The chief executive of the Post Office has said that the state-owned body should be stripped of any responsibility to handle financial redress for compensating victims of the Horizon IT scandal.
Nick Read told a public inquiry into the scandal that he and others within the organisation believe the process should be entirely handled by the UK government.
Read was giving evidence for a second day to the judge-led inquiry which is examining why Post Office operatives were wrongly prosecuted for financial shortfalls due to a faulty Horizon IT system.
He told the inquiry: “We have done everything we can to build independence into the schemes … There was always going to be difficulties with the Post Office administering compensation because of the level of trust and confidence that many victims have in the Post Office.”
Read was asked why he had not previously expressed his views about redress schemes to the public inquiry when four separate hearings about compensation were held in 2022 and 2023.
“If that was the corporate view … Why did you not communicate it to the inquiry in any of the four hearings?” Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry asked him.
“It’s a good question. I am unsure why we did not make that explicit. Clearly we should have done,” Read replied.
Read, who is stepping down from the role next year, said in his written witness statement that, by keeping the Post Office responsible for two of the schemes, he believed the Treasury “had wanted the Post Office to feel a degree of the pain and chaos caused” by the scandal. The government is responsible for the other two of the four redress schemes.
Earlier this year, the government said hundreds of wrongly convicted post office operators will be able to access the compensation scheme, set up for the victims of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent legal history after it emerged that Horizon suffered from a number of bugs and defects.
Read was asked why individuals who were working in areas like investigations at the Post Office at the time of the Horizon IT scandal were still working in the business.
The Post Office is examining whether certain staff who had worked on the Horizon investigations into post office operators should be transferred to other departments or leave the business entirely using voluntary redundancies or settlements, Read said.
He said there was a “handful of individuals” who worked in the investigations unit, which was disbanded in 2015, who are still employed by the Post Office but unless wrongdoing was formally and fairly established, the state-owned body “cannot simply remove” existing staff because they were in post when the miscarriages of justice were taking place.
“Those individuals, of course, have employment and indeed human rights themselves,” he said.
Read was shown notes of a meeting he held earlier this year with Kevin Hollinrake, the then minister for the department for business and trade, where the politician said he was “not a big fan of paying people off” and “didn’t mind” if it meant employment tribunal claims were brought.
Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, said to Read: “The government had given you the green light to be robust.”
Read responded: “I do not think we have been as robust as that”, adding that he believed the state-owned body had been “dragging its feet”.
On Wednesday, Read said that no employee is “above the law” and denied that there are “untouchables” within the organisation who will never face disciplinary action over the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators.
The inquiry continues.