosecuting powers in Scotland.
Catriona Watt on behalf of the National Federation of SubPostmasters, has asked Paula Vennells some quite technical questions about the “network transformation programme” programme.
Next up is Susan Sinclair’s legal team. Sinclair is a subpostmaster who was convicted in 2004 in Scotland, and the first to have successfully had their conviction quashed in Scotland.
The inquiry has previously established on multiple occasions that none of the senior leaders or senior legal team at the Post Office are conversant with Scots Law.
The Post Office also failed to disclose information about Horizon faults to courts in Scotland as well as in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I should add at this point that Alan Bates, one of the leading campaigners on this issue, had very little time for the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), and the feeling at times appeared to be mutual.
We saw yesterday an email from former head of the NFSP George Thompson in which he forwarded on a message from Bates to senior leadership in the Post Office, calling Bates’ words “rubbish” and saying that he would tell him to “go away”.
Catriona Watt mentioned this in her opening statement just now, pointing out that Thompson will be appearing at the inquiry and will have to “answer for the things he said and did” on behalf of the NFSP at the time. She said that email was “shocking and deplorable”.
In his oral testimony on 9 April, Bates said:
The NFSP was absolutely useless. I mean, they were just another department of Post Office, as I believe it still is these days as well.
If you go right back to the early days, the 2002s, 2003s, and when I was going to the NFSP meetings, I know I attended one meeting where a subpostmaster at the back of the meeting group, he started saying, “I’ve just had my post office taken off me and I’d had problems with Horizon”, and all the rest and the NFSP Exec people who were there escorted him out of the back of the place. They took him away, out of that meeting.
When my contract was terminated, I went to a NFSP meeting to try, well, a local branch one. I went to a NFSP meeting where I tried to speak on behalf of that, and there was one of the National Executive NFSP members at that meeting and he stopped … tried to stop me speaking. So there was an awful lot of pressure from the NFSP to support Post Office.
The inquiry has resumed with Catriona Watt asking questions on behalf of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP)
I mentioned earlier that Jane MacLeod, general counsel at the Post Office 2015-2019, named earlier as one of the people Paula Vennells said let her down [See 12.09 BST], is declining to cooperate with the inquiry in person.
Chair Wyn Williams has issued a statement, in which he says in part:
The inquiry sent MacLeod a request to produce a written witness statement. I was satisfied before seeing MacLeod’s draft witness statement that she would be an important witness from whom I wished to hear oral evidence. The inquiry wrote to MMacLeod to inform her that she was listed to give oral evidence.
MacLeod provided a draft of her witness statement on 11 April 2024. Her recognised legal representative informed the inquiry that, due to the passage of time, MacLeod considered that her written statement was the best evidence that she could offer and that she was “questioning … whether she would be able to assist the inquiry further”. The inquiry restated its position that it considered it important to hear oral evidence from MacLeod. Further, it offered to meet MacLeod’s travel and accommodation expenses. However, MacLeod has made it clear that she will not cooperate with the inquiry by providing oral evidence, whether by attending the inquiry in person or by giving evidence remotely via live video link.
The chair of the inquiry explains that while he does have some powers to summons her more forcefully, the chances of enforcement are negligible, and so the statement concludes
I … consider that there are no adequate means of compelling MacLeod to attend. However, I note that I have received a considerable amount of disclosure on the issues that are relevant to MacLeod. I shall be able to compare what MacLeod says in her witness statement alongside the extensive contemporaneous documentation I have received. Whilst it would have been greatly preferable to hear from MacLeod, I do not consider that her absence prevents me from establishing the facts of her involvement in the matters relevant to the terms of reference.
The inquiry is breaking and will resume at 12.35 for half-an-hour more before breaking for lunch. There is a three minute delay on the video stream.
Sam Stein KC has asked Paula Vennells why she did not do more to investigate what was happening when she first found out that subpostmasters were being forced to pay back large sums on money in 2013.
Vennells said she set up the mediation scheme “to look into every single one of those complaints.”
Stein, representing a number of subpostmasters, said: “You see a reasonable, caring CEO would have said, ‘I want answers. I want to know what’s going on. I want to find out about what’s happening to these people, the subpostamsters that are the lifeblood of the system’ … not set up some distance review.
“You didn’t do that did you?” he asked.
The former Post Office boss replied:
I think you will find those cases where I asked those sorts of questions, but where we were dealing with historic cases, they needed to go through a proper review process. You can’t just, as a chief executive, ask somebody for their opinion on something. You have to go into it in a huge amount of detail which is what I understood as happening and I regret that we did not deal with those cases as we should have done.
Sky News have clipped up the moment when Paula Vennells began to sob having said “I loved the Post Office”, then delivered a monologue about her dedication to her work there, only to be told “Absolute rubbish” by Sam Stein KC.
"I loved the Post Office. I gave it... I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK."
— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 24, 2024
An emotional Paula Vennells cries as she tells the inquiry that "I let these people down"
Sam Stein KC replies: 'Absolute rubbish'https://t.co/JeOmNkGkV7 pic.twitter.com/XE5u2EB4f8
The inquiry’s lead counsel Jason Beer KC has just had to threaten to remove people from the hearing if they heckle the witness, after someone appeared to shout something out at Paula Vennells while the contentious nature of subpostmaster contracts was being discussed. “The witness should give their evidence without interruption,” he told the public gallery.
Vennells names IT and legal staff at Post Office who she says she shouldn't have trusted over Horizon
Sam Stein KC has pressed Paula Vennells to explicitly name the colleagues who she claims she was too trusting of, and who she thinks let her down. After protesting that she has already named people throughout the hearing, she names
Lesley Sewell, former head of IT
Mike Young, former CTO
Susan Crichton, former general counsel 2010-2013
Chris Aujard, former interim general counsel
Jane MacLeod, general counsel 2015-2019
She adds that they were people she had worked with “on a number of other projects” and they had not let her down then. “I am not sure at what stage you stop trusting individuals who you have previously,” she adds.
She goes on to say she thinks one of the big mistakes of the business was “we did not have sufficient oversight, particularly around two very technical functions, because there is a risk if you rely on … one or two key individuals. That puts a burden on those individuals. And an organisation shouldn’t do that.”
As an aside, Jane MacLeod has refused to appear in person at the inquiry, and Wyn Williams just intervened to ask if Vennells was still in touch with Young, as the inquiry had been unable to trace him.
Vennells told her claim 'I worked as hard as I could' to deliver 'the best Post Office for the UK' is 'absolute rubbish'
Paula Vennells has just given a long monologue in answer to a question by Sam Stein KC after appearing to sob having said “I loved the Post Office”.
She told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London:
I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK. It would have been wonderful to have 30,000 Post Office branches. That would have been the best outcome ever to have more post offices in more communities.
What I failed to do, and I have made this clear previously, is I did not recognise – and it has been discussed across the inquiry – the imbalance of power between the institution and the individual and I let these people down.
I’m very aware of that. And we should have had better governance in place. We should have had better data reporting in place that meant that we can see what was happening to individual postmasters and to the system. That was not the case.
I’ve worked as hard as I could and to the best of my ability. I know today how much wasn’t told to me. I now know information that I didn’t get. And I don’t know in some cases why it didn’t reach me. But my only motivation was for the best for the Post Office. And for the hundreds of postmasters that I met and I regret deeply what’s happened to these people.
“That’s absolute rubbish,” says Stein.
He tells Vennells that she and her “sidekick” Angela van den Bogerd “took on the group litigants in the High Court, fighting tooth and nail, allowing counsel on behalf of the Post Office to cross-examine the litigants on the basis that the losses were their fault, due to their incompetence or dishonesty. That’s what happened under your leadership.”
Updated
Paula Vennells has broken down again at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry under questioning from Sam Stein KC. It sounded like there might have been a heckle from the room after she said “I loved the Post Office”. There was a long pause and she appeared to sob.
Sam Stein KC lists a whole load of things that Paula Vennells agrees she knew by mid-2013, including that bugs existed in Horizon, that the Second Sight report existed, that Gareth Jenkins had been deemed unreliable, that the head of security had interfered in the record-keeping about Horizon (the “shredding” memo), that the JFSA existed, that subpostmasters had written to her directly, that the Post Office carried out its own prosecutions and so forth.
He says to her this must have been “world-shattering” for her view of the Horizon system. Stein says:
This was an entire collection of Horizon-belief shattering facts, that were a direct attack upon the very basic system that supported the Post Office. All of these come in one after another, bang, bang, bang, attacking the Horizon system, by the end of 2013. You could have been in no doubt that the Horizon system needed investigation, needed inquiry, needed a deep investigation and review. Do you agree?
She replies:
I wish we had done that. I absolutely wish we had done that. I still had confidence in the Horizon system, from as the inquiry has heard, the fact that it was working for the majority of people. I did not have the detail that I have today. And had I had that, my view would have been very, very different.
He says to her she was asking questions about the problem, saying “We don’t see emails saying I demand answers. I need them now. What on earth has been going on with this system? We don’t see those emails.”
He tries to give her a binary choice: “Which is it Miss Vennells? You either didn’t want to look under the rocks because you didn’t dare see what was under there. Or you didn’t ask the right deep-rooted questions. Which is it? Go for one or the other. It has got to be one.”
Sam Stein KC’s initial line of questioning is about the long history of attempts to get the Post Office into a financially stable situation. “That’s largely how you got your gong, your CBE, that you led the Post Office’s transformation into commercial viability, isn’t it?” he asks Paula Vennells.
Chair Wyn Williams has again intervened to try to cool the temperature of the exchanges here. “I don’t want the witness being spoken to when she’s answering, and I don’t want the witness answering when you’re asking your question. Let’s try again.”
The inquiry has restarted with Sam Stein KC asking questions. He has begun by saying Paula Vennells dragged the Post Office to profitibility over the debris of the lives of subpostmasters and their families.
The inquiry is now breaking and will resume at 11.10 with Sam Stein KC scheduled to ask questions. The video feed has a three minute delay.
Edward Henry KC is driving now at what Paula Vennells knew about Fujitsu expert witness Gareth Jenkins.
She is arguing she wasn’t a legal expert, but Henry isn’t having it. He asks her:
What legal knowledge do you need to know, Miss Vennells, that if an unsafe witness has given false witness or false evidence against somebody by not telling the whole picture about Horizon’s integrity, what legal knowledge did you need to know to say well, we should tell her lawyers.
He suggests that her witness statement, where she says she found out about Jenkins from a corridor conversation with a colleague which is not documented, is a “creation” and that she must have been fully briefed by the legal team. She denies this. Vennells over the last two days has accused senior colleagues, particularly including Post Office general counsel at the time Susan Crichton, of holding back vital legal advices from her.
Lead counsel Jason Beer KC criticised Vennells over the past two days, saying she has good recollection at the inquiry of undocumented corridor conversations that show her in a better light, while being unable to recall key documentation or key meetings.
Vennells admits to getting line about Horizon system removed from Royal Mail privatisation prospectus in 2013
Edward Henry KC is driving at the political angle of the scandal now. The Second Sight interim report revealing some bugs in Horizon was being published in July 2013 just at the time the then coalition government was looking to float Royal Mail.
Although Post Office and Royal Mail had separated by then, in the minds of the public they were still intrinsically linked and Henry is suggesting it would have been a political nightmare if problems with Horizon were exposed, and that Gareth Jenkins of Fujitsu was now considered an unreliable witness, which was endangering prosecutions, at the exact same time as the sale of Royal Mail shares was progressing.
Vennells tells him “I had no conversations about any strategy around the Royal Mail privatisation.”
Henry said “I suggest what must have been uppermost in your mind was keep the lid on this because of course you wanted to please stakeholders.”
She said: “I don’t think it was ever my style to try to please or to keep him with people” and stressed she had no role in the privatisation.
Henry then goes on to ask why she edited the Royal Mail privatisation prospectus.
She says:
This was very last minute. I wasn’t involved in the prospectus at all. I can’t remember how this occurred. It was flagged to me that in the IT section of the Royal Mail propsectus there was a reference to, I can’t remember the words now, but risks related to the Horizon It system.
It seemed the wrong place. So the line that was put in said that no systemic issues have been found with the Horizon system. The Horizon system was no longer anything to do with the Royal Mail group. So I got in touch with the company secretary, and said I don’t understand why this is here, please can we have it removed?
The line was removed. Henry points out that the unsafe convictions before the Royal Mail and Post Office separated in 2012 would have been a liability for the newly privatised Royal Mail. That included, for example, the high profile 2010 conviction of Seema Misra, in which Jenkins gave evidence.
Henry then points to an email after the reference was removed from the document where Vennells told the chair “I earned my keep.”
“You really had earned your keep on that one, hadn’t you?” Henry said. “You kept the lid on it.”
She repeats she had “no involvement with this” ie the prospectus, except for what she says is “this very last minute intervention”. It is difficult to see how a “last minute intervention” can also be “no involvement”.
Chair Wyn Williams intervenes to say this line of questioning is entirely new to him, and could Henry and his team notify the lead counsel of all the relevant documents so the inquiry team can read them. The inquiry was established in non-statutory form in September 2020, and converted to a statutory inquiry in June 2021.
Edward Henry KC is questioning Paula Vennells about remote access to the Horizon IT system. He put it to her that she was still, all through the scandal, was not determined in her CEO role to get to the bottom of how much external access was being used.
“This is la-la-land” says Henry, about her argument that senior figures did not know about the extent of the access, or attempt to uncover it.
Vennells said “it appears as though there were interventions on a on a fairly frequent basis, which as Mr Beer [lead counsel] said yesterday was not uncovered.”
Vennells: 'I lost all employment' and have 'no one to blame' but myself
Paula Vennells has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry that the business of the inquiry has been a full-time job for her for a year as she agreed with Edward Henry KC that she had “no one to blame” for her downfall except herself.
The former Post Office CEO, who stepped away from the business in 2019, said:
From when the Court of Appeal passed its judgment, I lost all the employment that I had, and since that time, I have only worked on this inquiry. It has been really important to me to do what I didn’t, or was unable to do at the time I was chief executive – and I have worked for three years and prioritised this above anything else – for the past year it has probably been a full-time job.
I have avoided talking to the press, perhaps to my own detriment, because all the way through, I have put this first and I was not working alone on this. I cannot think that any of the major decisions I took by myself in isolation of anybody. I did my best through this. And it wasn’t good enough, and that is a regret I carry with me.
Henry asked: “You have no one to blame but yourself, do you agree?”
Vennells replied: “Absolutely. Where I made mistakes and where I made the wrong calls … where I had information and I made the wrong calls, yes of course.”
Vennells has told the inquiry that colleagues withheld important information, including legal advices, from her, but that she did not think there had been a conspiracy.
Henry challenged her: “What I’m going to suggest to you is that whatever you did was deliberate, considered and calculated. No one deceived you, no one misled you. You set the agenda and the tone for the business.”
She responded:
I was the chief executive, I did not set the agenda for the work of the scheme and the way the legal and the IT parts of it worked. I had to rely on those colleagues who were experts and I had no reason not to take the advice that I was given. I accept I was chief executive and, as I have said, as a chief executive you have ultimate accountability and that is simply fact.
If you are watching the video stream, by the way, the woman sitting in front of Edward Henry KC in vision is former subpostmaster Jo Hamilton.
The 66-year-old was wrongly accused of stealing more than £36,000 from the Post Office branch she was in charge of at the time in South Warnborough, Hampshire. To avoid a potential jail sentence for theft, she pleaded guilty to a charge of false accounting, and was prosecuted in 2006.
Edward Henry KC has asked Paula Vennells whether she was aware of the Seema Misra case in 2010, which he described as “the high-water mark” of Horizon reliabilty being touted in court.
Henry said:
Her conviction became for years a validation of Horizon’s integrity for the Post Office was as it were a test case. And if the Post Office had failed in this prosecution, it would have opened up the floodgates to civil litigation, civil claims for damages. And a defeat in that trial in Guilford would have made civil claims difficult to defend.
Vennells says she thinks she had heard of it at the time, but has maintained in her witness statement that she did not know that the Post Office was carrying out its own prosecutions until 2012, and was not aware of any bugs, errors or defects in the Horizon system until mid-2013.
Paula Vennells told the Horizon IT Inquiry there are “no words” that will make the “sorrow and what people have gone through any better. It was an extraordinarily complex undertaking and the Post Office and I didn’t always take the right path, I’m very clear about that.”
Chair Wyn Williams has intervened after Edward Henry KC interrupts Paula Vennells for the third or fourth time.
The chair says “I appreciate that you [Henry] have a difficult task, but also the witness has a difficult task. So I’d ask you both, one to ask the question, one to complete the answer. And then we move on.”
Edward Henry KC has said to Paula Vennells that her witness statement is a “craven self-serving account” and that “to this day” she still lives in “a cloud of denial”.
Vennells has said that she lost all her work, and essentially has now been working full-time responding to the inquiry. “It is my commitment,” she said. “I have avoided talking to the press – perhaps to my own detriment – because all the way through I have put [the inquiry] first.”
Mounting a defence of her actions she said “I did my very best through this, and it wasn’t good enough.”
She said as chief executive she was responsible, but she did not work alone. “I had to rely on those colleagues who were experts. And I had no reason not to take the advice that I was given.”
Henry suggests to her she is very “politically adept” and was “managing up not down”.
Edward Henry KC has asked Paula Vennells about the case of Lee Castleton, was made bankrupt by the Post Office after a two-year legal battle as one of the early victims of the scandal.
Henry said to Vennells that Castleton was “locked out of the mediation scheme” because he was “an illustrious scalp that could be used a precedent”. He said to her “you instigated no investigation into why £32,000 pounds of public money was used to crush him and grind him into the dirt.”
She replied “I agree with what you’re saying”.
Wyn Williams, the chair, has confirmed the timetable for day. Edward Henry KC will have questions for an hour, followed by Sam Stein KC for an hour. They both represent groups of victims of the scandal.
Then before lunch there will be questions from legal teams representing the National Federation of Subpostmasters and an individual, Susan Sinclair.
After lunch, another barrister representing victims, Tim Moloney KC will have an hour for questions.
Then, the chair said a legal representative for Paula Vennells will have a chance, if they wish, to ask questions.
There was a ripple of laughter in the room when Williams finished by saying to lead counsel Jason Beer KC, and then you, as usual, can have the last word.
Edward Henry KC will open the questioning. He represents a number of subpostmasters affected by the scandal, and he has opened by asking Paula Vennells “There were so many forks in the road, but you always took the wrong path, didn’t you?”
Paula Vennells begins third day of evidence at Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has begun giving her third and final day of oral testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London, where she will be questioned by legal teams representing victims of the scandal.
On Wednesday, the inquiry published her written witness statements, which run to nearly 800 pages and can be found here and here. Vennells was criticised by lead counsel Jason Beer KC about the witness statements, saying “given you provided a 775 page witness statement that took seven months to write, could you not have reflected on what you could and should have done fully and differently within the witness statement?”
The inquiry is presided over by Wyn Williams, who will be attending remotely on Friday. He has praised the public gallery for their restraint during the hearing, but did intervene to admonish them yesterday when loud groans greeted one of Vennells’ non-answers.
The video feed of the inquiry runs on a three-minute delay, and the hearing is scheduled to run from 9.45am to 4.30pm today, but often wraps up slightly earlier on a Friday. You can watch it here, and we will bring you the key lines and exchanges as they emerge.
Nick Wallis, who has been writing about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal for many years, and who runs the Post Office Scandal blog, had a quick piece last night pointing out two groups of people who are excluded from the Post Office Horizon System Offences bill which only needs royal assent to become law in England, Northenr Ireland and Wales.
Firstly, Scottish subpostmasters aren’t included. Those prosecuted under Scots law will not be having their convictions quashed from Westminster.
Secondly, and somewhat more complex, are those who have already appealed against their conviction, and failed to have it overturned in court. It is worth reading the details from Wallis of these cases.
Paula Vennells has now arrived at Aldwych House in London for today’s hearing. It is scheduled to begin at 9.45am.
As a reminder, the inquiry is being held because more than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 during a period that Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon IT system was known to have bugs, some of which made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Hundreds of subpostmasters are still awaiting compensation for the damage to their lives and reputations.
Last night in parliament MPs agreed with amendments made in the House of Lords to the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences bill, which will quash hundreds of convictions in England and Wales and Northern Ireland without subpostmasters having to go through the court of appeal. It now only requires royal assent to be implemented.
Once again members of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) have gathered ahead of the hearing in London with their protest banner spelling out their demands, which include “identify and hold the individuals responsible to account”.
During yesterday’s session Paula Vennells admitted it was “possibly” her hope that a mediation scheme with subpostmasters would “minimise compensation”.
Vennells accepted that an email she sent in August 2013 which said “the hope of mediation was to avoid or minimise compensation” sounded like subpostmasters were only welcome on the scheme if they agreed to receive a “pat on the head and a token payment”.
PA Media reports she told the Horizon IT inquiry she did not believe the mediation scheme, set up for people who believed they had been wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office, was for paying out “substantial figures”.
In 2011 she set out the a “goal” of hers that all press “should be scoured for negative comment and refuted” in an email she sent. She made the comments after she was notified about a Private Eye article on the Horizon IT system and criticism from subpostmasters.
The inquiry also heard the ex-chief executive followed a “grossly improper” suggestion to not review all subpostmaster prosecutions after her communications chief said it would end up “front page news”.
The public gallery at the inquiry, made up of mainly subpostmasters, groaned loudly after Vennells said she did not remember if she took the “advice of the PR guy” to review past prosecutions. Lead counsel Jason Beer KC put it to Vennells that in her witness statement she said legal advice was being withheld from her, but she appeared to taking legal advice from the heads of PR and of IT.
Our chief reporter, Dan Boffey, was watching the session yesterday. Here is his report.
Welcome and opening summary …
The former CEO of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, will face a third day of questioning in London today at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
Unlike the previous two days, when she was questioned by lead counsel for the inquiry Jason Beer KC, today she will be quizzed directly by legal teams representing some of the victims of the scandal, which has been described as “the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history” by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The hearing is scheduled to begin at 9.45am, and you will be able to watch it here. The feed has a three minute time delay.
