Mediation chairman told Paula Vennells subpostmaster cases ‘didn’t make sense’

The chairman of the mediation scheme for people who believed they had been wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office repeatedly told Paula Vennells that cases against subpostmasters “didn’t make sense”, an inquiry has heard.

Giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry via videolink on Wednesday, Sir Anthony Hooper said it did not make sense that “reputable” subpostmasters “would be stealing these sums of money”.

He told the probe: “I made that point over and over again.”

Sir Anthony chaired the working group that ran the mediation scheme and consisted of members of the Post Office, Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance and forensic accountants from the firm Second Sight.

The inquiry heard an official from the Department for Business suggested the Government and the Post Office could “capitalise” on Sir Anthony’s “waning” faith in forensic investigators who found faults in the Horizon system.

Richard Callard, of the Shareholder Executive in the Business Department, said in an email in March 2014 that Ms Vennells was “a bit worried about forcing the point too much” following Sir Anthony’s criticism of the “substandard” reports by Second Sight.

The email read: “Apparently chair Tony Hooper has send (sic) the Second Sight reports back to them to be re-written – he considered them to be substandard and unsubstantiated (not sure those were his precise words but the sentiment was certainly there).

“And Tony Hooper has also decided to give Second Sight his idea of what the general framework paper should cover, so clearly his faith in Second Sight is waning.

“Whilst we could capitalise on this, Paula is a bit worried of forcing the point too much (ie we should let him draw his own conclusions, he might start to rebel if he feels he is being pushed in that direction).”

Addressing what he had told Ms Vennells about cases against subpostmasters, Sir Anthony said: “As I say in my witness statement, I tried to make it clear to Paula Vennells and to the chairman that the Post Office case didn’t make sense, and I felt that throughout and, no doubt, Second Sight did.

“It didn’t make sense that reputable subpostmasters, appointed by the Post Office after an examination of their characters, would be stealing these sums of money.

“It didn’t make sense, in particular, because within a matter of days of any, quote, ‘alleged theft’ they had to balance the books.”

Sir Anthony said he made this point to former Post Office chief executive Ms Vennells and then-chairwoman Alice Perkins on multiple occasions.

He said: “It just never made sense. I made that point over and over again.”

Sir Anthony said it was “ridiculous” to shut down the mediation scheme in 2015.

He told the inquiry of the “slow disintegration” of the working group, adding: “Conflicts gradually grew and grew, and grew and grew, until we were finally closed down in March 2015.

“So I can’t tell you at what stage it disintegrated, it was a slow disintegration.”

On the termination of the mediation scheme, Sir Anthony said: “I thought it was ridiculous to close down the scheme at this stage when we were still at the very early stages.

He added: “To close it down would have been ridiculous.”

Sir Anthony said he wanted four prosecutions of subpostmasters that had been planned by the Post Office to be dropped in January 2014.

He said: “As I remember, there were about four cases which had gone past the charge stage and were to go to trial, and I was obviously concerned, not really in my position as chairman, but simply as someone who wanted to make sure there were no wrongful convictions.

“So I think I asked to look at the case summary and I think I suggested that I would hope that these four cases would be dropped.

“That’s my memory.”

In his short witness statement, Sir Anthony said the Post Office’s failures “must never be forgotten or forgiven”.

He said: “I am not in a position to say whether the management of Post Office knew or suspected at the time that the Horizon system was unreliable.

“The evidence from the subsequent litigation, civil and criminal, would suggest to me that the management over many years deliberately failed fully and properly to investigate the cause of the losses, notwithstanding the obvious unlikelihood that subpostmasters were stealing from Post Office.

“That failure ruined the lives of countless subpostmasters and must never be forgotten or forgiven.”

Concluding his evidence, Sir Anthony described the Horizon scandal as the “the greatest scandal that I have ever seen” and called for a re-evaluation of the justice system.

He said: “We’ve had many miscarriages of justice but nowhere as many as these.

“We need to re-evaluate how we approach criminal cases of this kind, and I don’t envy the chairman’s task in trying to find out how it all started – something went very, very wrong.”