Paula Vennells begins giving second day of evidence to Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
Paula Vennells has begun giving her second day of testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London. She will be questioned again by lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC. The inquiry is presided over by chair Wyn Williams.
You can watch the inquiry on this live blog. The video feed produced by the inquiry has a three minute delay on it. Nearly 800 pages of Vennells’ written witness statement have also been published. Her two statements can be found here and here.
Yesterday the former Post Office chief executive repeatedly broke down in tears as told the inquiry she had been misled by her staff about the safety of the prosecutions of branch operators. Text messages were also shared with the inquiry revealing that the former Royal Mail boss Moya Greene messaged Vennells, 65, in January this year accusing her of being part of a cover-up of wrongful prosecutions.
In her evidence, during which she broke down on four occasions, Vennells claimed the Post Office’s structure and the decisions of some employees not to pass on information, including legal advice and damning independent reports, meant she was unaware that people were being wrongly prosecuted or chased for missing funds. Vennells repeatedly insisted during her tenure that the Horizon system was unimpeachable despite mounting evidence to the contrary
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of post office operators were prosecuted on the basis of faulty accounting software, and thousands more were bankrupted or forced to pay back cash.
Key events
Vennells: limiting cases looked at by Second Sight was attempt to get report ready faster for MPs
Paula Vennells is shown a letter sent to her by Alan Bates in which he proposed meeting with her, accompanied by a forensic auditor, and told Vennells that what he had seen so far of the Second Sight work showed to him
This is in May 2013, and Bates told her “Whilst I appreciate the majority of the issues began on the previous regimes, and you’ve expressed a genuine willingness to address the concerns that JFSA has been raising. These issues are still continuing. It is now feasible to show the many of the prosecutions that the Post Office pressed should never have taken place.”
She said she was “surprised about some of the conclusions” by Bates because the Second Sight work was ongoing, and that the point the JFSA was making here was one it had been already making for several years.
She offered to meet but told him in her reply “My understanding is we’re too early in the investigation to suggest that things have been discovered which call into question the integrity of the system or the validity of the prosecutions, and to suggest that at this stage would be wrong.”
At the inquiry Paula Vennells names Susan Crichton and Alwen Lyons among those who would have been the people she was getting that information from.
Jason Beer KC asks her how if the original documentation about the Second Sight work was about reviewing all cases brought forward by MPs and including testing of the Horizon IT system ended up with a focus on just three cases.
Vennells tells him:
My recollection is … what I can recall is frustration from the team that the work Second Sight was doing had moved away from focusing on individual cases to the development of “themes”. And what they were trying to do at this stage, and Second Sight as well, to be fair, was to try and corral this back into the piece of work which could have a report which could be fed back to the MPs before we got to recess.
Paula Vennells says the topic of cost and time overruns and Second Sight not reviewing cases fast enough for the Post Office was “a fairly frequent topic of conversation.”
Paula Vennells is being asked about the process by which cases were selected for review. There was some debate in the Post Office about whether to include ones that had led to criminal prosecution, and specifically that of Seema Misra, who gave birth in prison after being convicted. The Post Office general counsel at the time, Susan Crichton, is shown saying in an email from Alwen Lyons that she felt even contacting Misra to say there would be a review would be “a red rag to a bull”. Vennells says she did not share that sentiment.
Jason Beer KC has shown Paula Vennells a document in which Second Sight proposed that their report should cover a selection of cases that had led to criminal actions, and should include testing of the Horizon IT system. He says neither of those things were what happened.
In June 2012 Second Sight were proposing a review of past cases, and Deloitte were proposing what Paula Vennells has just called “a detailed investigation of the Horizon system.”
She says “my priority at the time was to choose an organisation whom I felt would relate best with subpostmasters who had been raising their claims.”
The inquiry has heard in other evidence that Susan Crichton – general counsel at the Post Office from 2010 to 2013 – had previously worked with Ron Warmington of Second Sight. It has been implied this might have been a factor in them being selected over Deloitte, although Vennells adds today:
I felt very strongly that we needed an organisation to be able to work well with subpostmasters. I was concerned that any one of the big four [auditors/consultant companies] – Deloitte being one of them – may have come across as corporate and wouldn’t necessarily have had the understanding of running a post office or small retail businesses.
Vennells says that looking at the documents now, of the Deloitte proposal, “actually that would have been a very good piece of work to have done, because it may have brought more data to the fore than we knew.”
Jason Beer KC says he will start by looking at the circumstances around the Second Sight forensic audit into cases and the mediation scheme with subpostmasters.
Paula Vennells begins giving second day of evidence to Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
Paula Vennells has begun giving her second day of testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London. She will be questioned again by lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC. The inquiry is presided over by chair Wyn Williams.
You can watch the inquiry on this live blog. The video feed produced by the inquiry has a three minute delay on it. Nearly 800 pages of Vennells’ written witness statement have also been published. Her two statements can be found here and here.
Yesterday the former Post Office chief executive repeatedly broke down in tears as told the inquiry she had been misled by her staff about the safety of the prosecutions of branch operators. Text messages were also shared with the inquiry revealing that the former Royal Mail boss Moya Greene messaged Vennells, 65, in January this year accusing her of being part of a cover-up of wrongful prosecutions.
In her evidence, during which she broke down on four occasions, Vennells claimed the Post Office’s structure and the decisions of some employees not to pass on information, including legal advice and damning independent reports, meant she was unaware that people were being wrongly prosecuted or chased for missing funds. Vennells repeatedly insisted during her tenure that the Horizon system was unimpeachable despite mounting evidence to the contrary
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of post office operators were prosecuted on the basis of faulty accounting software, and thousands more were bankrupted or forced to pay back cash.
The inquiry will be starting for the day shortly. Here is Tim Adams’ profile of Paula Vennells from the Observer at the weekend.
Ella Baron’s cartoon for us today tackles the apology that Paula Vennells gave to the inquiry.
Here is the scene when Paula Vennells arrived in Aldwych earlier.
At one point yesterday Jason Beer KC put it to Paula Vennells that given the amount of information and documents she claimed were withheld from her by colleagues, she might be “the unluckiest CEO in UK”. Then Rishi Sunak announced a snap general election, and wiped coverage of Vennells’ testimony from most newspaper front pages. She might reflect, given it was the first time she has spoken about the scandal in public for years, that was actually rather lucky for her.
Metro and the Daily Star kept Vennells on their front pages, with the latter calling her “Little Miss Twaddle” and the former saying the nation’s sympathy for her tears was “in the post”.
An honourable mention also goes to the Perth and Perthshire Courier, which leads on victim reactions to what its headline described as Vennells’ “crocodile tears”.
Rather lengthier than anybody’s sketches or key takeaway pieces, the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry yesterday published the written witness statements of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. The first statement is 775 pages long and can be found here. A second additional statement of 23 pages is here.
Vennells was criticised by lead counsel Jason Beer KC about the witness statements. In it she said “there are many things I and the Post Office should have done differently. I am now reflecting with care on these matters.”
Beer asked her “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?”
Marina Hyde was also watching yesterday’s hearing, and produced her own sketch of the day …
Nick Wallis is a freelance journalist who has been reporting on the scandal for sometime, and who was live tweeting yesterday’s hearing. He has produced his own five things we learned article on his Post Office Scandal blog. You can find that here, and it is definitely worth a few moments of your time to read.
Daniel Boffey
Our chief reporter Daniel Boffey pulled out these four key disclosures from yesterday’s hearing:
Vennells said she did not know of IT faults and was ‘too trusting’ of subordinates
Vennells claimed that she was not made aware by her staff of problems with the Horizon IT system. She claimed this was a consequence of the structure of the organisation. She further claimed to have been misled by the Post Office’s legal team. “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,” she said. Vennells told the inquiry: “I was too trusting”.
A former CEO of the Royal Mail texted Vennells this year to accuse her of a cover up
Dame Moya Greene, chief executive of Royal Mail between 2010 and 2018, texted Vennells in January this year to express her dismay as further revelations were coming out about the Post Office scandal. She told Vennells “I can’t support you now after what I have learnt.”
Vennells was told in 2011 that Fujitsu had remote access to the Horizon system
An audit by Ernst and Young in 2011 included the identification of a risk posed by Fujitsu’s ability to remotely access the Horizon IT system. The Post Office went on to deny that such access was possible for many years, including in the high court. The inquiry also saw a briefing document given to Vennells before a select committee hearing in 2015. She was advised by her press office to deny that there was remote access unless she was “pushed”.
Vennels claimed that she did not know the Post Office was prosecuting staff until 2012
Despite evidence that Vennells had been in a meeting in 2008 when the subject of training Post Office investigators was raised, she claimed that it was not until 2012 that she understood that the organisation was investigating and prosecuting its own employees. The lead counsel of the inquiry, Jason Beer, wondered what Vennells believed was the purpose of a department called the Post Office Investigation Division.
Welcome and open summary …
Today is the second day of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells appearing at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London.
The inquiry is chaired by Wyn Williams, and Vennells will bequestioned again by lead counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC.
In her testimony yesterday, Vennells said that she had been misled by colleagues, but that she did not believe there had been a conspiracy. She also argued that she was telling what she believed to be the truth when she told MPs in 2015 that there was no remote access to the Post Office’s beleagured Horizon IT system, despite being shown documentary evidence that appeared to show she had been briefed otherwise.
On more than one occasion an emotional Vennels appeared to cry, but her tears and apologies didn’t cut much ice with the most high profile campaigner for justice, Alan Bates. After yesterday’s hearing he told the media “The whole thing is upsetting for everybody, including for so many of the victims. I’ve got no sympathy really.”
The inquiry is expected to start at 9.45am, and you will be able to watch it here with a three minute delay on the video feed.
