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

Paula Vennells has said it was "completely unfair" of the Post Office to maintain that there were no systemic errors in Horizon.

Counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC asked if a "frequent refrain" of the Post Office in 2014 was that there were no systemic errors in Horizon.

Ms Vennells replied: "It was, and it was wrong...it was completely unfair to use in the business.”

The Post Office’s most senior IT manager was “dismissive” of a magazine which broke the story of seven subpostmasters beginning their fight for justice in 2009, Paula Vennells said.

In her first witness statement, Ms Vennells said the first she was aware that anyone was questioning Horizon was after the Computer Weekly article was published in May 2009.

She said the article was raised by Mike Young at a meeting of the executive management team who said it was “critical of Horizon and had been picked up by a Welsh language television station”.

Ms Vennells added: “I remember this reasonably well because Mike was dismissive of Computer Weekly. I recall he said it was a trade magazine that did not know what it was talking about in relation to Horizon. Mike said he was handling it.

“I spoke to him about it after the meeting because I was still concerned. He assured me that there was nothing wrong with the system and that the article was nonsense (or words to that effect).”

Wronged subpostmaster Lee Castleton has said Paula Vennells will “never” shed as many tears as he has.

Mr 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.

Speaking about Ms Vennells’ evidence, he said: “She’s got a huge opportunity to get what she sees as the truth out there.

“I think it’s a huge stage for her, I think the paperwork is fantastic, to see what was being written at the time it’s really, really important for us to see that. And what she remembers really is kind of a background for me, the actual verbal evidence is not really that important.”

Asked about Ms Vennells breaking down in tears, he added: “She’ll never shed as many as I have, I’m afraid, or my family, or the rest of the victims or the wider group.

“Not that I have no empathy for that because I do, I understand completely.

“I’d imagine a lot of it’s nerves too and doing her best. I think she’s got a need or want to do the right thing.”

Rubina, a sub postmistress who was accused of taking £43,000 in 2010 and sentenced to a 12 months in prison, said Paula Vennells should be made “homeless”, Archie Mitchell reports.

When asked whether she wants to see Paula Vennells go to prison, she told Times Radio: "I don’t want Paula Vennells to go to prison because she won’t learn anything.

“The only way she’ll learn is everything being stripped of her, her assets, her mark against her name so that she can’t get employment, made homeless. That’s how I want her to pay back what she did to us"

"When people like [her] go to prison, they don’t learn anything. After three or four months or six months later they’ll be out.”

Lord Arbuthnot, James Arbuthnot, a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board has told Times Radio that Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells testimony is an “astonishing announcement of her ignorance” and is “displaying an incompetence of gargantuan scale”

He said: “It’s an astonishing announcement of her ignorance of what the organisation of which she was chief executive was actually doing and I think Sir William’s reaction was a bit of incredulity. How could you not know that your organisation was prosecuting hundreds and hundreds of sub-postmasters.

“The question is, is it credible? She was either telling the truth but displaying an incompetence of gargantuan scale or she was not telling the truth.”

He also rejected her argument that she did not know about the prosecutions: “For one thing, I wrote to Moira Green, her predecessor chief executive, in 2011 and got a letter back from her, from Paula Vennells, talking about the prosecutions.

“So, to say that she didn’t know until after she’d written the letter to me about prosecutions strikes me as being just not credible.”

Paula Vennells has been accused of asking her team to “dig into” the records of Martin Griffiths, who stepped in front of a bus after being sacked from his Post Office branch in 2013.

The former Post Office chief was quizzed at the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal about an email she sent after his suicide attempt suggesting she had heard about “previous mental health and family issues”.

In the email to Post Office executives, Ms Vennells said: “Can you let me know what background we have on Martin?

The Horizon IT Inquiry heard that Paula Vennells received direct correspondence from subpostmasters having issues with the computer system from 2012.

Ms Vennells sent an email after receiving word from subpostmaster Pervez Nakvi about Horizon issues in February 2012, in which the former Post Office chief executive said: “It is very frustrating to receive mails like this. Pervez is right to raise it.

“It is my understanding that Horizon is reliable...but if trusted individuals like Pervez are now not feeling that is the case are we monitoring the right metrics?”

Asked if it was relevant that they were a trusted individual, she said: “I responded to all complaints in the exact same way. It would not have made a difference whether I knew the subpostmaster or not.”

Pressed on whether all complaints raised by subpostmasters would call for investigation, Ms Vennells said: “I would hope so. I’m sure there are cases where that was not the case but I would have tried to.”

Paula Vennells has broken into tears for a third time amid a grilling about what she called “disturbing” reports from postmasters as the Horizon IT scandal unfolded.

She was asked about eight examples of complaints from postmasters who had applied for mediation in 2013.

After reading the complaints, she wrote an email to a colleague saying: “Apart from finding them very disturbing, I defy anyone not to, I’m now even better informed.”

She described the “dreadful” financial impacts on some postmasters and said she wanted to share their stories with colleagues.

But, referring to a 2015 decision by the former Post Office chief to close the mediation scheme, inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC asked what happened between that decision and her finding the cases “disturbing”.

“When did they cease to become very disturbing?” he asked.

Ms Vennells broke into tears before saying nothing had been found in the mediation process and there were “explanations” for what had happened in every case.

“I’m very sorry we didn’t reach the right conclusion on these cases,” she added.

Fujitsu Europe’s then-chief executive described the core of Horizon like “Fort Knox” or an “aircraft flight recorder” when discussing remote access, Paula Vennells said in her first witness statement.

Ms Vennells and Duncan Tait, Fujitsu Europe’s then-CEO, concurred it was “implausible” that Post Office branch accounts could be altered remotely, Ms Vennells said when detailing her understanding of remote access as of July 3 2013.

She said she asked Mr Tait if a Fujitsu colleague could alter branch accounts remotely, and said his response was no and “we concurred it was an implausible scenario”.

She added: “Why would a Fujitsu colleague try to hack into a branch’s accounts? We couldn’t find any suitable explanation - there was no way they could benefit financially from such an action. The only possible reason would be a malicious act by a disgruntled employee.

“Duncan described the core of Horizon like a black box, ie., similar to an aircraft flight recorder; he said that even if someone wanted to, it was not possible to alter or break it.

“I had heard the black box description before. He described how secure the system was - that even if someone had the motivation, it just wasn’t possible - Horizon was like Fort Knox. I found it reassuring that the CEO of Fujitsu confirmed that there was no cause for concern and that the system could not be tampered with.”

Paula Vennells has said she does not know why she was not shown a 2013 report warning that Post Office systems were “not fit for purpose in a modern retail and financial environment” – and said she is not sure she even knew that company Detica were carrying it out.

Ms Vennells said: “I find it very strange that it wasn’t brought to me, not just to my attention, but to the attention of everybody else who had responsibilities in terms of the running of the Post Office.”

Asked whether it was a serious failure by Lesley Sewell, Chris Aujard and Angela van den Bogerd – who all appear to have had access to the document – not to inform her, Ms Vennells said: “I find it very strange that it wasn’t brought to my – and it isn’t just to my attention, it’s the attention of everybody else who had responsibilities in terms of the running of the Post Office.

Pressed on whether she had “any clue why they would want to keep you, the executive, and the board, out of this information”, she said: “No I don’t. And I don’t recall either that they were colleagues that I would have suspected were witholding something from the board, or myself.

“I don’t understand why the report didn’t progress.”