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

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.

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.

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.

Vennells names IT and legal staff at Post Office who she says she shouldn’t have trusted over Horizon

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 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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.