November 2023 – Cyclefree

What did Parliament do?

28 November 20230Comments

It was not the Commission which changed the law allowing the Post Office to prosecute subpostmasters on the basis of flawed unreliable evidence. But MPs. Parliamentary scrutiny should mean something, shouldn’t it? Let’s see what it actually meant here. How did they discharge their function? Many are lawyers. One of the much touted benefits is meant to be that they can properly scrutinise such legislation and understand its implications. MPs also get expenses to pay for researchers.

Did they ask any of the questions the Commission failed to?
Did they check the Commission’s analysis or look at what the IT experts quoted in it actually said?
Did they remember the many miscarriages of justice there had been in previous years and consider whether this change might become part of the ever expanding Law of Unintended Consequences?

Having a memory going back more than a few weeks, curiosity, research, proper analysis: surely this is what MPs should be for? Will it come as much of a surprise to find that the answer to this is no? Not in this case anyway.

The relevant Hansard record provides the answer. MPs made the blindingly stupid mistake of thinking that because computer technology had become more complicated, thus making it more difficult to prove reliability, the answer was not to bother at all because this would be “impractical”. The idea that it was precisely this complexity which made it imperative to find a way of ensuring and proving that it could be relied on – especially in criminal cases when a person’s reputation, career and liberty might be at stake – did not occur to them. They did not question the Commission’s binary approach: keep S.69 as it was or remove it entirely. They did not consider replacing S.69 with something that better addressed the issue of establishing the reliability of computer evidence. Nor did they wonder how much more impractical (in all likelihood impossible) it would be for defendants to rebut the presumption by showing that the system was wrong, unreliable, not working as it should etc. Nor did they consider the costs associated with such a change, in particular, whether Legal Aid would pay for a defendant to challenge computer evidence.

The relevant Minister – Paul Boateng (a solicitor) – treated it as a trivial change. He frivolously commented about eight year old children being the only ones to understand computers. There was simply no understanding of how complex computer systems operate nor any consideration of the consequences. Boateng seemed to think that the common law presumption worked fine with mechanical sources – traffic lights and speedometers – and so would work fine for evidence coming from complex corporate computer systems. It was unpardonably ignorant.

The result made it very much easier for the Post Office to do what it did. Its misconduct is not the only example of miscarriages of justice caused by this change. In 2015 a trial of nurses in S. Wales accused of wilful neglect of patients had to be abandoned because the computer log of patient records was deemed wholly unreliable. The judge criticised the hospital’s failure to have a dependable computer system in place. The details of the IT failings can be read here.

Does this matter now?

Yes. The presumption that computer evidence is reliable unless proved otherwise is untenable. It is based on an ignorant misunderstanding of computer systems. It is not supported by IT experts. It has been a key factor in the worst miscarriage of justice in English legal history. The legal aid budget has been cut back even further since 2000 when the change was introduced. It is now practically impossible for a defendant to rebut the presumption. This is not likely to improve any time soon.

The fundamental problem is the poor understanding of IT by government, the legal system and many of its buyers. Its complexity and risks are not well understood and this has led to “lax legislation, lax regulation and lax procurement”. All have been seen in the Post Office scandal and all of them were caused by government.

In 2022 the Justice Ministry said there were no plans to review the presumption “as it has wide application”. This is simply 2022’s version of the error made when S.69 was removed. Then it was “impractical” to expect people to prove that their evidence was reliable: too difficult. Now it is too much effort to review this because it’s used so widely. Again, too difficult. But it is precisely because it has wide application that it is imperative that it be based on a proper understanding. Ignoring the problems caused by a flawed decision 23 years ago will not make them go away. It simply means that their costs will be borne by those least able to pay.

Fairness

This is – ultimately – a question of fairness. Fairness between the state and citizens. The state has immense power: to pass legislation, to prosecute, imprison and so on. There is little equality of arms between it and individuals. The very minimum they have a right to expect is that the state should use those powers fairly and responsibly, should correct mistakes promptly when they happen and should legislate responsibly, thoughtfully and on the basis of sound evidence. That did not happen here.

In April 2021 the Court of Appeal said that the Post Office’s conduct in its prosecutions were “an affront to the conscience of the court.” It would be an affront to the conscience of Parliament for it to keep in place a flawed legislative change permitting such injustice simply because it does not want to confront the consequences of the poor decision it made so many years ago and now do the hard work necessary to put it right.

Photo by Massimiliano Morosinotto on Unsplash

How was this sausage made?

28 November 20231Comment

What was the one development without which the Post Office scandal could not have happened? In a bitter irony, tinkering with a law enacted following a serious miscarriage of justice – the Confait case – the Inquiry report (yes, another one!) is here) enabled what is now the worst miscarriage of justice in English history. The law is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (“PACE”); the tinkering is to S.69 – its removal and replacement by – well, nothing.

Yes – it is time to look at how the Law Commission reached its recommendation. And, in the second part of this (here), the scrutiny MPs gave to the Commission’s recommendation.

This matters for three reasons:

What the Law Commission did and how and Parliament’s role are outside the scope of the Williams Inquiry;
There are decisions now to be made about how to correct this, decisions which Ministers are seeking to avoid; and
This is not just a miscarriage of justice, a cover up, an IT failure, corporate failings by Post Office managers. It is a failure of governance by Parliament and Ministers at every stage. It continues now.

Section 69

This dealt with the admissibility of evidence obtained from a computer. To use it, a prosecutor (or defendant) had to prove the computer was operating properly (and if it wasn’t, this did not affect the accuracy of the document provided) and had not been used improperly. Important to note two points – because they lie at the heart of what the Law Commission got wrong:-

(1) admissibility relates only to whether something can be evidence (an exception to the hearsay rule);

but

(2) it says nothing about the reliability, accuracy or completeness of that evidence.

The latter is a factual assessment of what a particular computer system is designed to do, how accurate it is for those purposes and whether that purpose and level of accuracy are sufficiently reliable in a criminal trial.

The Experts?

In 1997 the Law Commission recommended its removal. This meant that computer evidence put forward by the prosecution would be accepted as admissible and true unless the defendant could prove otherwise. This had a number of important and serious consequences:-

It shifted the burden of proof onto the defendant in any case reliant on computer evidence;
Defendants would need access to the necessary expertise and the money to pay for it if they were to rebut this presumption; and
The prosecution would have to be scrupulous about disclosure relating to the workings of the computer systems from which it obtained evidence.

Surely this last could be taken for granted? No: many of the miscarriages of justice in previous decades were because of police disclosure failings (e.g. the failure to reveal alibis in the Guildford Four case). Hence the creation of the CPS. But what of prosecutors not part of the CPS?

The Commission’s analysis has been eviscerated in two articles here and here. In summary, it showed a woeful ignorance of how computer-based systems, particularly complex ones, work and the difference between hardware, software and data. It failed to understand the concept of technical reliability of complex computer systems (depending on their purpose), margins of error and the difference between this and the legal reliability of data produced. It consulted very narrowly; and it misrepresented what those computer experts it did consult said, so badly that it recommended the precise opposite of what they had advised. This is a very serious failing by a body whose expertise is the law not computer science.

There is worse. One of the bodies lobbying hard for this change was the Post Office. It stated that this provision made it hard for it to prosecute its staff because of the difficulties of showing that its computer systems were working properly. The Commission appears not to have noticed that this was an entirely self-interested argument. Nor did it consider the Post Office’s obvious conflict of interest. Nor does it seem to have worried that, if a prosecuting authority no longer had to prove its systems were working properly, it had no incentive to ensure they were in fact doing so – at least to the standard required by the criminal courts. Nor did it ask itself whether it was right to shift the burden of proof to the defendant in something so important and complicated as computer evidence, given the then widespread use of computers and the likelihood of this increasing still further. Nor did it state how, if this shift were made, defendants would in practice be able to prove that the computer systems were not working properly, given the need for expert evidence and detailed technical disclosure.

It did ask the question:

“what sort of evidence must the defence adduce, and how realistic is it to suppose that the defence will be able to adduce it without any knowledge of the working of the machine?“

(Note the confusion between hardware and software. And the description of a complex computer system as a “machine”.)

It airily gave this de haut en bas answer:

“a party cannot be required to produce more by way of evidence than one in his or her position could be expected to produce. It could therefore take very little for the presumption to be rebutted, if the party against whom the evidence was adduced could not be expected to produce more.“

There is so much wrong here it is hard to know where to start.

First, what is necessary as evidence is what is needed to satisfy a jury to the right standard. The prosecutor says the computer works fine. The defendant says: “The computer system is wrong but I can’t prove it” (much as subpostmasters did ad nauseam). What on earth is a jury going to make of that? The strength and validity of evidence is not determined by a defendant’s ability or resources.
Second, the belief that only a “very little” would be needed is a pious hope. It is not set out in law as the low threshold which must be passed.
Third, it completely ignores the practical problems of meeting even such a low threshold, especially in complex systems, unless full disclosure is made of all the problems and defects in such a system. It ignores the reality that, even if disclosure is made, expert evidence would be needed, a cost which most defendants cannot afford and which legal aid won’t often pay for.
It did not properly consider what sort of disclosure would be necessary by the party relying on computer evidence nor how to ensure that this should be produced in a way fair to all parties.
Finally, the Commission seemed unaware of the concept of plea bargaining or defendants feeling forced into admitting guilt if they could not afford to mount a defence.

It was bad enough for the Commission to get technical matters wrong as this undermined the recommendation it made. But not properly considering these fundamentally legal questions and presenting lofty answers untethered to the reality of the criminal courts was utterly inexcusable.

The Myth of Expertise

Why did the Commission take such a flawed approach? One answer which has been given is that it fell into the all too common trap of believing what it wanted to be true then finding the opinions justifying this.

Another is the myth of expertise. It is not uncommon for experts in one area to think that they can become experts in another without too much difficulty. It is a trap which lawyers all too easily fall into. Their ability to understand non-legal material, query it, explain it to juries, use it to make legal points can give the illusion of being an expert in it. But being able to question something, however expertly, is not the same as being an expert in it. Lawyers are not computer scientists. The Commission’s report was based on a superficial, faulty understanding of a very different discipline.

In thinking that S.69 could be removed with no problems arising or unintended consequences, the Commission was, ironically enough, making the same mistake IT engineers sometimes make when fixing a bug in software – assuming (or hoping) that one change would not have other unwanted, unintended or unknown consequences. Complex computer systems are dynamic; so are legal systems. The criminal justice rules are like Jenga: if you pull one of the blocks out the whole thing can come tumbling down. The judgment is knowing what you can remove or change without undermining the tower.

The issue should not have been what to do with S.69. Rather it should have been how to ensure the courts could properly assess evidence from computer systems, particularly complex ones, in a fair, effective, realistic way, taking into account the realities of such systems, disclosure obligations requirements and the need to have a fair trial. This was not done.

It is unsurprising that one of the experts consulted – Alistair Kelman, an IT engineer turned barrister – wrote this in 2006 in his book “The Computer in Court”:

“Today there are virtually no controls over putting computer evidence before the court….. The opportunities for fabricating computer evidence and …. destroying or altering audit trails are growing.

Although ….. I believe that nobody has yet been convicted in the UK of a crime they did not commit owing to inaccurate computer evidence ….. well publicised miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four show how dangerous it can be to accept technical evidence in the courtroom at face value.“

Prescient words. At the time he wrote this, many subpostmasters had already been wrongly convicted on the basis of inaccurate computer evidence, though this was not yet widely known. The reference to the Irish miscarriage of justice cases is also key. The Law Commission might not have joined – or even be expected to join – the dots between what happened there and what would happen if S.69 were removed. But Parliament surely would have looked at the issue more widely.

Wouldn’t it?

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What are Ministers for?

15 November 20235Comments

A key issue in the Post Office scandal is what its owner, the government, was doing – or not – while it happened. It is one (1) not within the inquiry’s scope, that being written by politicians and civil servants whose behaviour, or that of their predecessors, would otherwise come uncomfortably under scrutiny. Let’s look anyway.

The self-image of publicly owned entities is exemplified by the National Coal Board after nationalisation. Miners were photographed proudly holding signs saying collieries were now being managed ‘On Behalf Of The People‘. Alas, when the interests of the people clashed with those of the institution, when its wilful negligence killed the people’s children, guess whose interests came first? What is astonishing about the response to Aberfan was that, even when the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, said publicly the tip should be removed, the government/Coal Board refused to pay in full. The families had to contribute. It took 41 years before that money was fully repaid. This was only one of the many instances of a callous disregard for the interests of the people, both before and after the tragedy. A lovely sounding slogan turned out to be an empty promise at precisely the time when it should have meant something.

The events comprising the Post Office scandal started in the late 1990’s. Prosecutions/civil proceedings started in 1999 continuing until as late as 2016. Litigation by subpostmaster action groups and criminal appeals started in 2009. The Williams Inquiry announced in February 2020 became statutory in June 2021. During this entire time, the PO has been publicly owned, first as part of Royal Mail and, since 2012, as a separate company, wholly owned and financed by the government. It has a Board and Chair.

Its CEO’s:-

Adam Crozier, Royal Mail CEO 2003 – 2010
Moya Greene, Royal Mail CEO 2010 – 2018
David Mills, Post Office MD 2002 – 2005
Alan Cook, Post Office MD 2006–2010
Paula Vennells, Post Office CEO after its separation from Royal Mail 2012–2019 (2)
Nick Read 2019 to date

Its Chairmen (while it was part of Royal Mail):-

Allan Leighton 2002 – 2009
Donald Bryson 2009 – 2011

Thereafter:-

Alice Perkins 2011 – 2015
Tim Parker 2015 – 2022
Henry Staunton 2022 to date

These are just the CEO’s and Chairs. It had many other directors during this period, about 80 directors in total over the entire period. The Post Office publishes accounts. It has external auditors (E&Y until 2018, PwC thereafter). The government has claimed that it operated “as an independent, commercial business within the strategic parameters set by government.” On this point – particularly the reality of how independent it actually was from government – recollections may vary.

Nonetheless, despite having all the structures of a company – including large salaries and bonuses for its directors – it did not have any of the constraints or scrutiny which public companies face: no analysts questioning its management, reviewing its accounts, no shareholders able to express views at public meetings or privately or show their displeasure by selling shares. No regulator either. It had all the advantages with none of the downsides. Worse: it had privileges other companies do not – its own internal investigators able to investigate and prosecute with few of the legal requirements or training expected of the Crown Prosecution Service (“CPS“) or police.

What of politicians? How did they exercise oversight? Did they exercise any? Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-

Peter Mandelson
Patricia Hewitt
Alan Johnson (ex-postman)
Peter Mandelson (again)

followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-

Vince Cable
Sajid Javid
Greg Clark
Andrea Leadsom
Alok Sharma
Kwasi Kwarteng
Nadine Dorries
Michelle Donelan
Kemi Badenoch.

Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-

Ed Davey
Norman Lamb
Jo Swinson
Jenny Willott
Jo Swinson (again)
Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair)
Andrew Griffiths
Kelly Tolhurst
Paul Scully
Kevin Hollinrake.

A veritable carousel of people scarcely known in their own households let alone the wider public, in office for too short a time to get to grips with their responsibilities.

But they had civil servants and a director on the Post Office Board, there specifically to represent the government. Over the relevant period that person was:-

Susannah Storey 2012 – 2014
Richard Callard 2014 – 2018
Tom Cooper 2018 – 2023 (3)
Lorna Gratton May 2023 to date

All of these are civil servants, save for Tom Cooper, an investment banker for many years. Richard Callard trained and worked as an accountant before joining the civil service in 2009.

So what, as reportedly asked by a child seeing Gladstone make an interminable speech, are all these people for?

What questions were Ministers and civil servants asking? What, in particular, was the director representing the shareholder’s interests doing and asking? Did any of them think to question, for instance:-

(1) The wisdom of allowing the Post Office to investigate and prosecute its own cases?

Or (2) how the new and key accounting IT system was being commissioned, what independent testing and auditing there was?

Or (3) what the auditors, both internal and external, were doing. (4)

These are not hindsight questions. The CPS was created in 1986 in part to avoid an obvious conflict of interest in having the same body (the police) investigate and prosecute cases. Did no-one ask why the Post Office should have powers denied to the police? Did no-one wonder whether the Post Office’s structure created an obvious conflict of interest which could be open to abuse? Did no-one ask how that conflict was going to be managed or mitigated?

When prosecutions started happening did no-one (the law officers even) wonder what was going on? Did no-one ask whether an accounting system which might have been sufficiently reliable as a source for corporate accounts might not be suitable as a reliable source of evidence for a criminal trial? The government claimed in 2020 that it did “not play a day-to-day role in the litigation or on the contractual and operational matters that were at the heart of it”. This is a claim contradicted by the evidence given to the Business Select Committee about the close working relationship between the Post Office’s Board, the government-appointed director and the Business Department. It also begs the question of why it was not so involved. It had to finance the litigation and the various compensation schemes that the Post Office sought to set up. Someone must surely have briefed it on the 2018 common issues judgment and what Mr Justice Fraser said about the Post Office’s behaviour. It is simply not credible that the government financed the Post Office during this period without being involved in some capacity in the matters which led to the litigation. Not least because the Post Office directors needed to satisfy themselves that the Post Office was a going concern. How could they do so without some assurances from Ministers? How could Ministers give such assurances without understanding the extent of the litigation and the potential compensation liabilities if the Post Office was wrong in what it was asserting? And if the government did pay without asking even the most basic questions, it is – surely – an admission of a grossly negligent and worryingly casual approach to public money.

Nor have government IT failings been unprecedented. Rather, they are the norm, as endless reports from MPs and the National Audit Office have said. Yet, despite all this, despite Harriet Harman raising concerns with Blair about Horizon failings in 1998, despite him saying in Parliament in April 2000 “When we came to office, there was probably no greater shambles than the Horizon project”, despite endless Computer Weekly reports describing multiple problems, all these Ministers and civil servants missed or turned a blind eye to what was happening, accepting the assurances given by the people with every interest in replying: “Nothing to see here, guv”. Can so many senior/apparently intelligent people be so lacking in basic scepticism or curiosity? At best they interpreted an arm’s length relationship with a company as a reason to ask no probing questions at all. At worst, it was – and is – culpable negligence. They may as well have been replaced by a cardboard cut-out of Mr Pangloss.

Notably one MP – James Arbuthnot – did spot the two key issues at the heart of this:-

(1) the unreliability of computer systems; and

(2) the tendency of institutions to deny problems and blame individuals to save their reputations.

He did so because of his previous experience with the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash. He did what ought to be done as a matter of course but too often isn’t. He read across from his knowledge of that matter, realising that the same system failures and human misbehaviours can and do happen in different sectors. It is one vital step which ought to be done at the end of every investigation. There is, however, no institutional capacity, structure or willingness to do this within one institution (see the repeated reports about the police or NHS) let alone across sectors.

This is not just a historical matter. There will likely be more state owned bodies under a Labour government: it has already promised a “GB Energy” company, for a start. The Post Office is only one of many state owned bodies failing in ways causing great suffering to the people in whose interests they are meant to exist. This is not an argument for privatisation (private monopolies with weak regulators are hardly an example to emulate). The issue is not ownership. It is how government entities are governed, controlled and kept up to high professional standards. It is how governments avoid creating conflicts of interest or manage them properly, if unavoidable. It is how their Boards and managers are made meaningfully accountable.

What we have instead is an unholy trinity of poor commissioning, false economies and weak supervision and oversight. Only when the matter goes “Splat” do we then roll out the best lawyers money can buy, embark on gold-plated, fantastically detailed and interminably long inquiries and produce splendid reports few read and even fewer act on. This is, bluntly, arse about face. We have a state congratulating itself on its magnificent reports while ignoring any meaningful steps to get things right from the start or resolve problems early. The government announced this week it won’t even take steps to accelerate the appeals process, despite its own Compensation Advisory Board stating “the justice system itself is called into question in the current circumstances.” It will do nothing. There are no signs that Labour even understands the problem let alone know what to do about it. But backroom as good governance and accountability issue may seem, they are nonetheless one of the next government’s vital tasks.

Notes

(1) The other is the legal system: the Law Commission, appeal courts, civil and criminal courts, certain senior judges, in-house and external lawyers, internal investigators and prosecuting counsel. A whole topic worth exploring separately.

(2) Yes, you read that right: the post of Post Office MD was abolished while the separation from the Royal Mail and the latter’s privatisation were being implemented. It was also during this period that questions and concerns were increasingly being asked by subpostmasters, MPs and others about Horizon and the prosecutions. And, yes, who exactly was in charge is a good question to ask. One day we may even get an answer.

(3) Tom Cooper resigned as a director in May not long after the issue of why the Board had given itself bonuses for complying with the Williams Inquiry while being untruthful about this in its published accounts. Mr Cooper was criticised by the Business Select Committee for not making it aware of this matter for a number of weeks after he first became aware. The Post Office stated that his resignation had been planned since February.

(4) The issue of what the auditors, both internal and external, were or were not doing is explored here.

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Going Postal

10 November 20230Comments

There comes a point in many investigations when you know exactly what has happened, why and who is at fault. It may not mean its end. But the essential findings are clear, no matter what’s needed to colour in the whole picture.

What happened on Tuesday at the Post Office Inquiry was such a moment. There were two events. The first was the evidence of Elaine Cottam, eviscerated here by Nick Wallis as an “obtuse, thick-as-mince, malevolent incompetent”. She displayed the attributes we have come to expect from Post Office witnesses, both internal and external: incompetence, no understanding of her job or the systems she was supposed to be administering, a lack of professionalism, convenient memory failings, a total disregard for truth, obligations to the court – whether over witness statements in civil or criminal proceedings or in this inquiry – utterly disregarded and malice, as shown by her sly attempts to slander a Subpostmaster’s husband on no evidence whatsoever. Wallis’s description could apply to pretty much all Post Office witnesses (with rare exceptions, one of whom gave evidence on Wednesday). This has been the case ever since the March 2019 Bates litigation when Mr Justice Fraser found a number of different creative ways of saying the Post Office’s witnesses were liars, without directly using that term.

The second was the revelation that the Post Office had discovered ca. 363,000 potentially relevant emails dating back to 2012 it should have – but hadn’t – disclosed. Yet another postponement would be needed. This is not the first time this has happened. There have been seven previous occasions when the Post Office has admitted failing to disclose relevant material. Seven. In the two years since it became a statutory inquiry in June 2021. As Inquiry Counsel, Jason Beer KC said, the Post Office’s conduct is obstructing the inquiry.

This is not an inquiry-specific problem. The Post Office’s failure to disclose – right from the start – the problems with Horizon resulted in malicious prosecutions and civil proceedings against subpostmasters and the misleading of various criminal and civil courts which sought to get to grips with the extent and nature of this scandal. Now it is doing the same to the Inquiry. This is no longer – if it ever was – a result of incompetence or the inevitable difficulties of extensive disclosure. This is an organisation which is simply refusing to take the Inquiry seriously, as it has refused to take seriously any of the legal processes it has abused for its own ends.

The Post Office is not fit for purpose. It is an organisation unwilling to comply and/or incapable of complying with the requirements placed on it, whether those of the Inquiry, those relating to its accounts or those imposed by Parliamentary Select Committees. It is out of control – and has been for some while.

On Thursday we learnt from Kevin Hollinrake, Under Secretary of State in the Business Department that the Post Office has discovered “operational issues” which financially prejudiced subpostmasters and for which another compensation scheme is to be set up. Yet another WTAF moment.

These repeated failings are not just evidence of the failure to comply with the Inquiry’s requirements. They are proof that everything alleged about Horizon and how the Post Office dealt with it are true. They show in the clearest possible way that the Post Office has no clue what is going on inside the organisation and that its word on anything simply cannot be trusted. Res ipsa loquitur, as lawyers liked to say – the thing speaks for itself.

What Now?

The Inquiry Judge could issue S.21 Notices holding the Post Office in contempt of court; he can make rulings; he can even write all sorts of damning assessments in his final report. But really: why grind on with this for the next few years? The Post Office is making a farce of the inquiry. It is abusing it because its endless obstruction reduces even further the chances of the subpostmasters (and their families) finding out the truth before they die, of receiving proper compensation before they die, of ensuring that those who have committed crimes face justice and so on. It is an affront to the conscience of the inquiry to allow this to continue.

The Judge is behaving as if all parties are seeking the truth. The Post Office (and its advisors) are not even on this pitch. It is playing a quite different game – seeking to delay, obfuscate and deny, to do everything possible to ensure that the truth will never be known or so late that nothing can be done to those responsible and that it becomes merely a matter of historical interest – at best.

The Judge should – but likely won’t – say that there is little point to the Inquiry: there has been enough evidence to show that the Post Office has utterly failed at all stages to implement an effective IT system, has lied about what it knew, has abused the criminal and civil justice system, and is now abusing the inquiry process. He should say that it is only the government – as its owner – which can take steps to make proper, full compensation now. It is only the government – as its owner – which can take steps to replace the entire Board, pretty much most of its senior management and many of the staff and rebuild the entire organisation from the bottom up. It is only the government which can take legislative steps to quash the convictions of everyone prosecuted by the Post Office over the last two decades. It is only the government which can take action against the Post Office’s directors, past and present. It is only the government which can take steps to ensure that Fujitsu is banned from any government work. It is only the government which can make clear to the Post Office what it must do to comply with the inquiry properly.

He should say that given how long the inquiry has been going on and the number of Post Office failures to comply, he must now assume that the government has not made this clear. He can therefore have no confidence in the competence or good faith of Post Office staff charged with complying with the inquiry and is no longer prepared to allow the inquiry – or the subpostmasters – to be made fools of in this way.

He should, in short, tell the politicians that when they own a company it is them – as owners – who are responsible for its actions. It is now time for them to take responsibility for their creature – not dump it onto an inquiry and processes (such as prosecutions for perverting the course of justice) which will take an age, if ever, to come to a resolution.

Ultimately, this scandal arises from a failure of governance – by the Post Office’s directors, certainly – but also by the politicians to whom they were and are answerable. When a publicly-owned body fails, the responsibility rests with the elected government. As does the responsibility for fixing the problems.

How and why this governance failure happened and its implications for other state owned entities will be discussed separately.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

What did Parliament do?

How was this sausage made?

What are Ministers for?

Going Postal

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