Post Office Inquiry – live: Paula Vennells booed over calling postmasters ‘inadequate’ in bombshell email

Paula Vennells has insisted she still had confidence in Horizon despite accepting that she knew Fujitsu's former chief IT architect Gareth Jenkins was no longer deemed reliable as an expert witness in Post Office prosecutions about Horizon.

“By 2012, you had learned for the first time that the Post Office actually took people to court” and by 2013 “that the expert being used to support those prosecutions was no longer reliable”, said subpostmasters’ barrister Sam Stein KC.

“You also knew that there was a reputational and potentially financial risk to the Post Office that had to be discussed with the board arising from possible attempts to reopen past convictions. Do you agree when considering this entire collection of information that your world belief in the Horizon system had been shaken to the core?”

Ms Vennells replied: “My understanding around the bugs is that they had been fixed, that they affected a small number of Post Offices, that Mr Jenkins had had to be stood down because of that, and that the Post Office was no longer bringing prosecutions, and that it would look for an expert witness at a future stage.

“I was not aware – as I’ve said a number of times now – the elements around Mr Jenkins had caused the Post Office to breach its duties as a prosecutor, and I accept the other matters that you’ve explained.”

Challenged that each of these facts were “a direct attack on the very basic system that supported the Post Office”, Mr Stein insisted that “by the end of 2013 you could be in no doubt Ms Vennells that the Horizon system needed investigation, needed inquiry and review”.

She replied: “I absolutely wish we had done that. I still had confidence in the Horizon system from the fact it was working for the majority of people. I did not have the detail I have today, and had I had that, my view would have been very, very different.”

Following a short break, subpostmasters’ barrister Sam Stein KC is now asking Paula Vennells about the Network Transformation Programme to improve the Post Office’s financial sustainability.

He begins by alleging that Ms Vennells “dragged the Post Office to profitibility over the debris of the lives of subpostmasters”.

She replied: “I said at the very beginning of giving my evidence that there are no words that can express the regret I feel for what happened to subpostmasters. I had an objective, it is right, as the chief executive of the company, to bring it – it wasn’t profitability, but commercial sustainability, so that it consumed less funding and subsidy from the government.”

Paula Vennells sent an email to Post Office board chair Alice Perkins telling her “I have earned my keep”, the inquiry has been told.

Asked what she meant by this, Ms Vennells said that it “had taken some time” to remove a line from the 2013 prospectus about the Royal Mail flotation which warned about potential risks in the Post Office IT system, which Ms Vennells said she had done “because I didn’t believe that it was helpful in any way”.

Challenged by barrister Ed Henry that “you knew of the existence of bugs, errors, and defects and you’d already kept those out, hadn’t you?”, Ms Vennells said she was not involved in the prospectus until this “very last minute” intervention.

Paula Vennells has told the Horizon IT inquiry that revelations about possible prosecution failures at the time of Royal Mail’s privatisation would have been “devastating”.

Edward Henry KC asked: “You had, on July 16 (2013), the board meeting where [former Post Office general counsel] Susan Crichton is sitting outside on the naughty step. You know that at that July 16 board meeting, the board was alarmed about potential claims against it, correct?”

Ms Vennels said: “Yes.”

Mr Henry continued: “How would revelations about possible prosecution failures at a time when Royal Mail was in charge of the Post Office have affected privatisation? It would have been devastating, wouldn’t it?”

Ms Vennells replied: “Yes it would, I’m sure.”

Paula Vennells has insisted that her response to the claims about Horizon errors had no connection to the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

Edward Henry KC claimed: “Let’s be clear. You were given the job I suggest, or it must have been uppermost in your mind: keep the lid on this. Because of course you wanted to please stakeholders. You wanted to please the board, government, Whitehall.

“I mean how else can we explain your intransigence throughout your tenure in relation to the concerns that were being brought to you about Horizon?”

After Ms Vennells once again asks him to repeat the question, he continued: “What I am suggesting to you is that you wanted to diffuse this because it was going to be immensely politically damaging both to the Post Office itself but also to the privatisation – and you were of course anxious to please BIS [the now defunct Department for Business, Innovation and Skills], weren’t you?”

Ms Vennells replied: “I had no role at all in relation to the privatisation, I had no conversations with BIS about the privatisation. My concerns at this stage were only about the Post Office ... I don’t believe I made any connection between this and the Royal Mail privatisation at all.”

Subpostmasters’ barrister Edward Henry has challenged Paula Vennells that “this is la-la land” as the former Post Office chief executive said she wasn’t aware that Fujitsu had remote access to branch accounts on the Horizon system while the company’s lawyers Cartwright King did.

Ms Vennells said she was not aware that Cartwright King knew of Fujitsu’s remote access.

Paula Vennells has been challenged on the fact that “remote access – unauthorised tampering – was never resolved throughout the entire time of your tenure as managing director and as chief executive”.

Ms Vennells replied: “And the question is?”

Mr Henry continued: “Well, in other words, the disconnect between corporate communications, the outward face of the business, and the grubby internal reality.”

The former chief executive said: “I’m sorry, I want to be able to help. You’re making statements...” to which chair Sir Wyn Williams interjected: “Let me try, Ms Vennells. I think the point that’s being put to you is that throughout the period you were chief executive, let’s keep to that - it makes it simpler - the true extent of remote access was never satisfactorily resolved by the senior people at the Post Office.”

Ms Vennells said: “So when that is correct, the volume of interventions that were happening, as I understand it and I’ve only understood this since in terms of what is detailed in the Horizon judgement and the Project Bramble report which I’ve seen afterwards is that appears as though there were interventions on a fairly frequent basis, which as Mr Beer says yesterday was not known to me, and I believe the board and the group executive.

“I don’t know how widely wthin the Post Office that information was known but clearly it was happening.”

Paula Vennells was rejected the suggestion that she is “politically adept, saying: “I would suggest that wasn’t the case, this was my first job in a public sector organisation.”

But barrister Ed Henry KC said he found this surprising as she had later moved on to the Cabinet Office.

When Ms Vennells said she did not understand the connection, Mr Henry continued: “Your concerns were managing upwards. You were obsessed with the media, pleasing the stakeholders, the board, the government, Whitehall. Those were your priorities, weren’t they?”

Ms Vennells said these were “very important stakeholders” for the Post Office.

In a sign of the intensity of the questioning being levelled at Paula Vennells, the inquiry’s chair Sir Wyn Williams has seen fit to intervene after the former chief executive was interrupted multiple times.

Sir Wyn told Ed Henry KC, who acts on behalf of subpostmasters: “I appreciate that you 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.”

Mr Henry apologised to Ms Vennells, and to Sir Wyn.

Paula Vennells has insisted she did her “very best” when chief executive but that she “did not set the agenda” and had “no reason not to take the advice” she was given by legal and IT experts on the Horizon scandal.

She said: “I was the chief executive. I did not set the agenda for the work of the scheme and the way the legal and IT parts of it worked. As I’ve said to the inquiry over the past two days, I’m not a lawyer, I didn’t have the expertise or the experience to lead on that. Nor did I on the IT side.

“I had to rely on those colleagues who were experts and I had no reason not to take the advice I was given. I accept I was chief executive and as chief executive you have ultimate accountability, and that is simply fact.

“You are not responsible for everything that happens underneath you. You have to rely on the advice of internal and external experts, and that is what I did. I was not working alone on this. I was surrounded by the board, by the group executive committee.

“I cannot think of any of the major decisions I took by myself in isolation of anybody. This was far too serious an undertaking for the Post Office – for everybody affected, for every single postmaster case, and my ambition was to get those through the scheme.

“I did my very best through this and it wasn’t good enough. And that is a regret I carry with me.”