The former head of Royal Mail has said she believes that Paula Vennells, the ex-chief executive of the Post Office, knew that the prosecution of branch operators was wrong, adding that executives “grossly understated the gravity of the situation” as the Horizon IT scandal unfolded.
Moya Greene, who headed Royal Mail from 2010 to 2018, was Vennells’ boss until the Post Office was split off from Royal Mail Group in 2012.
In a series of text messages between the two over the past few years, shown at the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal on Friday, Greene was at first supportive of Vennells. However, by the final communication, she told Vennells that she believed she was part of the cover-up of wrongful prosecutions, writing: “I don’t know what to say. I think you knew.”
Speaking at the inquiry into one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, Greene said: “I think she knew on the basis of the evidence that has emerged at this inquiry that there were faults in the system.
“What changed my mind is the evidence that has come out of this inquiry. I do see it in a different light because I do think we were misled. I think it grossly understated the gravity of the situation [which] had calamitous results for people.
“I think Post Office executives including [Paula] Vennells continued to slavishly, in my opinion, adhere to the position that was not tenable on the basis of the evidence presented here … It was a mischaracterisation that was so great as to be incomprehensible.”
Greene said the claims of the robustness of Horizon and the issue of the public prosecutions had been underplayed by Vennells and her team to Royal Mail management.
She said that her perception of the Horizon issue first began to change when Lord Arbuthnot, who championed the cause of the post office operators, wrote her a letter in 2011 stating that he was aware of 34 operators who had wrongly been accused of fraud due to faults in the software system.
“What we were being told at the audit committee was there was no problem with the system,” she said. “We were also told it was just a handful, a few, people blaming the system. [But] this was a significant number of people. All the assertions and undertakings that had been given to us – the executive team of Royal Mail, the audit and risk committee at Royal Mail – they were just not so.”
Greene said that, after receiving Arbuthnot’s letter, she suggested a root and branch review of the Horizon IT system but Vennells rejected the need for it.
“She didn’t think we needed the sort of independent review I was suggesting,” said Greene. “I was somehow given reassurance that it had been tested, it had been reviewed. I did ask questions, but we were brushed aside.”
A lawyer representing post office operators suggested to Greene that she did not investigate the Horizon scandal because, if the growing extent of it had been uncovered, it could have dramatically affected the reputation and commercial position of the Post Office just as she was about to separate the operation from Royal Mail, which was privatised in 2013.
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“If we were doing something wrong I would not have shied away from it,” she responded. “If I knew then what I know now I would certainly not have managed this horrible – this grotesque, as you put it – in the way this was managed.
“My view is when you find out that something has been done in gross error like this you put your hand up and try to set it right as fast as you can.”
Earlier on Thursday, the former postal affairs minister, Jo Swinson, railed against the “Orwellian” and “duplicitous” behaviour of some civil servants who kept her in the dark about goings on at the Post Office.
Campaigners have spent decades seeking justice for wronged operators, including at least 700 people who were prosecuted by the Post Office and other bodies between 1999 and 2015 based on the botched Horizon IT system.