A former Post Office chief operating officer (COO) did nothing to intervene in wrongful prosecutions when it became obvious to him that the firm’s prosecution practices were unfair.
Mike Young, COO at the Post Office from 2008 to 2012, said he had concerns over the burden being on subpostmasters to provide evidence of their innocence as well as the reliance on Horizon’s supplier, Fujitsu, for expert evidence.
But speaking in the latest Post Office Horizon scandal public inquiry hearing, Young, who was giving evidence for phases 5 and 6 of the inquiry, admitted to doing nothing about this despite his experience as a police officer.
He did not raise alarms when he found out the burden of proof was placed on the subpostmasters when they were being prosecuted for unexplained shortfalls, which they believed were caused by computer errors.
In an internal Post Office email exchange shown during the inquiry, which was copied to Young during his Post Office tenure, there was a discussion about how prosecuted subpostmasters had not provided hard evidence that their discrepancies were caused by Horizon errors.
Young was asked by inquiry barrister Catriona Hodge whether, with his “police hat on”, he believed it was right that the burden of proof “rest on subpostmasters to show that Horizon was at fault in causing these accounting discrepancies”.
He said he didn’t know whether at the time this jumped out as an issue of concern. “I suspect it probably did,” he said, and admitted, “I don’t think I did anything.”
Workload blamed
The former COO blamed his workload for not acting on a problem that would be obvious to a former police officer. “It’s by no means an excuse, but when you are inundated with three or four hundred emails a day and you have got the world before you in terms of what you’ve got to do, you can’t pick up on every nuance in an email.”
Young also failed to raise concerns about the use of employees of Fujitsu, the supplier of the Horizon system, as expert witnesses in cases where prosecution teams are using data from the software as evidence. “I would have expected to see in prosecutions of this nature an independent expert commenting on Horizon data and audit logs,” he said. “It felt a little bit like poachers turned gamekeeper and it didn’t fit well with me as a former police officer.”
He told the inquiry that he could not recall whether he raised concerns, but added: “The likelihood is no. I was clearly told, ‘Let the process be the process’.”
Young had opportunities to raise concerns with bosses at the Post Office, and had the ear of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. In an earlier hearing, Young was named among others by Vennells as someone she had been “too trusting” of, and that she had accepted what he had told her.
Dismissive attitude
In her witness statement, she wrote that when Computer Weekly investigated and reported on Horizon in 2009, revealing serious concerns, Young was dismissive. “I recall he said it was a trade magazine that did not know what it was talking about in relation to Horizon,” she wrote. “He assured me that there was nothing wrong with the system and that the article was nonsense, or words to that effect.”
But Young said Vennells “misinterpreted” what he said. During his evidence, he told the inquiry that it was two calls from Computer Weekly in 2011, regarding subpostmasters’ claims against Horizon and proposed legal action against the Post Office, that led him to question the integrity of Horizon.
He also claimed it was he who instigated the investigation of the Horizon system by Forensic accountancy firm Second Sight. Young said he acted upon the call by contacting Vennells and the Fujitsu UK head at the time, Duncan Tait, to encourage them to investigate Horizon “thoroughly”.
“Frankly, I got to the point, I had had enough,” he told the inquiry. But at the time, subpostmasters campaign group the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, led by Alan Bates, was preparing legal action against the Post Office. As well as media attention, there was pressure from MPs representing subpostmasters.
Second Sight was contracted in 2012 and investigated the system, completing two reports. The interim report in 2013 revealed serious concerns, including the existence of bugs, and the final report in 2015 was damning, concluding that the Post Office had prosecuted subpostmasters for unexplained losses before investigating the cause. Almost immediately after Second Sight’s final report, the Criminal Cases Review Commission launched an investigation into potential wrongful prosecutions. As a result, hundreds of subpostmasters prosecuted for crimes based on Horizon evidence have either had or are in the process of having their convictions overturned.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •
• Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •
• Also read: Post Office and Fujitsu malevolence and incompetence means huge taxpayers’ bill •