Paula Vennells laughed at on final day of Post Office inquiry

The Post Office’s former boss Paula Vennells has told the final day of an inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal that her senior team failed to inform her of key information but said “she has no desire to point the finger at others”.

In a closing statement, Ms Vennells’ lawyer named a number of ex-colleagues – including Angela van den Bogerd – who she claimed did not tell her about pertinent facts linked to the scandal.

Sub-postmasters at the inquiry greeted Ms Vennells’ words with groans and, when the former Anglican priest said she did not want to blame others, with laughter.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for shortfalls in their accounts caused by bugs in the Horizon IT system.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the government said it would pay compensation to sub-postmasters who suffered losses due to shortfalls in the Post Office IT system prior to Horizon, which was called Capture.

The government said that it has asked the Post Office to “urgently review its files” so criminal cases review bodies can “ensure no one was wrongfully convicted of a Horizon-style injustice”.

The Capture accounting system was used between 1992 and 1999, when it was replace by Horizon.

On the final day of the inquiry into Horizon, Ms Vennlls’ lawyer Samantha Leek KC claimed that throughout the whole public hearing “there has been nothing to show that she acted in bad faith”.

Ms Leek said Ms Vennells “cannot, and does not, try to hide from the fact that while chief executive she did not manage to uncover the truth about the extent of the bugs, errors and defects” in the software.

But “she simply did not get the information which she ought to have been given by her senior team, whom she trusted and to whom she delegated responsible roles”.

“Ms Vennells does not know why key information was not passed on to her,” she added.

Ms Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019. She was previously network director at the organisation for five years.

Her statement is one of the last to be heard in the long-running inquiry into the Horizon scandal which was set up in September 2020.

It has heard from 298 witnesses, received 780 witness statements and dealt with more than 2.2 million pages of disclosure.

Edward Henry KC, who is acting for some sub-postmasters, told the inquiry earlier this week: “People were ruined, people were bankrupted, people were imprisoned, there were atrocious miscarriages of justice, people died.

“Whether the board and the executive knew of these injustices from the start is an irrelevant diversion.

Post Office bosses “refusing” to recognise that Horizon might generate shortfall errors had “created a terrible risk”, he said, adding that “it was a recipe for certain disaster”.

A lawyer for the Post Office said that the inquiry had been “a humbling experience”.

Nicola Greaney KC said that the scandal lay in “fundamental structural and governance failings” but that the Post Office of today “is a different organisation from the one that was in place during the failures of the past”.

She conceded that the Post Office “still has a long way to go to reset its relationship with postmasters and the public”.

On Monday, a number of lawyers for victims of the scandal said in their closing statements that their clients were still waiting for compensation.

Months after the Post Office began rolling out Horizon in 1999, the prosecution of sub-postmasters began, and lasted until 2015, resulting in one of the most widespread miscarriages in British justice.

Maureen McKelvey, who ran a Post Office in Clanabogan, Omagh between 1990 and 2001, said she was still waiting for financial redress.

“I have been made to feel like a beggar with my hand out waiting for compensation,” she said.

A lawyer representing the Department for Business and Trade told the public hearing: “It realises that every day that postmasters and their families continue to wait for full and fair financial redress is a day too long.”

He added that the department would “continue to work hard to make improvements to the schemes”.