THE Revd Paula Vennells finished giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry on Friday, on the identical day that a Bill quashing the convictions of former post-submasters was fast-tracked into law.
The Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill overturns convictions of theft, fraud, and other offences linked to the Horizon IT scandal, which saw greater than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted based on a faulty IT system.
The final stages of parliamentary scrutiny were fast-tracked due to the upcoming dissolution of Parliament next week, after it was confirmed that a General Election could be held on 4 July (News, 22 May).
While the Bill received broad support, including from the Lord’s Spiritual, some peers, including the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, while still supporting the Bill, had expressed concerns that the laws carried the chance of unexpected consequences for the rule of law (News, 15 May).
Ms Vennells, who was chief executive of the Post Office throughout the last years of the prosecutions, spent three days answering questions on her leadership of the Post Office during a time when it pursued sub-postmasters relentlessly through the courts even while internal evidence was build up of faults within the Horizon system (News, 22 May).
Ms Vennells served as Non-Stipendiary Minister of Bromham with Oakley and Stagsden, in St Albans diocese, until she stepped back from ministry in 2021 (News, 30 April 2021). From 2010 to 2019, Ms Vennells was a trustee of Hymns Ancient & Modern, the charity that owns the Church Times.
On Thursday, Ms Vennells was asked whether the motivation behind a review into a lot of cases had been merely to guard the Post Office’s repute, to which she said that she had “believed, very sincerely, that the scheme we were putting in would help”.
Asked what PR chief Mark Davies meant when he wrote in an email that the Post Office should aim to “take the sting out of” the report, Ms Vennells said: “I’m not entirely sure”. On Friday, she was asked about Mr Davies’s use of the phrase “lifestyle changes” experienced by convicted sub-postmasters in a BBC interview. She described how she had heard it with dismay.
The email exchange in query concerned the potential of establishing a review of convictions which relied on the info from the Horizon IT system.
The scope of such a review was discussed between senior management staff on the Post Office, including Ms Vennells, but not all information was shared with the board. Asked whether she was “shielding the board from the manager team’s dirty laundry”, Ms Vennells said this was “completely improper”.
On Friday, Ms Vennells faced intense and infrequently hostile questioning from lawyers representing former sub-postmasters. Edward Henry KC, who’s representing the victims of miscarriages of justice, began by saying: “There were so many forks within the road, but you mostly took the improper path, didn’t you?”
Ms Vennells replied: “It was a very complex undertaking, and the Post Office and I didn’t all the time take the correct path.”
Mr Henry said that she “preached compassion but didn’t practise it”, citing the exclusion of former sub-postmaster Lee Castleton from the Post Office-run mediation scheme. Ms Vennells described the treatment of Mr Castleton — who was prosecuted by the Post Office, and went bankrupt resulting from the legal costs of losing his case — as “completely unacceptable”, but said that she was not personally involved through which cases went into the mediation scheme.
She again broke down in tears on Friday, after saying that she “loved” the Post Office. “I’ve worked as hard as I could and to one of the best of my ability,” she said, before returning to the defence used throughout her evidence: that she hadn’t been given key information.
“I now know information that I didn’t get. And I don’t know in some cases why it didn’t reach me. But my only motivation was for one of the best for the Post Office. And for the a whole lot of postmasters that I met, and I regret deeply that I let these people down,” she said.
Sam Stein KC, who’s acting on behalf of sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted, responded: “Ms Vennells, that’s absolutely rubbish, isn’t it?”
