Post Office had ‘no interest’ in exonerating operators, says former chair

The former chair of the Post Office has told a public inquiry there was no interest at all in the exoneration of post office operators at the state-owned body, arguing it and the government “dragged their feet” making compensation payments.

Henry Staunton, who was sacked by the former business secretary Kemi Badenoch in January, said his first impression upon taking up the role in late 2022 was that there wasn’t an acceptance among management of the conclusions of damning high court judgments that the Post Office had been wrong to pursue prosecutions.

“They didn’t fully accept it, that was my impression, that somehow the case hadn’t been put well or whatever,” Staunton told the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal on Tuesday. “There wasn’t a feeling that this was absolutely wrong, [what] had happened. It was a feeling across the piece with the team.”

It has emerged that Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, wrote to ministers as recently as January to say it would stand by the prosecution of more than half of the post office operators targeted during the Horizon scandal.

The letter, to the then justice secretary, was sent less than a week after the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office finished airing and made the scandal a national issue.

Staunton, who has accused the last government of wanting to delay payments to post office operators until after the general election, said his second takeaway when he started was that there was “no appetite at all for exoneration. Those were the two things that came through strongly to me.”

He also said that from his first meeting it was obvious that the Horizon IT system was “completely and utterly unreliable”. Staunton described the Post Office’s investigations department as “powerful” and “quite brutal” in the way they dealt with post office operators.

Staunton said that he was shocked at the attitude of the remediation process designed to evaluate and compensate those prosecuted.

He cited examples including a reluctance to “pause” branch owner-operators having to repay money while they were being evaluated in the scheme, as that might result in more coming forward to seek redress.

“What surprised me was, we shouldn’t not be doing something because it would generate claims,” he said. “That is not the basis the remediation committee should be working on. I formed a view over a period of months regarding bureaucracy and an unsympathetic and adversarial approach.”

This same attitude was taken during a discussion about expanding the scheme, relating to a death in the family of a post office operator.

“The view was if we widened the principles we open ourselves up to more claims,” he said. “That seemed pretty unsympathetic to me. With respect to remediation the government and Post Office were dragging their heels.”

Staunton said that one Post Office executive said that the organisation did not owe the same duty of care to post office operators as it did to the organisation’s own employees.

“After all they have been through,” he said, “we owed them a greater duty of care compared with our own employees.”

In May, the government pushed through unprecedented legislation allowing more than 900 operators to have their convictions overturned after being wrongfully prosecuted.