Paula Vennells, in response to a question by Sam Stein KC, claimed that she worked as hard as she could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK, expressing regret for not recognizing the imbalance of power between the institution and the individual. She acknowledged the need for better governance and data reporting, admitting that she did not have all the information that she needed. However, Stein rejected her claim, stating that under her leadership, she and her colleague Angela van den Bogerd fought against litigants in the High Court, allowing counsel to cross-examine them on the basis of their incompetence or dishonesty, which he deemed as the reality of her leadership.
Post Office Horizon IT inquiry: tearful Vennells’ claim she worked as hard as she could dismissed as ‘absolute rubbish’ – live | Post Office Horizon scandal
Vennells told her claim ‘I worked as hard as I could’ to deliver ‘the best Post Office for the UK’ is ‘absolute rubbish’
Paula Vennells has just given a long monologue in answer to a question by Sam Stein KC after appearing to sob having said “I loved the Post Office”.
She told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London:
I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK. It would have been wonderful to have 30,000 Post Office branches. That would have been the best outcome ever to have more post offices in more communities.
What I failed to do, and I have made this clear previously, is I did not recognise – and it has been discussed across the inquiry – the imbalance of power between the institution and the individual and I let these people down.
I’m very aware of that. And we should have had better governance in place. We should have had better data reporting in place that meant that we can see what was happening to individual postmasters and to the system. That was not the case.
I’ve worked as hard as I could and to the best of my ability. I know today how much wasn’t told to me. I now know information that I didn’t get. And I don’t know in some cases why it didn’t reach me. But my only motivation was for the best for the Post Office. And for the hundreds of postmasters that I met and I regret deeply what’s happened to these people.
“That’s absolute rubbish,” says Stein.
He tells Vennells that she and her “sidekick” Angela van den Bogerd “took on the group litigants in the High Court, fighting tooth and nail, allowing counsel on behalf of the Post Office to cross-examine the litigants on the basis that the losses were their fault, due to their incompetence or dishonesty. That’s what happened under your leadership.”
‘Absolute rubbish’: lawyer rejects Paula Vennells answer at Horizon IT inquiry – videoShare
Updated at 13.31 BST
Key events
Post Office Horizon IT inquiry breaks for lunch
The inquiry has now broken for lunch and will resume at 2pm with an hour of questions from Tim Moloney KC, representing victims of the scandal.
There may be further questions from Paula Vennells’ own legal representative and from lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC after that, but only if required.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The inquiry has resumed with Catriona Watt asking questions on behalf of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sky News have clipped up the moment when Paula Vennells began to sob having said “I loved the Post Office”, then delivered a monologue about her dedication to her work there, only to be told “Absolute rubbish” by Sam Stein KC.
“I loved the Post Office. I gave it… I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK.”
An emotional Paula Vennells cries as she tells the inquiry that “I let these people down”
Sam Stein KC replies: ‘Absolute rubbish’https://t.co/JeOmNkGkV7 pic.twitter.com/XE5u2EB4f8
— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 24, 2024
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The inquiry’s lead counsel Jason Beer KC has just had to threaten to remove people from the hearing if they heckle the witness, after someone appeared to shout something out at Paula Vennells while the contentious nature of subpostmaster contracts was being discussed. “The witness should give their evidence without interruption,” he told the public gallery.
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Vennells names IT and legal staff at Post Office who she says she shouldn’t have trusted over Horizon
Sam Stein KC has pressed Paula Vennells to explicitly name the colleagues who she claims she was too trusting of, and who she thinks let her down. After protesting that she has already named people throughout the hearing, she names
Lesley Sewell, former head of IT
Mike Young, former CTO
Susan Crichton, former general counsel 2010-2013
Chris Aujard, former interim general counsel
Jane MacLeod, general counsel 2015-2019
She adds that they were people she had worked with “on a number of other projects” and they had not let her down then. “I am not sure at what stage you stop trusting individuals who you have previously,” she adds.
She goes on to say she thinks one of the big mistakes of the business was “we did not have sufficient oversight, particularly around two very technical functions, because there is a risk if you rely on … one or two key individuals. That puts a burden on those individuals. And an organisation shouldn’t do that.”
As an aside, Jane MacLeod has refused to appear in person at the inquiry, and Wyn Williams just intervened to ask if Vennells was still in touch with Young, as the inquiry had been unable to trace him.
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Vennells told her claim ‘I worked as hard as I could’ to deliver ‘the best Post Office for the UK’ is ‘absolute rubbish’
Paula Vennells has just given a long monologue in answer to a question by Sam Stein KC after appearing to sob having said “I loved the Post Office”.
She told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London:
I worked as hard as I possibly could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK. It would have been wonderful to have 30,000 Post Office branches. That would have been the best outcome ever to have more post offices in more communities.
What I failed to do, and I have made this clear previously, is I did not recognise – and it has been discussed across the inquiry – the imbalance of power between the institution and the individual and I let these people down.
I’m very aware of that. And we should have had better governance in place. We should have had better data reporting in place that meant that we can see what was happening to individual postmasters and to the system. That was not the case.
I’ve worked as hard as I could and to the best of my ability. I know today how much wasn’t told to me. I now know information that I didn’t get. And I don’t know in some cases why it didn’t reach me. But my only motivation was for the best for the Post Office. And for the hundreds of postmasters that I met and I regret deeply what’s happened to these people.
“That’s absolute rubbish,” says Stein.
He tells Vennells that she and her “sidekick” Angela van den Bogerd “took on the group litigants in the High Court, fighting tooth and nail, allowing counsel on behalf of the Post Office to cross-examine the litigants on the basis that the losses were their fault, due to their incompetence or dishonesty. That’s what happened under your leadership.”
‘Absolute rubbish’: lawyer rejects Paula Vennells answer at Horizon IT inquiry – videoShare
Updated at 13.31 BST
Paula Vennells has broken down again at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry under questioning from Sam Stein KC. It sounded like there might have been a heckle from the room after she said “I loved the Post Office”. There was a long pause and she appeared to sob.
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Sam Stein KC lists a whole load of things that Paula Vennells agrees she knew by mid-2013, including that bugs existed in Horizon, that the Second Sight report existed, that Gareth Jenkins had been deemed unreliable, that the head of security had interfered in the record-keeping about Horizon (the “shredding” memo), that the JFSA existed, that subpostmasters had written to her directly, that the Post Office carried out its own prosecutions and so forth.
He says to her this must have been “world-shattering” for her view of the Horizon system. Stein says:
This was an entire collection of Horizon-belief shattering facts, that were a direct attack upon the very basic system that supported the Post Office. All of these come in one after another, bang, bang, bang, attacking the Horizon system, by the end of 2013. You could have been in no doubt that the Horizon system needed investigation, needed inquiry, needed a deep investigation and review. Do you agree?
She replies:
I wish we had done that. I absolutely wish we had done that. I still had confidence in the Horizon system, from as the inquiry has heard, the fact that it was working for the majority of people. I did not have the detail that I have today. And had I had that, my view would have been very, very different.
He says to her she was asking questions about the problem, saying “We don’t see emails saying I demand answers. I need them now. What on earth has been going on with this system? We don’t see those emails.”
He tries to give her a binary choice: “Which is it Miss Vennells? You either didn’t want to look under the rocks because you didn’t dare see what was under there. Or you didn’t ask the right deep-rooted questions. Which is it? Go for one or the other. It has got to be one.”
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Sam Stein KC’s initial line of questioning is about the long history of attempts to get the Post Office into a financially stable situation. “That’s largely how you got your gong, your CBE, that you led the Post Office’s transformation into commercial viability, isn’t it?” he asks Paula Vennells.
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Chair Wyn Williams has again intervened to try to cool the temperature of the exchanges here. “I don’t want the witness being spoken to when she’s answering, and I don’t want the witness answering when you’re asking your question. Let’s try again.”
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The inquiry has restarted with Sam Stein KC asking questions. He has begun by saying Paula Vennells dragged the Post Office to profitibility over the debris of the lives of subpostmasters and their families.
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The inquiry is now breaking and will resume at 11.10 with Sam Stein KC scheduled to ask questions. The video feed has a three minute delay.
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Read the full story on www.theguardian.com
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2024/may/24/paula-vennells-post-office-horizon-it-inquiry-day-3-alan-bates-live-updates