Sub-postmaster victims and Royal Mail’s Dame Moya Greene alike don’t believe Paula Vennell’s account
The account of the Post Office’s former chief executive about what she knew during key years of the firm’s scandal is not believed by the former CEO of Royal Mail, the inquiry into the injustice has heard.
Paula Vennells has been giving evidence as part of a three-day appearance at the inquiry into the impact of faulty Horizon accounting software, which led to the prosecution of more than 700 sub-postmasters.
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Paula Vennells breaks down in tears during questioning
In addition to the wrongful convictions for theft and false accounting, many more sub-postmaster victims generated large debts, lost homes, livelihoods and reputations and suffered ill health. Some died by suicide.
Widely not believed
The inquiry heard that Dame Moya Greene, the former Royal Mail CEO whom Ms Vennells worked alongside for many years, texted Ms Vennells in January of this year to express her disbelief at the wrongdoing denials.
Ms Vennells has long maintained – and reiterated on Wednesday – that she was unaware of the extent of flaws with Fujitsu’s Horizon software.
Sub-postmasters listening to the inquiry in the Fenny Compton village hall in Warwickshire, where dozens of sub-postmasters met for the first time in 2009 as they began their fight for justice, also said they did not believe Ms Vennells.
“She is blatantly, utterly lying, and it’s got to stop,” former sub-postmaster Sally Stringer told Sky News.
Dame Moya texted Ms Vennells after the airing of the ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which reinvigorated interest in the scandal, saying: “When it was clear the system was at fault, the Post Office should have raised a red flag. Stopped all proceedings. Given people back their money, and then tried to compensate them from the ruin this caused in their lives.”
When Ms Vennells replied that she agreed, Ms Greene said: “I don’t know what to say. I think you knew”.
“I want to believe you. I asked you twice. I suggested you get an independent review reporting to you. I was afraid you were being lied to. You said the system had already been reviewed multiple times. How could you not have known?” her text said.
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Why she says she didn’t know
The question of how it was that she couldn’t have known was taken up the the inquiry’s lead barrister Jason Beer KC.
Ms Vennells core argument emerged early in questioning: she said she wasn’t informed of bugs because of the way information flowed within the organisation. She accepted that as CEO she was in charge of how information was communicated.
“I was too trusting,” she said.
Emotional testimony
Ms Vennells broke down in tears numerous times during her evidence, the first of which was when Mr Beer read out details of sub-postmasters who were not convicted, as juries accepted there were flaws with Horizon.
The inquiry had just been presented with evidence of Ms Vennells telling MPs in 2012, “Every case taken to prosecution has found in favour of the post office. There hasn’t been a case investigated where the horizon system has been found to be at fault”.
This belief, Ms Vennells said, was “a representation of the information that I was given” rather than proof of an unwavering belief that nothing had gone wrong.
‘Wait and see’ accusation
Criticism came from Mr Beer over the fulsomemess of Ms Vennells cumulative 798-page witness statement.
He asked if she was adopting a “wait and see” approach: “Let’s see what comes out in evidence. See what I’ve got to admit and then I’ll admit that?”
“Given you provided a 775-page witness statement that took seven months to write, could you not have reflected on what you should have done fully and differently within the witness statement?” he added.
Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry lead counsel Jason Beer KC.
Ms Vennells’ statement said that with the benefit of hindsight, there were “many things” she should have “done differently”, but she would wait for the inquiry to conclude to expand on that detail.
But she denied adopting a “wait and see” approach.
Rather, “It was simply a matter of time,” she said. “The inquiry asked me, I think, over 600 questions to 200 or 300 with subquestions in each. I went through probably hundreds of thousands of documents.”
Evidence to Parliament in 2015
A major question going into the inquiry was how Ms Vennells was able to tell Parliament in 2015 there was “no evidence” of “miscarriages of justice”.
On Wednesday morning, Ms Vennells said that was what she had been told “multiple times” by Fujitsu – that nothing had been found in Horizon.
Comic relief
Back in the village hall in Fenny Compton there were moments of laughter when Mr Beer asked Ms Vennells if she was “the unluckiest CEO in the United Kingdom?”
His question was asked “In the light of the information that you tell us in your witness statement you weren’t given… the documents that you tell us in your witness statement that you didn’t see. And in the light of the assurances that you tell us about in your witness statement that you were given by Post Office staff”.
‘Exculpatory’ remembering
Another line of questioning from Mr Beer was that Ms Vennells had a better memory of events and records that made her and the Post Office look good and a worse recollection of things that made her and her organisation look bad.
“Why is it that in your witness statement, when you refer to a recollection of a conversation that’s unminuted, undocumented, not referred to in any email there are always things that exculpate you that reduce your blameworthiness?” he asked.
That wasn’t her approach, Ms Vennells said.
Signing off a £300,000 legal bill to go after a £25,000 loss?
Sub-postmasters and those following the scandal likely will be listening out to see if Ms Vennells approved the legal bill to prosecute Lee Castleton, who was featured as a victim in the ITV drama.
Earlier this month former managing director Alan Cook told the inquiry Ms Vennells approved legal costs of £300,000 to prosecute Mr Castleton for a supposed £25,000 shortfall when she was a network director at the Post Office.
One of the UK’s largest water companies is considering shipping supplies from Norway to the UK.
Southern Water said the idea was a “last-resort contingency measure” in case of extreme droughts in the early 2030s.
Up to 45 million litres could be brought to the UK per day under the proposals.
The Financial Times, which first reported the potential move, said the water, from melting glaciers by fjords in the Scandinavian country, would be transported by tankers.
It comes as fears grow over the future of water services in the UK following droughts in the summer of 2022 when some areas of the country came close to running out of supplies.
The Financial Times said Southern Water was in “early-stage” talks with Extreme Drought Resilience Service, a private UK company that supplies water by sea tanker.
The firm would pay for the measure out of customers’ bills, according to the report.
Southern Water, which covers Hampshire, Kent, East and West Sussex, and the Isle of Wight, currently gets its supplies from groundwater and rare chalk streams.
However, the Environment Agency (EA) has urged the firm to reduce its reliance on such sources amid concerns over the environmental impact and fears they could make the risk of droughts worse.
‘Costly and carbon-intensive’
Water firms have come under growing criticism in recent years over sewage spills and rising bills, with households facing an average increase of 21% over the next five years.
Companies have also been urged to improve their infrastructure to help supplies. Currently around a fifth of water running through pipes is lost to leaks, according to regulator Ofwat.
And a report by the EA earlier this year found that Southern Water, along with Anglian Water, Thames Water and Yorkshire Water, was responsible for more than 90% of serious pollution incidents.
Following criticism over sewage discharges, Southern Water’s chief executive Lawrence Gosden blamed “too much rain” in 2023 for the problem during an interview with ITV News.
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The company said it was facing a shortfall of 166 million litres per day in Hampshire alone during future droughts.
But the firm said it was already undertaking other measures to address the problem, including by building the UK’s first new reservoir in more than three decades in Havant Thicket.
However, Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist Dr Doug Parr criticised the Norway proposal and said the firm should focus more on addressing issues domestically.
“Tankering in huge quantities of water from Norway will inevitably be a costly and carbon-intensive alternative to that of doing a better job with the water resources that are available in a rainy country like the UK,” he said.
He added: “Despite the obvious failings of planning, water companies need to start thinking of potable fresh water as a precious and finite resource, and plan to start treating it as such.”
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From 2022: How can we protect ourselves from water crisis?
Tim McMahon, Southern Water’s managing director for water, said: “We put less water into supply now than we did 30 years ago and measures like reducing leakage have enabled us to keep pace so far with population growth and climate change.
“As we work to take less water from our chalk streams and build new reservoirs like Havant Thicket in Hampshire, we need a range of options to help protect the environment while this infrastructure comes online.”
Mr McMahon added: “Importing water would be a last resort contingency measure that would only be used for a short period in the event of an extreme drought emergency in the early 2030s – something considerably worse than the drought of 1976.
“We’re committed to continuing to work with our regulators on developing the right solutions to meet the challenge of water scarcity, while protecting the environment.”
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