Post Office Horizon IT inquiry: tearful Vennells’ claim she worked as hard as she could dismissed as ‘absolute rubbish’ – live | Post Office Horizon scandal

Tim Moloney KC is asking about legal documentation from 2011 to do with a potential class action. Paula Vennells has pointed out she wasn’t CEO then, but was managing director, and that this was before the Royal Mail and Post Office split.

She is shown a document from 2011 by Emily Springford that says “It’s very important that we control the creation of documents which relate to any of the above issues” and goes on to say “Your staff should therefore think very carefully before committing to writing anything relating to the above issues.”

There is a lot of legalese essentially telling staff to go out of their way to make every document as likely as possible to be covered by privilege, meaning it would not have to be disclosed in court.

Vennells says she never saw this document. Moloney appears a bit flustered here as he doesn’t seem to be able to tie this document to Vennells, and she wasn’t in charge of the Post Office legal services when it was issued.

He is now asking her “as a person, not as a lawyer” what she thinks of the advice. She says the whole thing in the document is “odd”.

Moloney is arguing that the mantra in the document became standard practice in the Post Office and asks Vennells to comment on it.

But maybe Moloney has laid a trap here, because he is now showing an email chain where Paula Vennells in October 2011 was writing about a Horizon independent assessment and at one point she says “We have had lawyers advice re how mails etc are now handled”, suggesting she had read it.

Angela van den Bogerd, in her evidence to the inquiry, said that legal privilege was used to “cloak” messages.

Tim Moloney KC says he has three topics to tackle:

• the importance of legal professional privilege to the Post Office

• Paula Vennells’ involvement in the Royal Mail prospectus that Henry asked about this morning

• some of the media coverage in 2014

Paula Vennells begins final session of evidence at Post Office Horizon IT inquiry

Before we resume for the afternoon, some reaction from Lee Castleton. He has told PA Media he wishes Paula Vennells would have recognised a decade ago that what happened to him and his Post Office colleagues was “unforgivable”.

“It’s a different world for me now. It’s 20 years on and we have had to fight so hard. I just wish she would have recognised that in 2013 – it would have made such a difference to a lot of people,” he said.

“It would have been so much better for everybody had the Post Office not done what they had done. There have been so many people punished for nothing.”

Castleton was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004 and was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office.

Post Office Horizon IT inquiry breaks for lunch

Paula Vennells is asked “How would you reconcile that despite your knowledge of issues with the reliability of Horizon evidence, criminal prosecutions based on such evidence continued in Scotland up until 2015?”

She replies that as far as she is aware those cases did not proceed on the basis of Horizon data alone, adding “I’m afraid my knowledge of the legal system in Scotland isn’t sufficient to be able to answer any more than about.”

She is informed that the Crown Office in Scotland has uncovered four cases prosecuted between 2013 and 2015 which relied on Horizon evidence.

Vennells then agrees that it has been “a very appropriate response” that the Post Office has been stripped of prosecuting powers in Scotland.

Catriona Watt on behalf of the National Federation of SubPostmasters, has asked Paula Vennells some quite technical questions about the “network transformation programme” programme.

Next up is Susan Sinclair’s legal team. Sinclair is a subpostmaster who was convicted in 2004 in Scotland, and the first to have successfully had their conviction quashed in Scotland.

The inquiry has previously established on multiple occasions that none of the senior leaders or senior legal team at the Post Office are conversant with Scots Law.

The Post Office also failed to disclose information about Horizon faults to courts in Scotland as well as in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I should add at this point that Alan Bates, one of the leading campaigners on this issue, had very little time for the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), and the feeling at times appeared to be mutual.

We saw yesterday an email from former head of the NFSP George Thompson in which he forwarded on a message from Bates to senior leadership in the Post Office, calling Bates’ words “rubbish” and saying that he would tell him to “go away”.

Catriona Watt mentioned this in her opening statement just now, pointing out that Thompson will be appearing at the inquiry and will have to “answer for the things he said and did” on behalf of the NFSP at the time. She said that email was “shocking and deplorable”.

In his oral testimony on 9 April, Bates said:

The NFSP was absolutely useless. I mean, they were just another department of Post Office, as I believe it still is these days as well.

If you go right back to the early days, the 2002s, 2003s, and when I was going to the NFSP meetings, I know I attended one meeting where a subpostmaster at the back of the meeting group, he started saying, “I’ve just had my post office taken off me and I’d had problems with Horizon”, and all the rest and the NFSP Exec people who were there escorted him out of the back of the place. They took him away, out of that meeting.

When my contract was terminated, I went to a NFSP meeting to try, well, a local branch one. I went to a NFSP meeting where I tried to speak on behalf of that, and there was one of the National Executive NFSP members at that meeting and he stopped … tried to stop me speaking. So there was an awful lot of pressure from the NFSP to support Post Office.

The inquiry has resumed with Catriona Watt asking questions on behalf of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP)

I mentioned earlier that Jane MacLeod, general counsel at the Post Office 2015-2019, named earlier as one of the people Paula Vennells said let her down [See 12.09 BST], is declining to cooperate with the inquiry in person.

Chair Wyn Williams has issued a statement, in which he says in part:

The inquiry sent MacLeod a request to produce a written witness statement. I was satisfied before seeing MacLeod’s draft witness statement that she would be an important witness from whom I wished to hear oral evidence. The inquiry wrote to MMacLeod to inform her that she was listed to give oral evidence.

MacLeod provided a draft of her witness statement on 11 April 2024. Her recognised legal representative informed the inquiry that, due to the passage of time, MacLeod considered that her written statement was the best evidence that she could offer and that she was “questioning … whether she would be able to assist the inquiry further”. The inquiry restated its position that it considered it important to hear oral evidence from MacLeod. Further, it offered to meet MacLeod’s travel and accommodation expenses. However, MacLeod has made it clear that she will not cooperate with the inquiry by providing oral evidence, whether by attending the inquiry in person or by giving evidence remotely via live video link.

The chair of the inquiry explains that while he does have some powers to summons her more forcefully, the chances of enforcement are negligible, and so the statement concludes

I … consider that there are no adequate means of compelling MacLeod to attend. However, I note that I have received a considerable amount of disclosure on the issues that are relevant to MacLeod. I shall be able to compare what MacLeod says in her witness statement alongside the extensive contemporaneous documentation I have received. Whilst it would have been greatly preferable to hear from MacLeod, I do not consider that her absence prevents me from establishing the facts of her involvement in the matters relevant to the terms of reference.

The inquiry is breaking and will resume at 12.35 for half-an-hour more before breaking for lunch. There is a three minute delay on the video stream.

Sam Stein KC has asked Paula Vennells why she did not do more to investigate what was happening when she first found out that subpostmasters were being forced to pay back large sums on money in 2013.

Vennells said she set up the mediation scheme “to look into every single one of those complaints.”

Stein, representing a number of subpostmasters, said: “You see a reasonable, caring CEO would have said, ‘I want answers. I want to know what’s going on. I want to find out about what’s happening to these people, the subpostamsters that are the lifeblood of the system’ … not set up some distance review.

“You didn’t do that did you?” he asked.

The former Post Office boss replied:

I think you will find those cases where I asked those sorts of questions, but where we were dealing with historic cases, they needed to go through a proper review process. You can’t just, as a chief executive, ask somebody for their opinion on something. You have to go into it in a huge amount of detail which is what I understood as happening and I regret that we did not deal with those cases as we should have done.