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.
Key events
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.”
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”.
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
