Post Office Inquiry live: I didn’t realise Post Office brought its own prosecutions, says Alan Cook

Inquiry lawyer Stevens is now asking about Cook’s knowledge of Horizon and turns his attention once again to his witness statement

Stevens presses Cook about a line in the statement where he says he was aware of being asked about Horizon’s reliability in terms of system availability and accuracy.

Cook says that the issues he was more aware of at that time were questions of whether the Horizon IT system was there when it meant to be there – in other words, was the system turning on when postmasters logged into their computers?

He admits that later on that functionality – of the system actually being unlocked and turned on – became an issue.

“I was assured at the time that there were no critical bugs,” Cook’s statement reads, before asking: who assured you?

Cook answers by saying people working in IT would have taken him through demonstrations of the system as well as another former Post Office managing director, David Smith. “This was an environment where the accuracy of the system was not in question but there were issues about overnight performance,” he says.