Vennells: ‘I have no sense that there was any conspiracy at all’
Paula Vennells has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry she does not think there was a conspiracy, but that mistakes were made. She said it was a huge lesson in corporate governance about the sharing of legal advice.
She told the inquiry in London:
I have been disappointed, particularly more recently, listening to evidence of the inquiry, where I think I have learned that people knew more than perhaps either they remembered at the time or I knew at the time.
I have no sense that there was any conspiracy at all. My deep sorrow in this is that I think that individuals, myself included, made mistakes, they didn’t see things and hear things.
I may be wrong, but that wasn’t the impression that I had at the time. I have more questions now, but [that is was] a conspiracy feels too far-fetched.
Key events
Jason Beer KC opened his questioning of Paula Vennells by asking her, in light of all the documents and statements and reports she claims she did not see in her witness statement, whether she was “the unluckiest CEO in the UK.”
He has then listed a large number of documents, reports and advices that the inquiry has seen many times, and is establishing that Vennells appears to be claiming that she did not see or read any of these key documents while she was CEO, and saw them or read them for the first time when they were disclosed to her as part of this inquiry.
Vennells said “As the inquiry has heard, there was information I wasn’t given and others didn’t receive as well. One of my reflections of all of this – I was too trusting.”
Vennells: I have been ‘deeply affected’ by victim impact statements heard at the inquiry
Paula Vennells has made an opening statement at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry where she apologised to the victims of the scandal and offered to stand outside the old Post Office of one of the victims with them to explain to people what happened and what they went through. She said she had been deeply affected by victim impact statements heard by the inquiry.
She said:
I would just like to say, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this, how sorry I am for all that subpostmasters and their families and others who suffered as a result of all of the matters that the inquiry has been looking into for so long.
I followed and listened to all of the human impact statements, and I was very affected by them. I remember listening to one subpostmaster whose name I noted, who said that he would like somebody to go and stand outside his old Post Office with him so he could tell them exactly what he’d been through. I would do that.
I’m very, very sorry.
I would also like to repeat the apology which is in my witness statements to Alan Bates, to Ron Warmington and Ian Henderson from Second Sight and to Lord Arbuthnot that I and those I worked with made their work so much harder, and I’m very, very sorry for that.
Second Sight were the forensic auditors employed by the Post Office to report on the integrity of the Horizon IT system. Lord Arbuthnot, then James Arbuthnot, was one of the MPs who pursued a case on behalf of a constituent who was a subpostmaster.
After Paula Vennells was given the reminder about self-incrimination by Wyn Williams, she said that she intended to answer all the questions. The warning has been given by the chair to several witnesses. Journalist Nick Wallis, who has been reporting on the scandal for years, notes on social media “This indicates she is a person of interest to the police and CPS.”
Jason Beer KC is asking the questions today as expected. They are going through some corrections and changes to Vennells’ two witness statements. The first statement she gave to the inquiry was from March of this year and is 775 pages long. The second was from April is an additional 23 pages.
Vennells has said she would like to make a short statement in person before the questions.
Paul Vennells begins giving evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
The former CEO of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, has begun to give evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London. She is scheduled to appear over the next three days.
She will take an oath and then present a written witness statement. She will then be questioned by counsel for the inquiry in front of the chair, retired judge Sir Wyn Williams. After being questioned by counsel, she will also likely be questioned by barristers and lawyers representing victims of the scandal.
Williams has given her a direction about self-incrimination. He reminds her “under our law, a witness at a public inquiry has the right to decline to answer a question put by counsel to the inquiry, by any legal representative, or by me, if there is a risk that the answer to that question would incriminate the witness.”
John Hyde of the Law Society Gazette reports there was a complete hush when Vennells entered the room. There are at least 30 former post office operators and victims of the scandal
The inquiry will try to establish when precisely she found out about failures in the Post Office’s Horizon system, and what she knew as the Post Office continued to prosecute people for fraud and false accounting, despite repeated warnings about the unreliability of the numbers being generated by the computer system.
Several of the victims of the scandal will be at the hearing in person in London today. Former subpostmaster Seema Misra called on Paula Vennells to “speak truth”.
Misra, who ran a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, was jailed in 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000. She was pregnant at the time.
Asked what she would say to Vennells, Misra told the PA news agency outside Aldwych House on Wednesday: “Please, for god’s sake, speak truth. That’s what we all deserve, we’ve been fighting such a long time. We want to know exactly what happened.”
Former subpostmaster Lee Castleton said he is “really looking forward” to Vennell’s evidence.
Castleton, from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004. He was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office.
He told the PA news agency: “I’m really looking forward to listen to what she has to say. It’s a good platform for her to finally speak. She’s not been able to, for whatever reason, speak for all these years. I think it’s important that she is listened to and heard and then we can all judge that. Let’s hear what, why and when, and who – who was involved in those decisions, why those decisions were made.”
He urged her to “Do what you feel is right.”
PA reports Vennells arrived at 7.45am and did not answer any questions as she walked a short distance up to the venue. The hearing is due to start at 9.45am. The live video feed has a three minute delay on it.
Jane Croft also told Rupert Neate back in April that the question of Fujitsu having remote access to the system is a key thing the inquiry is trying to understand the chronology of, and will be something to look out for in Vennells’ testimony in the coming days:
In 2015 the Post Office told a House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, a high court judge ruled in a landmark court case four years later.
In fact, staff at Fujitsu were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard.
A recording from 2013, unearthed by Channel 4 News, shows Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s head lawyer, confirm that Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could remotely access the Horizon system and adjust branches’ accounts. The recordings suggest Vennells was aware of claims that remote access to branch accounts was possible two years before prosecutions were halted against post office operators.
In 2015 Vennells told the Commons business select committee that “we have no evidence” of miscarriages of justice.
My colleague, Jane Croft, has been covering the scandal since 2018, and earlier this year for our First Edition newsletter she spoke to Rupert Neate about what to expect from this phase of the inquiry. She told him:
“The impact this scandal has had on thousands of people’s lives has been truly devastating,” Jane says. “These are ordinary people, without money and connections that have been caught up in this real David and Goliath battle.”
In personal impact statements to the inquiry, the victims have spoken about losing everything. “It’s not just their money,” Jane says. “It’s their liberty, their partners, their families, their homes. Some spoke about their children being bullied at school, being shunned by their local community, and being referred to as ‘the postmaster who stole old people’s pensions’.”
“They want justice and for the truth to come out,” Jane says. “It feels like the Post Office knew the Horizon IT system wasn’t working properly, but they continued to prosecute these innocent people anyway.”
The subpostmasters want to know what Post Office bosses, executives from Fujitsu (the Japanese company that developed the IT software), and government ministers knew about the faulty Horizon system. The judge in a high court case in 2019 concluded that “bugs, errors and defects” meant there was a “material risk” Horizon was to blame for the money missing from post office operators’ accounts.
Paula Vennells is likely to be asked why she decided to spend millions prosecuting the post office operators when the company was already aware of the Horizon problems.
Tim Adams
At the weekend Tim Adams for the Observer wrote a profile of Vennells ahead of her appearance today, asking how did Paula Vennells, an ordained priest, fall so far and so fast from grace?
Vennells’s role in the Post Office’s efforts at rebuttal and cover-up has, like much of the evidence at issue, been hard to extract from the public body at every stage. On Friday, Jason Beer KC for the inquiry revealed that Vennells had only that morning supplied 50 new documents relevant to it. Late and incomplete disclosure has been a repeated cause of criticism from chair of the inquiry, retired judge Sir Wyn Williams. Vennells came to her role promising transparency and openness in Post Office’s dealings. One of the first questions she will no doubt be asked on Wednesday is: whatever became of that commitment?
And not least because it seems so at odds with her public persona and utterances. Vennells grew up in what she describes as “working-class Manchester”; her father was an industrial chemist, her mother a company bookkeeper and volunteer with Citizens Advice. Vennells joined Unilever as a graduate trainee in 1981, and, in those corporate boom years, had jobs with L’Oréal, Dixons, Argos and Whitbread. She was hired initially as group network director by the Post Office in 2007, saying later: “I saw something in the Post Office that was bigger and deeper, maybe it was something about giving back. People care desperately for the Post Office. Very often it’s the subpostmaster or mistress that notices that an elderly customer hasn’t turned up recently and finds out what’s happened to them.”
Read more of Tim Adams’ profile of Paula Vennells here: Post Office scandal – how did Paula Vennells, an ordained priest, fall so far and so fast from grace?
How the inquiry hearing works …
We can expect today that Paula Vennells, the former CEO of the Post Office, will be sworn in under oath, and then will be presented with a physical copy of the written witness statement she has presented to the inquiry.
She will be given an opportunity to make any changes to it. Sometimes a witness will note small typographical changes. On other occasions witnesses add, delete or correct elements because subsequent written or oral testimony at the inquiry has changed their testimony or revealed new details. Witnesses are also sometimes given the opportunity to make an opening statement to the inquiry.
Vennells will then most likely be questioned by lead counsel for the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, who will take her through the written testimony, and use other documents and testimony to ask for clarification. The chair, retired judge Wyn Williams, may also intercede at points to seek clarification or pose his own questions.
When the counsel to the inquiry has finished questioning Vennells, “core particpants” are then also able to put a series of questions to her. These are barristers and lawyers representing various parties connected to the inquiry, including subpostmasters who served prison sentences during the scandal, former Fujitsu employee Gareth Jenkins, and a team specifically representing Scottish subpostmasters, where prosecutions fell under a separate judicial framework. Those questions tend to be very adversarial.
Vennells is scheduled to appear for three days, and so core participants are unlikely to be able to put questions to Vennells until Friday. Her witness statement will be published on the inquiry website and will be available here.
Paula Vennells: key questions the ex-Post Office boss must answer
Jane Croft
Yesterday my colleague Jane Croft put together an explainer on the questions that Paula Vennells must answer:
Why did she wrongly tell MPs in 2012 the Post Office had not lost a Horizon case?
Vennells met six MPs in 2012. A note of meeting showed Vennells told those present: “Every case taken to prosecution that involves the Horizon system thus far has found in favour of the Post Office”. Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, told the hearings this claim simply was “not true” as at that time there had been three acquittals.
Why did the Post Office not disclose legal advice in 2013 highlighting problems with past prosecutions?
In July 2013, Simon Clarke, a barrister advising the Post Office, concluded there was a serious problem with past prosecutions because of an “unreliable witness”. Clarke said there were issues with evidence from the Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins because he had failed to disclose information he knew about bugs in the Horizon software to defendants.
Chris Aujard, a former senior lawyer at the Post Office, has told the inquiry that in 2013 the Post Office’s executive committee “were in favour of ceasing prosecutions entirely”, but Vennells said “limited” prosecutions should continue. It was not disclosed to defence lawyers at the time.
Did she mislead MPs about whether remote access through Horizon was possible?
Before appearing before the business, innovation and skills committee in 2015, Vennells sent an email to her head of corporate communications asking if the Horizon system developed by Fujitsu was indeed secure: “What is the true answer?” she asked. “I need to say: ‘No, [remote access] is not possible.’”
The day after her testimony, the Post Office sent MPs a letter saying there was “no functionality in Horizon” for anyone at the company or Fujitsu to “edit, manipulate or remove transaction data” in a branch’s accounts. This was not true, and evidence suggests Vennells had previously been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could adjust accounts remotely.
Why did the Post Office continue fighting the high court case from 2016?
By 2017, the Post Office had received a draft report by Deloitte, which concluded “transactions can be deleted at database layer”, yet the company did not disclose the existence of that report to defence lawyers, instead choosing to spend millions maintaining that the branch operators were at fault.
During her time as chief executive, did she consider the possibility that Horizon might be flawed?
The Post Office’s chief financial officer, Alisdair Cameron, told the inquiry his former boss Vennells “did not believe there had been a miscarriage [of justice] and could not have got there emotionally. She seemed clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong and it was very clearly stated in my very first board meeting. She never, in my observation, deviated from that or seemed to particularly doubt that.”
You can read the full explainer from Jane Croft here: Paula Vennells: key questions the ex-Post Office boss must answer
Welcome and opening summary …
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has over recent weeks been hearing from senior leaders in the business to try to unravel exactly who knew what and when while it was prosecuting post office operators and publicly defending its faulty Horizon IT system. Today begins three days of scheduled testimony from Paula Vennells, who was Post Office CEO from 2012 and 2019.
Proceedings are due to start at 9.45am. You will be able to follow it live via video here, and I will bring you the key lines that emerge.
