The Post Office tried to use selective positive comments about the reliability of the Horizon IT system from a damning high court judgment to try to get police to review a decision not to launch criminal proceedings against a post office operator earlier this year, it has emerged.
More than 550 post office operators – including Alan Bates and Jo Hamilton, who were portrayed in a hit ITV drama on the Horizon IT scandal – were vindicated in 2019 when a 400-page judgment found the faulty system relied upon to secure the convictions was not “remotely robust” and the Post Office agreed to pay £58m to settle the claims.
The public inquiry into the scandal has been shown an exchange of emails between Lancashire police, the senior investigations manager at the Post Office and the organisation’s legal department.
Kurt Edwards, in the economic crime unit at Lancashire police, requested “documentary evidence” that the Horizon system currently being used was “more robust” than previous iterations that were full of bugs and errors that resulted in the wrongful prosecution of more than 900 post office operators.
The police investigation, Operation Jetfire, involved looking into allegations that owners or employees at an unnamed branch “conspired to commit large-scale money laundering and possibly other fraud offences against the Post Office”.
Ultimately the police decided that no further action would be taken.
The Post Office sent a letter earlier this year to Edwards offering to “assist” in a review of that decision explaining that the police had “misinterpreted” court findings about Horizon.
“It is not for the Post Office to influence the independence of the investigation or the assessment of evidence in any case,” the letter shown to the inquiry said. “However, the reasoning around the credibility of the Horizon system seems to be a significant factor, if not the central factor, in the reasoning for not progressing this investigation further and that reasoning appears to be based on a misinterpretation of the findings of courts.”
Jason Beer, the counsel for the inquiry, said the Post Office had “leant on” selective passages from Mr Justice Fraser’s highly critical Horizon judgment from 2019.
The seminal judgment brought the scale of the Horizon scandal to national attention and ultimately paved the way for the overturning of the wrongful convictions and the exoneration of hundreds of post office operators.
Beer highlighted parts of passages from the judgment forwarded to police by the Post Office, such as that Horizon was “relatively robust”, that there were only “isolated instances” of bugs and errors compared with pre-2019 versions of the software, and that “experts agree it is a better system” than its predecessors.
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Beer asked Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office who gave evidence at the inquiry last week, if he was aware of this strategy to use “extracts from a judgment in civil proceedings … as evidence in criminal proceedings to prove the reliability of the Horizon IT system?”
“I was not aware of this investigation,” said Read. “I wasn’t aware of the level of engagement, candidly.”
He added that company policy was that board approval was meant to be sought for “bringing to the table information associated with interaction with law enforcement agencies on specific issues”.
Read said the approach taken by the Post Office legal team toward the police had not been sanctioned by the board or the group executive team.