Post Office Horizon Inquiry: Volume 1

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for those questions. He asked first about the cultural issues, and we all understand just how poorly the Post Office has been run over many years to allow this scandal to appear and not be addressed, given the increasing amount of evidence that was presented to the leadership in the Post Office. We are taking steps to address this. There is now, as my noble friend will know, a new leadership in the Post Office. The Green Paper gives us an opportunity to revisit what we want from the Post Office, which ought to remain a vital part of UK life in our communities and on our high streets, providing small business opportunities for many people. It is potentially a huge reset that will take place in the Post Office.

We are committed to maintaining it as a strong, accessible network. The noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, asked about the size. It is our preferred option that the overall size and shape of that network would remain the same. My noble friend is right about the cultural issues. For us, there are other issues about governance going forward, but the key thing is to make sure that postmasters and postmistresses play a critical role in shaping and designing the future of the Post Office, because they know what works, they know their communities and, as we know, we really have not listened to them sufficiently in the past. I am confident that they will very much be part of shaping the future of the Post Office as the consultation goes forward, and it will be all the better for that.

My noble friend asked about the technology. We are working to replace Fujitsu as quickly as we can. The development of the technology is based on a test and learn approach, so we are working to make sure that the replacement of Fujitsu is done right in a robust system. Post Office Ltd’s IT transformation is ensuring that the hardware that was purchased for NBIT will now be used to refresh counter devices across the network and that the software that was developed will still be used for drop and collect services. We need to get the technology right and there is money going into it, but the important thing here is that we really listen to those people at the heart of it, the postmasters and postmistresses.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, this is a very sad story about the failures of a very large business, the Post Office—which many years ago I used to work for—and its culture, and about the failure of the machinery of the state, which has had very serious impacts on the lives of many human beings and their families. It has cost us all hundreds of millions of pounds, is still costing us all large amounts of money and is still affecting these people, despite all that has happened. What are the Government intending to do to drill into and come to terms with those failures in the machinery of the state and what the real lessons learned might be? Some of us in our working life have seen these same kinds of failures in other areas of public life, in the NHS and in the public sector. What lessons are going to be learned from this, given the human tragedies that we can all clearly see in this set of affairs in plain sight?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right. From the top down, we all bear some responsibility for this, although I pay tribute to the MPs and the Members of this House who used their positions to highlight and eventually bring to account some of the individuals involved in this scandal. The Green Paper is attempting to address exactly those issues about the machinery of state and whether the Post Office should be reconfigured and run in a different way. We want to make sure that it is financially viable on a longer-term basis. This is an opportunity for us to make sure that the future of the Post Office is robust and that we learn the lessons from previous scandals for how government listens and flags issues going wrong at the kind of level that occurred with the Horizon scandal. We will look at whether there are any crossover lessons from other scandals that we can take forward. I understand that the second volume of Sir Wyn Williams’s report will also look at some of those wider issues.