Post Office Management Culture

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Today’s debate is extremely timely and important. It is harrowing to listen to cases from across the UK, and it takes time for it to sink in how the cover-up of this scandal has cost the lives of ordinary, hard-working people who only wanted to provide for their families by working for their communities in post offices. We have to think about how many of those people have been tret, not just by the Post Office but by the Government and Fujitsu. Many of them have had extreme difficulties in employment. They were not just betrayed but sent to prison for crimes that they did not commit. They knew they were innocent; more importantly, the people who sent them there knew that they were innocent as well. We need a lot of answers. More and more is coming to the fore every day with regard to this scandal.

Mention has been made of who knew about this. The Government knew about it, Fujitsu knew about it, and the Post Office knew about it; yet they still sent investigators into sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses’ post offices. They investigated people, charged people, and devastated people’s lives. They acted like the Gestapo. They turned up on the day and closed post offices down. That is the Post Office management culture, and it needs to be addressed.

I am not sure how we can compensate anybody. How can we compensate the family of a woman or man who committed suicide as a result of the pressure that they were put under by the Government, the Post Office and investigators? How do we compensate people for the death of a loved one who was the breadwinner in the family, and decided that their only option was to take their own life? It is unimaginable. We cannot put ourselves in their shoes.

What about the men and women who went to prison because they had supposedly falsified accounts and committed theft? They were imprisoned with child-killers and rapists for things they had not done. Not only did they know they had not done them; the Government and the Post Office knew it too. Fujitsu knew what was happening behind the scenes. This does not seem like the country I am very proud of—what happened with the Government behind the scenes. It is very murky and sinister. At the same time, the Government and the Post Office were prosecuting people with evidence from Fujitsu, and people were being imprisoned and taking their own lives. Frankly, it is enough to make us cry.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman is rightly making a typically impassioned speech. I have been very careful throughout the whole time I have been involved in this matter, which is over four years, as a Back-Bencher and a Front-Bencher, not to play any kind of party politics with it. I put it on the record that the issues occurred under a series of Governments: the Labour Government, the coalition Government and the current Government. It is important that we look at the matter on a cross-party basis and seek to resolve it as such. I am keen to work with him on that basis.

[Ian Lavery]

I thank the Minister for that intervention, and I agree. I have a lot of time for him. We have had conversations about this matter and many others. As he will notice if he looks in Hansard, I have not been party political. I have said “the Government”. He is correct to point out that there have been Governments of different colours throughout the period.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ian Lavery]

The hon. Gentleman has just come in, but of course I will.

[Richard Graham]

The hon. Gentleman is making some very good points, as did the hon. Members for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). All of us who have been in the House for a while share the feelings that all three Members have expressed of horror and great anxiety, given the cases that we are dealing with. However, roughly 3,000 people work for Post Office Ltd, including all those working in Crown post offices, like the one in my constituency of Gloucester. It is important that we try to separate things out in our minds before we know from the inquiry precisely where guilt lies and where charges and prosecutions will come, so that we do not label everybody within Post Office Ltd with the accusations that are rightly being made in the House today.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. Before we proceed, I heard what the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, and I heard the Chairman of Ways and Means’ admonition of another hon. Member earlier. The difference in this case is that the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) was here for the start of the speech. That said, I personally believe that there is a prerequisite for Members, whenever they can, to be in from the start of a debate and to hear the whole debate.

[Ian Lavery]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point, and nothing I have said up until now has criticised everyone in the Post Office. We have some fantastic employees in the Post Office, but I am not going to say the same thing about the executive team in the Post Office. I refuse to accept that things have changed, because the management culture within the Post Office has not changed one iota. However, I agree that we have to look forward and take the Post Office forward.

I mentioned that there might or might not be charges in the future, but too many people have been charged already. This whole Horizon scandal is a result of people being sent to prison, people being traumatised and people—kids, men and women—having their lives destroyed because people knew there was something happening at the Post Office.

I sit on the Business and Trade Committee, and the chief executive of the Post Office has been to the House a couple of times. I must be honest: he shows no remorse whatsoever. He believes that, because he was not there at the time, that is right. This individual’s wage is, I think, about £344,000 a year. I asked him, “Why are you getting a bonus in excess of £145,000 in addition to your salary? What makes you so special?” He could not answer. That is at a time when people have suffered so greatly and the Post Office and the Government are reluctant even now to address many people who have suffered as a consequence of this scandal.

I will come on shortly to the question of who has been missed in the compensation. There are three packages, and I have had a chat with the Minister—I am going to call him my hon. Friend, and why not?—about this very issue. I have three heartbreaking examples, and my understanding is that it will be very difficult for these individuals to claim any compensation whatsoever.

The culture has not changed; there has always been a serious cultural problem in the Post Office, which obviously came to the fore with the abuse of power blatantly displayed during the Horizon scandal. As I mentioned before, the management structure, the governance and the culture largely remain unreformed. We have people in post offices now suffering greatly because of low wages. They are not getting the wages from the Post Office to make ends meet. Those people are mainly in newsagents and Spar shops and so on. That is wrong when, as I mentioned before, at the same time Post Office executives are being awarded bonuses of tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of pounds. That has to be looked at.

It has been suggested, as the Minister will be aware, that a lot of the bonuses that have been paid are for progress on the Horizon scandal. How can anybody get a bonus for that? Is a bonus not supposed to be for additional production or good work? How can the chief executive get a bonus of hundreds of thousands of pounds while this is happening? Who do we blame for that? We have to look at how these remuneration packages are settled and who benefits. We cannot have people getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in one hand and bonuses of 10 times what ordinary sub-postmasters or sub-postmistresses, or postal workers, are getting in the other. It is just not correct. Bonuses should not be paid for failure, and that is what is happening here.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that, on investigation, it was found that the Horizon system had a suspense account? A suspense account in an accounting package is where transactions are put before they are properly allotted. At the end of most years, there was more than £1 million retained in the suspense account, which was kept for four years and then added back to profit and never resolved.

[Ian Lavery]

Not only that, but Jo Hamilton had to pay £36,000 back, even though she knew she was in the right. I asked Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, whether it was a possibility that the money paid back by a number of the victims would have been in a place where it could have provided bonuses for senior executives. How perverse is that? The answer from the chief executive, when I pressed him and pressed him, was that yes, it was a possibility, but he did not know where the money actually went. That in itself is so bad that it beggars belief.

Fujitsu, meanwhile, denied any knowledge of bugs or any wrongdoing, but actually knew quite the opposite, and it supplied evidence to the Post Office to prosecute individuals. How bad is that situation? This is not a spy movie—it is worse than a spy movie. They had a dark room in Fujitsu where its employees were communicating with the Horizon computer system in post offices up and down the country. Fujitsu denied it all along, saying that it was impossible it could ever happen, yet people there were changing the amounts of money openly. The Government knew. Fujitsu knew, because it had the operation in its own offices, with employees changing facts and figures in the accounts of ordinary hard-working individuals—again, spy movie stuff. It is unbelievable that that could be the case.

Is it not unreal to think that none of this would have come about if not for the ITV dramatisation, “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”? We would not be discussing it in this Chamber, because it would have been kicked into the long grass. The people would all have suffered the same—those who are in prison, the families who have been destroyed, and the kids who have been brought up with the criticism and abuse that their parents were thieves —but it would not have been unearthed.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

There is no doubt that the ITV series has rightly heightened awareness both in this House and further afield, and I welcome that, but much work was going on in this space before it aired, including on how we can overturn more convictions on a blanket basis. I was working on that with the advisory board before the series aired, so it is not right to say that we would not have got to this position without it. We probably would not have got here as quickly, but the hon. Gentleman must concede that this work has been going on for years—although I welcome the fact that it is happening more rapidly now.

[Ian Lavery]

I thank the Minister for that clarification. Forgive me, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I suggested that nothing at all had happened, because I know that the Minister, the all-party parliamentary group, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) and others have been working on the matter assiduously. However, as the Minister said, we might not otherwise have been at this stage. We might not have got Fujitsu to say for the first time, “Yes, we are sorry,” and the Post Office might not have started to admit that it had pursued wrongful or unsafe prosecutions. But we are where we are. I would not want to mislead anyone in the debate.

I have three brief examples. These people, Minister, were heavily involved with Horizon and the Post Office, and suffered greatly. It causes me real heartbreak, to be honest. The first example is that of Janine, a lady from my constituency who has sadly passed on; no one came to see me about her case until they saw the ITV documentary. Her husband simply cried for the entire hour that I sat with him. He wanted justice for Janine, who sadly died of covid. He is hoping for some sort of justice now.

Janine was employed in a post office in a newsagents, which is a regular thing up and down the country. Her contract with the newsagents said that any shortfall in the post office finances must be made up by her. She and another person were employed by the newsagents, and then there was the sub-postmaster or mistress— I am not sure which it was on this occasion. Janine was accused of stealing £25,000, even though she had not seen that amount of money before. The Post Office investigators came to the newsagents and basically tret her like a common thief. The pressure was put on: “We are going to charge you with theft and you are going to prison.”

Janine was absolutely devastated. She pleaded guilty. Then, she sat back and realised, “Why should I be pleading guilty when I am not guilty?”. It cost her and her family a small fortune to take the case back to court and have the guilty verdict rescinded. The Post Office then said, “Okay, you can accept the lesser charge of false accounting and pay the money back.” She refused. All this cost her £15,000 in legal fees—these are just ordinary working people in the community. She was then informed that if she paid the £25,000 back, the Post Office would drop the charges. That is what happened: she paid the money back. Unfortunately, by the day she sadly passed on, she and her family had lost everything they had.

That needs scrutiny. We need to look at the management culture. What on earth was going on at the Post Office during this thing? Who directed the investigators to go to those post offices and treat people the way they were tret in the investigations? They knew at the time that the allegations were false. That is the thing that I have reiterated and will continue to reiterate: they knew that the allegations were in many ways false, unfounded, unfair. Maybe the investigators did not, but the people at the top of the Post Office certainly knew; people in government knew. That cannot be right. Janine’s husband has written and submitted a really heart-rending letter, but under the current schemes, he is unlikely to be able to claim any money. How can that be just? I will follow that up with the Minister.

The second example is that of a man who wrote to us saying: “I’ve got a massive problem. I’m like lots of other sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. We work at the very heart of the community. It’s where people used to come to talk. We were trusted, well respected, listened to.” He was seeing mistake after mistake crop up on his computer week after week, but rather than inform the Post Office, he was putting money in week by week to balance the accounts, which had been altered by somebody at the Fujitsu head office.

This individual says that he simply could not stand the idea that anybody would think him in the slightest—in the remotest sense—a thief. He has paid tens of thousands of pounds, if we aggregate the money that he paid week by week. There is no way that he or hundreds of other employees have the opportunity or ability to claim compensation at this moment. That begs the question of whether the Post Office, together with the Government, will write to every single person who was a sub-postmaster between 1998 and now to ask them if they are aware of anyone who might have put their own money—out of their own backside pocket, out of their family’s savings—into balancing the accounts. There should be consideration of compensation for such individuals. The Post Office will have all the details of people in those roles who claimed to have used finances from their own back pocket.

I will briefly mention the last example. I have not actually seen these individuals—they are coming to see us next week—but I have been told by one of their relations that they were involved in the Horizon scandal and paid £25,000. That sum crops up time and again. They paid that just to save their name. Nothing went to court—nothing happened—but they paid the money, despite the fact that they were innocent. They thought that because they paid the money, the matter would go away, and there is very little opportunity for people like them to reclaim their money. It is unfair. Never mind them stealing money off the Post Office; the Post Office has stolen money off hard-working people. That should be recognised.

It would be helpful if the Post Office and the Government could listen to what other people have to say. This is not just about those who were convicted or prosecuted; there are more people who were not convicted or prosecuted, but who are out of pocket and have had their life destroyed as a consequence of the Post Office Horizon scandal. We need to look at how that can be addressed. Those people deserve compensation. As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, this scandal is appalling. It is disgraceful, shameful, and a stain on all of us. I agree with the Minister that this is a cross-party issue. We have the opportunity to put things right, so let us do it. Let us look after the people whose only crime was going to work and looking after their family.