The chief executive of the Post Office has said that the state-owned body should be stripped of any responsibility to handle financial redress for compensating victims of the Horizon IT scandal.
Nick Read told a public inquiry into the scandal that he and others within the organisation believed the process should be entirely handled by the UK government.
Read was giving evidence for a second day to the judge-led inquiry which is examining why Post Office operatives were wrongly prosecuted for financial shortfalls caused by a faulty Horizon IT system.
He told the inquiry: “We have done everything we can to build independence into the schemes … There was always going to be difficulties with the Post Office administering compensation because of the level of trust and confidence that many victims have in the Post Office.”
Read was asked by Edward Henry KC, barrister representing post office operatives, whether the government was using the Post Office “as a shield or a fire curtain” to deflect criticism about the schemes. “That could be a description, yes,” Read replied.
Henry asked him whether having the Post Office administer the two schemes “was exposing a teetering institution which was virtually insolvent to further reputational damage and criticism.”
“I do hold that view,” Read said.
The chief executive, who is stepping down in March next year, was asked why he had not previously expressed his views about redress schemes to the public inquiry when four separate hearings about compensation were held in 2022 and 2023.
“If that was the corporate view … Why did you not communicate it to the inquiry in any of the four hearings?” Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry asked.
“It’s a good question,” Read replied. “I am unsure why we did not make that explicit. Clearly we should have done.”
Read said in his written witness statement that, by keeping the Post Office responsible for two of the schemes, he believed the Treasury “had wanted the Post Office to feel a degree of the pain and chaos caused” by the scandal. The government is responsible for the other redress schemes.
Earlier this year, the government said hundreds of wrongly convicted post office operators would be able to access the compensation scheme, set up for the victims of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent legal history after it emerged that Horizon had a number of bugs and defects.
Read was asked why individuals who were working in areas such as investigations at the time of the scandal were still working in the Post Office.
He said the state-owned body was examining whether certain staff who had worked on the Horizon prosecutions should be transferred to other departments or leave the business entirely using voluntary redundancies or settlements.
Read said there were a “handful of individuals” who worked in the investigations unit, which was disbanded in 2015, who were still employed by the Post Office but unless wrongdoing was formally and fairly established, the company “cannot simply remove” existing staff because they were in post when the miscarriages of justice were taking place.
“Those individuals, of course, have employment and indeed human rights themselves,” he said.
Read was shown notes of a meeting he held earlier this year with Kevin Hollinrake, the then minister for the department for business and trade, where the politician said he was “not a big fan of paying people off” and “didn’t mind” if it meant employment tribunal claims were brought.
Beer said to Read: “The government had given you the green light to be robust.” Read responded: “I do not think we have been as robust as that”, adding that he believed the state-owned body had been “dragging its feet”.
On Wednesday, Read said that no employee was “above the law” and denied that there were “untouchables” within the organisation who would never face disciplinary action over the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators.
The inquiry continues.