Post Office chief executive Nick Read has said he was told not to “dig into the details of the past” by its leading lawyer when stepping into the role in 2019.
Giving evidence at the long-running Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Wednesday, he said he was not made aware of the “scale and enormity” of the Horizon IT scandal before taking the top job.
Mr Read joined long after the events which sparked the scandal, whereby more than 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted for stealing, based on incorrect information from an IT system known as Horizon.
But when he became chief executive in 2019, litigation between a group of 555 subpostmasters and the Post Office, in which the company agreed to pay £58m in compensation, was just coming to a head.
He said that, early into the role of chief executive, he was told by the Post Office’s general counsel Ben Foat: “I did not need to dig into the details of what had happened at Post Office in the past as this conduct had ended.”
Wednesday was Mr Read’s first day of evidence and he is scheduled to appear before the inquiry on Thursday and Friday as well.
Mr Read also told the inquiry that three individuals are currently under further investigation by both the Post Office and external agencies over allegations made about their conduct by wronged subpostmasters.
Mr Read said that the allegations against these individuals had emerged in restorative justice hearings with the victims.
The inquiry heard that subpostmasters are still paying off shortfalls due to IT system errors in 2024. A recent survey of postmasters found that many reported dipping into their own funds to match shortfalls.
Sir Wyn Williams, who is chairing the inquiry, said that this represented hundreds of postmasters who are still using their own money to fix apparent errors. As many as 74 per cent of the respondents to the survey, which had around 1,000 replies, said they were in this position.
Speaking about his first few months in post in 2019, Mr Read added that there was a “degree of denial” over the impact of the Post Office losing the litigation brought by the subpostmasters, which he said in his witness statement had brought “shock and surprise” to the leadership team.
He wrote: “My recollection is that it was only in 2020 when there seemed to be a groundswell of opinion that Post Office had serious questions to answer about its previous mistreatment of postmasters that the senior leadership and board started to understand the potential scale of the crisis.”
Furthermore, Mr Read shed light on the opinion of the organisation after the convictions of hundreds of postmasters were quashed earlier this year.
“I don’t think I could say specifically that that is the case but there will be a view that not every quashed conviction will be innocent postmasters,” he told the inquiry.
“The majority of the organisation would agree that the action that has been taken is absolutely the right action and whether there are guilty postmasters that have been exonerated really is no longer an issue.”