The Post Office’s leadership has been accused of showing contempt for victims after its lawyers informed the inquiry into one of the country’s worst scandals that it was not reasonable to expect them to “leave no stone unturned” in getting to the truth.
The inquiry into the false convictions of 900 post office operators was further told it was unrealistic for the organisation’s lawyers responsible for handing over internal documents to “continue to work during the evenings and over weekends”.
The Post Office, which has admitted to failing to properly disclose thousands of relevant documents, has also not provided the inquiry with any WhatsApp messages on the basis that senior figures within the organisation had informed lawyers that it was not used for “substantive” discussions.
“It may be a surprise to a member of the public that no one in the Post Office used WhatsApp to discuss issues of substance relating to the Horizon system,” said Jason Beer, the lead counsel to the inquiry.
Earlier this week, the minister responsible for postal affairs, Kevin Hollinrake, announced that the government would legislate to exonerate post office operators convicted of crimes between 1999 and 2015 relating to theft, false accounting and fraud, based on faulty information from the Horizon system, which had erroneously suggested that money had gone missing from post office branch accounts.
The latest revelations from the inquiry, chaired by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, emerged out of evidence given by the Post Office’s lead legal representative, Chris Jackson, a partner at the law firm Burges Salmon LLP.
The former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis said the attitude of the Post Office and its legal representatives was a “disgrace” and that the organisation’s employment of expensive lawyers to thwart justice was an affront to the victims. He said: “They should ensure that every effort is made to disclose all the documents. The alternative to their own lawyers doing it is that we impose lawyers upon them to sift through their documents.”
Liam Byrne, the chair of the business select committee, which next week will interview the chief executive of the Post Office, Nick Read, said justice required those representing the organisation to work “round the clock”.
Byrne said: “This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, so, bluntly, parliament and the public will expect and demand the Post Office leaves no stone unturned in providing the evidence required so the truth can finally be known. The truth has already taken too long to emerge. There cannot and must not be any further delays.”
Ahead of criminal trials, appeal hearings and now at the public inquiry, the Post Office has been found to have failed to fully disclose evidence relevant to the false convictions of post office operators, of which 95 have so far been overturned.
Jackson apologised for “inaccurate and misleading” evidence having been previously submitted to the high court and court of appeal.
In a written statement to the inquiry before Friday’s hearing, Jackson, whose firm was instructed by the Post Office last year, conveyed an apology from the organisation for delaying the inquiry over the past two years by failing to disclose documents relating to its conduct in the scandal, including hundreds of thousands of relevant emails.
Gareth Jenkins, a key architect of the Horizon IT system, had his appearances at the inquiry delayed twice because of disclosure failings and the Post Office handed over 3,045 documents on the evening before he was due to give evidence.
A further disclosure setback in November, in which about 363,000 emails were found on a “legacy” mailing system, resulted in other evidence hearings being delayed, including that of Post Office investigator Stephen Bradshaw, who has denied claims of acting like a “mafia gangster” in pursuing post office operators.
The inquiry heard on Friday that an “exercise to identify the full extent of Post Office’s electronic data universe” had only started in June 2023 – two years into the start of the hearings.
Jackson wrote: “The Post Office has asked me to convey its apologies for the current situation and to assure the inquiry and other core participants that it is a Post Office priority to get to a position where hearings (and planning and preparation for hearings) can take place from a stable basis.”
In a letter sent in October that was seen for the first time on Friday, however, he had warned that the Post Office would reduce the scope of its searches for relevant documents. “The principle of reasonableness in relation to disclosure to the inquiry – even if operating at the more stringent end of the spectrum – does not, and cannot, require POL [the Post Office] to leave every stone unturned,” Jackson wrote. “Such a standard is impossible for POL to realistically comply with.”
The Post Office was responsible for most of the prosecutions of those falsely convicted but Keir Starmer confirmed on Friday that a “handful” of cases linked to the Horizon scandal may have been handled by the Crown Prosecution Service during his time in charge of the organisation.
The Labour leader, who led the CPS between 2008 and 2013, said he was not aware of Horizon cases brought against post office operators. He said: “In the five years I was director of public prosecutions I had 7,000 staff and we handled 4m cases. So this was a handful, within that.”
