The head of PR and media for the Post Office helped write a “story” vigorously defending the faulty Horizon IT system that was then “cut and pasted” as evidence in witness statements used in the prosecution of post office operators, the inquiry into the scandal has heard.
Simon Baker, a Post Office employee, asked the company’s media team to help “craft our message”, which had been developed by two lawyers, devising wording that was later used in legal proceedings, the inquiry heard.
As the Post Office’s legal team successfully pursued a string of prosecutions against post office operators wrongly accused of stealing, issues with the faulty Horizon IT system that was actually responsible for the accounting errors were increasingly being raised during the cases.
In a chain of internal communication from 2012 – which became known after the scandal as the “Horizon bashing bandwagon” emails – the Post Office moved to quash any perception that a review of the IT system by the auditors Second Sight might lend credibility to claims the system was faulty.
Second Sight was appointed by the Post Office in 2012 after talks with a small group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance campaign group to conduct an independent investigation into Horizon after concerns had been raised about the IT system during the prosecutions.
In response, the Post Office’s legal team, the PR chief and the company secretary jointly drafted a “story” asserting that there were no problems, the inquiry heard.
“Please can you help us craft our message around the Second Sight review,” said Baker, in an email to its media team. “We need to combat the assertion that the review is an acknowledgment that there is a problem with Horizon.”
He later wrote that when the “final draft of ‘Our Story’ is complete that it is to be given to “agents and counsel for [a] consistent approach and submissions where there is challenges to Horizon,” the inquiry heard.
“It was a press release, rather than a disclosure,” said Duncan Atkinson, the criminal prosecutions expert for the inquiry, who has provided two lengthy reports into the Post Office’s investigation and prosecution practices and gave testimony in two evidence sessions this week. “A form of words was put together … a significant part of that asserting there were no problems … even where faults were being understood [by the Post Office].”
In the email chain, Ronan Kelleher, the interim head of PR and media at the time, offered “tweaks”. One was described by Jason Beer, lead counsel to the inquiry, as a “significant amendment”.
The “press release” subsequently became part of “additional evidence” submitted in a witness statement for Stephen Bradshaw, a Post Office investigator, in the case against post office operator Kim Wylie.
“It starts to become familiar,” said Beer. “I think you’ll recognise that … [it has been] drafted by the head of public relations and media of the Post Office, and now it has become a witness statement.”
Beer added that not only had it been “cut and pasted” into Bradshaw’s witness statement but it had also been inserted into “other witness statements” in Post Office prosecution cases.
“It is profoundly disturbing,” Atkinson said. “Effectively, a press release that the system works well. It is certainly not a proper approach as to the extent of disclosure on these topics and its a rather disquieting approach to the use of a witness statement. To sign up to this, unless you really did think this was all that one could say on the topic of the operation of Horizon, it is disquieting.”
The Horizon scandal resulted in more than 700 post office operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.
The IT system, installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu, resulted in postal operators filing shortfalls in their returns and led to the the company suing them.
To date, 86 operators have had their wrongful convictions overturned with £21m paid in compensation.
