The chief executive of the Post Office has said he will return a bonus payment linked to the inquiry into the Horizon scandal that led to hundreds of postmasters being wrongfully convicted.
Nick Read apologised for “procedural and governance mistakes” made by the firm linking significant bonus payments to work related to the inquiry into the miscarriage of justice.
The Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system resulted in 700 postal workers being wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting between 2000 and 2014. The scandal led to some operators being sent to prison, and has been blamed for four suicides. It is the subject of an inquiry led by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, which was made statutory in 2021.
After the scandal, it emerged that about £1.6m in bonus payments had been made to executives. The progress of the Horizon inquiry was one of four metrics on which bonus payments were awarded.
Read said on Wednesday that he would voluntarily return this part of the £455,000 bonus he received for the 2021-22 financial year. It is understood this part of the bonus is £54,400, including about £13,000 of his bonus, which he had previously committed to returning.
The company has not said whether other employees who received bonus payments linked to the inquiry will also return the payments.
Last week the Post Office told Darren Jones MP, the chair of the Commons business and trade committee, that 33 employees had paid back a total of £64,252 in payments linked to the inquiry sub-metric.
Jones responded by threatening to haul bosses from the business back in front of the committee after it refused to fully commit to clawing back all executive bonuses linked to the inquiry.
Ministers investigated the bonus payments and published a report by a law firm, Simmons & Simmons, earlier this month saying that their payment was justifiable according to one reading of the wording of the metric.
The report said, however, that it was not possible to say whether this was the basis on which the bonuses were awarded because of incomplete records. A separate report was conducted by Amanda Burton, the incoming chair of the Post Office’s remuneration committee.
Read said on Wednesday: “I have made a personal decision to return voluntarily the full bonus payment attributed to the overall inquiry metric in the 2021/22 annual report and accounts.
“While neither the Simmons & Simmons report nor the Amanda Burton report found any basis to support suggestions of impropriety, and both stated that there was a justifiable basis to make the award, I hope this action will allow Post Office to redouble its focus on fully addressing the wrongs of the past and serving today’s postmasters.
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“I would like to reiterate Post Office’s sincere apology for the procedural and governance mistakes made.”
Jones said on Wednesday: “Following my repeated requests, I’m pleased that the CEO of the Post Office has decided to return all of the bonus payments he received in respect of the statutory inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal.
“However, the Post Office is still failing to recognise that the entire bonus scheme as it related to the statutory inquiry was wrong. The Post Office’s engagement with a statutory public inquiry should never have needed bonus incentives for senior executives to do their day job, for which they are already paid.”
Jones said he welcomed Read’s decision, but called for all of the bonuses related to the inquiry metric to be repaid and asked the company to “apologise for the morally bankrupt bonus scheme having ever existed in the first place”.
