The Post Office inquiry has shed an unflattering light on the inner workings of Whitehall, a hermetically sealed world in which officials purr with reassurance, ministers unquestioningly promulgate their findings to the outside world, and the little people (in this case, innocent sub-postmasters) are fobbed off as know-nothing troublemakers.
Witness after witness has expressed regrets, a sense that something more should have been done
The inquiry is investigating what happened and who is to blame for the Horizon scandal. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were accused of wrongdoing after faulty IT software showed errors in their accounts. Many were accused of false accounting, theft, or fraud: 236 ended up in prison. Others were financially ruined after being forced to pay back substantial sums. Some of those accused have died without clearing their names, and at least four are known to have committed suicide.
Two of the country’s leading politicians are the latest to appear before the inquiry, facing question after question about their involvement and why they did not do more to help sub-postmasters. Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, served as a minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills between May 2010 and February 2012. He told the inquiry he was ‘deeply sorry’ that he didn’t see through the ‘misinformation’ used by the Post Office to dispel questions, and that he would have ‘acted differently’ if the ‘Post Office had told the truth’. What’s missing in his hindsight view of events is any adequate explanation of why he didn’t show a little more curiosity about what might have been going on in his own department. Isn’t that the job of a minister?
Davey also apologised to the victims of the scandal, including Sir Alan Bates, whose requests for a meeting in 2010 he initially ignored, saying: ‘I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose’. He acknowledged that he could not remember reading Bates’s original letter to him and that he may even have signed his reply to Bates without seeing it. This reply produced murmurs of disbelief from people listening in the room. Davey was at pains to stress the heavy workload that he was under in his job, confronted with issues and problems in which he had no prior expertise (it was his first ministerial post). Davey went on to reveal that he had been left ‘shocked at the harm done to so many sub-postmasters over so many years’ after watching the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office and reading a landmark High Court judgment. This is a rather breathtaking admission from a politician who at the time was ultimately accountable for the Post Office. He also said that he was not aware that the Post Office and Royal Mail Group themselves investigated, prosecuted, and obtained convictions against sub-postmasters. Asked by the counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, how he satisfied himself that the company was properly managed, Davey said he was ‘primarily reliant’ on officials.
This story of reliance (over-reliance?) on officials also came through in testimony earlier in the day from Pat McFadden, who is now chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. McFadden was postal affairs minister from 2007-2009. He told the inquiry: ‘Ministers are reliant on the information they get from officials’. He too voiced expressions of regret about not asking more questions. He repeatedly described the government’s relationship with the Post Office as ‘arms-length’ and said that it was the ‘emphatic nature’ of the Post Office’s defence that reassured him. That’s all well and good, but curiosity of even the most cursory kind once again seems absent. McFadden highlighted the heavy workload faced by ministers after estimating that he spent up to 40 per cent of his time on Post Office issues in the early stage of his job. He explained that much of the time was ‘consumed’ with the mass closure of branches.
The testimony today carried depressing echoes of what has become a common theme throughout this inquiry. Witness after witness has expressed regrets, a sense that something more should have been done to help victims of the Post Office scandal but always with the caveat that ultimate blame lies with someone else in the food chain. Even Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, fell back on this broad line of argument. When pressed, during her evidence in May, on how she hadn’t known what was going on in her own organisation, she replied: ‘I was too trusting’. This scandal is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. It is also becoming clearer by the day that it is a damning indictment of the way government works in this country.
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