Post Office inquiry – live: Paula Vennells accused of talking ‘absolute rubbish’

Former subpostmaster Lee Castleton said he wishes Paula Vennells would have recognised a decade ago that what happened to him and his Post Office colleagues was “unforgivable”.

The former Post Office chief executive admitted the business’ treatment of Mr Castleton, who was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the company, was “unforgivable”, on her third day of her evidence to the Horizon IT inquiry.

Asked how he felt about her comments, Mr Castleton told the PA news agency during a break from the hearing: “It’s a different world for me now. It’s 20 years on and we have had to fight so hard.

“I just wish she would have recognised that in 2013 – it would have made such a difference to a lot of people. It would have been so much better for everybody had the Post Office not done what they had done. There have been so many people punished for nothing.”

Asked if he thought Ms Vennells’ comments on his case had been forced, he said: “Kind of. If I ever believed that it was just about me, me personally, then I probably wouldn’t be here today. But I think it has been forced and we have had to fight every step of the way, and it never needed to be like this.”

Mr Castleton said his overwhelming feeling over the course of Ms Vennells’ evidence has been sadness, adding: “This never needed to happen to anybody.”

The lawyer acting on behalf of wrongfully convicted Scottish subposmaster Susan Sinclair has asked Paula Vennells how she had received statements by Scotland’s lord advocate to the Scottish Parliament last week “that the Post Office is no longer trusted and has been stripped of its role as a specialist agency in Scotland”.

After asking for the question to be repeated, Ms Vennells said: “I think that’s a very appropriate response.”

Paula Vennells is now being quizzed by Christie Allan, who represents Susan Sinclair, the first subpostmistress in Scotland to successfully appeal her wrongful prosecution – which happened only last September.

Ms Allan has begun by asking how, given Ms Vennells’ claims that she always sought to be questioning in her approach – alongside accounts by subpostmasters, the findings of Second Sight, discovery of bugs in Horizon and revelations about Fujitsu witness Gareth Jenkins – to what extent she questioned the safety of convictions including those in Scotlan.

Ms Vennells replied: “All of the subpostmasters who raised cases were admitted into the scheme, if their applications were considered there was a case to do that. There was no intention to exclude anybody. So my understanding – and I’m very sorry because I wouldn’t have known the individual cases, if there were Scottish cases in those – I am very sorry that it took so long for that to be resolved.”

But she denied being reassured that there “was an extra layer of protection in Scottish prosecutions” because of how the Scottish legal system works, saying: “I had no knowledge of that and I don’t believe I asked enough questions.”

Paula Vennells is now being asked questions by Catriona Watt, who is representing the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), a group which campaigner Alan Bates described to the inquiry in April as “absolutely useless”.

She challenges that Horizon being “robust” was a mantra repeated again and again, “until it became corporate truth”.

Ms Vennells replied: “I and many colleagues in the Post Office took comfort from the fact that senior officials in the NFSP were saying that kind of thing. We see many examples of where words are picked up across time and I don’t know where ‘robust’ came from originally. It was certainly used very regularly by the Post Office.”

“We took it as very genuine, useful experience that the NFSP – made up as you know of people who ran Post Offices on a daily basis – found the system to be robust.”

The inquiry has been shown a strategy advice document which suggests “forcing” subpostmasters “into a collective position where they will either abandon the claims or seek a reasonable settlement”.

Barrister Sam Stein KC said: “That happened under your leadership, Ms Vennells, all of it did. You set the tone, didn’t you, Ms Vennells, and the tone was ‘let’s eliminate them, let’s get rid of these bugs in the system, the subpostmasters – that’s what you set in place, wasn’t it Ms Vennells?’”

After Ms Vennells asked again: “Is that a question because I’d like to answer it”, Mr Stein replied: “Yes, the ‘wasn’t it, Ms Vennells?’ was the question, I think you may have noticed.”

After another long pause, Ms Vennells said: “I did not set a culture like that. I did not lead the litigation. I remember reading this document – well actually I don’t know if I saw this particular document, because I was not personally involved in the litigation steering committee, there was a board subcommittee of which I was one member. I had two conversations with Jane MacLeod … and I’m disappointed she can’t come and give evidence to the inquiry because I think it is important that the inquiry understands more around the approach to the group litigation.”

Paula Vennells has said she became aware of the fact that postmasters were expected to pay for any shortfalls in their accounts, including sums of tens of thousands of pounds.

Asked when she first became aware of this, she said she was running an organisation of 60,000 people.

But pressed again, after a very long pause, she said: “I imagine when the team working on the complaints and mediation scheme were looking at the detail of some of those cases. And I knew about Mrs Misra’s case, which was a huge amount of money. I can’t remember other examples, but I’m sure there were some.”

The inquiry’s chair Sir Wyn Williams has intervened to ask whether Paula Vennells has had any recent contact with former Post Office IT director Mike Young.

Sir Wyn said: “It’s just that the inquiry to date has been unable to trace Mr Young, and so I was seeing if Ms Vennells could help us.”

Ms Vennells said: “No, I’m sorry. I had wondered why he hadn’t been here.”

Sir Wyn Williams has also issued a statement regarding former Post Office general counsel Jane MacLeod, confirming that she has been removed from the timetable as she “will not co-operate with the Inquiry by providing oral evidence”.

Paula Vennells has been challenged to name which individuals she blames and who she trusted too much.

After Ms Vennells suggested she had done this previously, Barrister Sam Stein KC said: “No, do it again. Tell us who you think that you shouldn’t have trusted because they let you down. Give us the names. Please.”

She said: “I will do that but I’d also like to say that, at the time I trusted the people who gave me the information, so on the IT side, Lesley Sewell and Mike Young, and there were two other IT directors, but at the times we’re talking about it was Mike Young and Lesley Sewell.

And on the legal side the general counsels, Susan Crichton and Chris Aujard, and later Jane MacLeod. And those people I had worked with on numbers of other very seriously important projects. They had never let me down. And I’m not sure at what stage you start to not trust individuals with whom you have previously.

“And I think one of the big mistakes which I mentioned on day one here is that we did not have sufficient oversight, particulaly around two very technical functions, because there is a risk that if you rely on – as I did and my board and group executive colleagues did – we relied on one or two key individuals.

“And that puts a burden on those individuals. And an organisation shouldn’t do that. We should have had better scrutiny around the board table in terms of IT and legal.”