Post Office Ltd: Management Culture

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir George. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) not just on securing this debate but on all the work she has done over a number of years campaigning on Post Office issues—particularly for sub-postmasters affected by the Horizon scandal. At various points, I have assisted her work; I will talk about that a little later.

My hon. Friend’s speech covered the bases very well. She spoke of the suffering of sub-postmasters, including those who have sadly died. She also spoke of the absolutely vital role that the Post Office plays in our communities. That has always been the case, but it is particularly so now that the banks have abandoned our high streets. She did not miss when she spoke of the horrendous management practices at Post Office Ltd. Moreover, there is no evidence that that management culture has changed. That sharp practice continues into the Post Office’s handling of the compensation scheme. I respect the Minster and I am looking forward to his answers to our questions.

The hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) spoke about the experience of her constituent Tracy Felstead, and the somewhat tainted apology that she received from Nick Read. The hon. Lady rightly compared the Horizon scandal with other shameful episodes in which there have similarly been secrecy, incompetence, institutional blindness—I thought that was a good phrase—and an overwhelming desire to protect the organisation at any cost.

The hon. Lady also mentioned the role of the civil service and the fact that Ministers—in fact, all elected representatives from local councils right up to Holyrood and Westminster—rely on information given to them by civil servants or our member on the Post Office board. We know about that all too well in my constituency, because a local school that has been built is two or three times too small, despite officers being told that information years ago.

The hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) made the very good point that all businesses, including the Post Office, are built on their workforce, which should at the very least be treated with respect. She praised and thanked the sub-postmasters and their families for their campaigning and their extraordinary patience over the years, and I wholeheartedly second that thanks. She also made the very good point that many sub-postmasters thought they were alone when they faced these accusations and charges.

The right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) said that the Post Office board was rotten to the core, and that not a great deal has changed in that regard. He said that the board knew in 2011 that the Horizon system was flawed, and yet it pursued the prosecutions, one of which resulted in the imprisonment of a pregnant mother. He made the very obvious point—at least it should have been very obvious to the Post Office—that when the system was introduced, the instances and the value of missing money increased significantly, and yet the Post Office did nothing and pursued these prosecutions.

I mentioned my work with my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw, which was to do with the definition of community post offices, and about banking transactions. Sub-postmasters were paid 24p for every £1,000 of banks’ money that they handled. However, there was no distinction between notes and coins, so if someone was processing—this is not likely; it is the extreme—£1,000-worth of pennies, they would be able to keep 24 of those 100,000 pennies as payment for that work. I am glad that that was increased threefold after a lot of campaigning by many of us in this House and, more importantly, sub-postmasters themselves, but the levels that they are paid today are still, particularly in the light of the inflation that we have seen in the last while, not enough.

It has been said in this debate that not a single senior manager at Post Office Ltd has lost their job as a result of this shameful episode. Not a single highly paid executive has yet faced criminal charges for their role in this conspiracy. Many have quietly departed with golden handshake payments and their gold-plated pensions intact. When counterclaims were being lodged by the Post Office in court—at the behest of its senior execs—it knew full well that its own systems were dodgy and that those who were seeking redress for the ordeal that they had suffered were completely correct, yet still it went ahead with its counterclaims, seeking to drive the claimants off the case.

Virtually every Member will have experience of their constituents being victims of the conspiracy at the top of the Post Office, and I am no different. My constituent was accused of the theft of tens of thousands of pounds during her time as a sub-postmaster at a rural sub-post office. She was advised that going to court and defending her innocence would be futile and might result in a longer sentence if she was found guilty, because the Post Office had evidence of her “theft” in black and white—evidence taken from the flawed Horizon system. She took that advice: she pled guilty, despite knowing that the charges were utterly untrue. She ended up being sentenced to more than a year in prison and had her life ruined. Her name was plastered over the local newspapers as a common thief. Her house was repossessed as the Post Office moved on from its abuse of the criminal justice system to abuse the civil legal system and sought to recover the money that had been “stolen”. She lost everything—her family, her friends and her freedom. Thankfully, she has been able to move on somewhat and settle in my constituency, but she will never get back the years of being marked as a crook by a collection of spivs at the Post Office.

That is in marked contrast to those involved at the heart of this conspiracy, who have been able to move on with ease to new roles and positions with other organisations—all of them generously paid and secure. That is to say nothing of those still with the Post Office, who continue the appalling track record of their predecessors and obstruct the work that Sir Wyn Williams and others are doing to lay bare exactly what happened at POL and Fujitsu over decades. Even this week, we have heard that the inquiry will be further delayed while the Post Office fails yet again to disclose documents that it has been ordered to provide. You would think, Sir George, that given the revelations and scandals of the past few years surrounding the Post Office and its responsibility for destroying the lives of thousands of people on the basis of a lie, it might be a little less cavalier with the facts. It saw fit to pay bonuses to senior management and executives and to boast in its annual accounts that it had supplied the inquiry with all the documentation that it required, but we all know that to be a complete lie—another pack of falsehoods that it thought it could get away with, but which fortunately has been stopped in its tracks. How many more lies will Sir Wyn’s inquiry uncover in the end? That is what Post Office management are afraid of and why they should not be allowed to delay or obfuscate for a single minute longer.

This scandal should also bring into sharp focus the idea that major IT projects should be automatically awarded to the private sector. Throughout this saga, Fujitsu has behaved deplorably, to say the very least, with some instances of behaviour potentially being criminal. Why is Post Office Ltd extending its contract? It makes no sense; it beggars belief that it is extending its contract, unless they are in cahoots. Horizon was manifestly unfit for purpose from the very start and continued to produce fundamental and systemic errors. Those errors should have been properly investigated and changes made. Instead, hundreds of innocent men and women paid the price for both organisations’ arrogant intransigence.

Why has Fujitsu escaped paying a single penny back to the Post Office for a contract that it clearly was incapable of fulfilling properly? Given its key role in this scandal from start to finish, why is Fujitsu still allowed to involve itself in contracts from the public sector when it is manifestly unsuitable, practically and morally, for that task? The accountability quite rightly has been focused on Post Office Ltd, but responsibility also lies with those it engaged, using public funds to commission the deeply flawed Horizon programme. They cannot and should not be allowed to escape their responsibility in this affair.

While all this was going on, Post Office Ltd was engaged in a programme of stripping our country of large parts of our post office network. Only 200 Crown post offices are left, out of about 11,000 offices. Most of the rest of the network has been contracted out to sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, which makes the company’s behaviour toward the very people who have ensured that we still have a post office network all the more appalling.

I want the inquiry to go through all the facts and events that led to such despicable behaviour. I want to see each of the former executives and managers brought in front of Sir Wyn and made to explain in detail their actions and the actions of those around them that led to these miscarriages of justice. Finally, those involved in the catastrophic errors made by the Post Office and Fujitsu, and more pertinently those who organised the cover-up, must be held accountable for their actions. That is the only way forward to restore public trust in the Post Office, an organisation that we expect to be proud of, but that is currently a byword for corruption, cover-ups and chicanery.