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News that the former head of the Post Office (PO) has handed back her CBE, and that legal powers are being explored to clear completely the hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters and mistresses caught up in the enormous Post Office (PO) IT scandal, again puts centre stage the vital role played by Wales.
All of this has come along with worrying details of how the company at the centre of these events, has secured an enormous number of public contracts, and that only last year it received £485 million in taxpayers’ money to provide services to schools in Northern Ireland (NI).
The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has described what happened as an “appalling miscarriage of justice”, and said that the powers of the PO were now under review. His Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, who along with asking his officials whether the law can be changed to exonerate those wrongly convicted, is also examining if the PO’s role in the legal appeals process can be removed.
On Monday the shocking situation featured as the front page lead on two UK newspapers, and Paula Vennells, who was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the PO from 2012 to 2019, is still facing growing public criticism even after her decision to give back the honour.
It is claimed that Ms Vennells played a key role in prolonging the scandal, and her statement did little to ease the situation, as it appeared to minimise her own role, but placed the responsibility very much on the computer system.
She said: “I am truly sorry for the devastation caused… as a result of the Horizon system”. Ms Vennells remains at the centre of a storm over receipt of £2.2 million in bonuses.
The Horizon system Ms Vennells has referred to, was supplied by the giant Japanese company Fujitsu (which has gained the public contracts since). The system’s aim was to replace paper in the network of 17,000 branches – however soon after it was rolled out, shortfalls began to appear, often of several thousand pounds, which meant it looked like money was missing from branches when it wasn’t.
It is widely considered one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British history.
One former sub-postmistress, Seema Misra, spent four months in jail, before she was totally exonerated. She was one of more than 700 people who were falsely accused of stealing money, with 165 going to prison, and it has been blamed for causing at least four suicides.
A campaign in support of all the innocent people, and highlighting the role of executives at the PO, was led by a former postmaster from Wales (although born in Liverpool), and a four-part drama about the terrible events finished on ITV last week (but it can still be seen on catch-up), which was filmed in North Wales. The series was called ‘Mr. Bates vs The Post Office‘, and the former postmaster was played by star actor Toby Jones.
The drama followed the story of Alan Bates, who with his wife Suzanne Sercombe, used life savings in 1998 to buy a PO branch in Llandudno.
Mr Bates refused to accept liability like many other sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, yet officials terminated their contract with just three months’ notice. It meant the couple lost the £65,000 they had invested.
A media outlet publicising the hit show, reported how the PO have said that they are sorry, and declared: “We sincerely apologise to victims for the devastating impact of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal on the lives of so many”.
A key player at the PO then was Angela van den Bogerd. She too featured in the broadcast and, along with the head of the organisation, Ms Vennells, was described as part of “the gruesome twosome!”.
Ms van den Bogerd was named afterwards as ‘Head of People’ at the Football Association of Wales (FAW). Her arrival led to the abrupt departure of the organisation’s contentious chief at the time, Jonathan Ford, who left losing a vote of no-confidence, following an astonishing civil war inside the organisation, which has never been fully explained by the mainstream media. Ms van den Bogerd’s appointment came despite the fact that she had been found by a judge to have “obfuscated” and “misled” a court, and she is shown in the drama in tears as she reads the judgement.
She was an integral part of the PO’s complaints and mediation scheme, and in 2015 Ms van den Bogerd appeared before MPs at a parliamentary select committee inquiry into the Horizon computer system (which played a part in the show too). She has also co-authored at least one internal PO report on its relationship between sub-postmasters and mistresses, and that system, while in 2018 she was made ‘Business Improvement Director’. Ms van den Bogerd has now departed from the FAW as well.
The Eye’s disclosure of crucial facts like these, came amid news that one sub-postmaster who lived between Swansea and Merthyr Tydfil explained how he (along with others) had tried to take his own life, while another Welshman talked about his marriage going on the rocks.
The Postal Services Minister at the time Paul Scully MP unveiled a further £19.5 million in compensation, taking the total amount of public cash to be paid out to around £30 million, but there is, now, mounting concern that many have yet to receive any money.
Mark Kelly, who ran the Brondeg Post Office, from 2003 until 2006, has like others described publicly the terrible impact on him, of the wrongful accusation from the PO that he had stolen money. He said that it had “made me feel guilty and depressed, over the years, I started then to blame myself and I tried to end my life a few times”.
But Mr Kelly is not alone in having these suicidal thoughts because of the incorrect allegation.
Another former PO worker, Jennifer O’Dell, said she had also considered killing herself and suffered from recurring night terrors. She had been wrongly accused of stealing almost £10,000 from a post office in Cambridgeshire. Speaking at the end of the first week of an independent inquiry into what happened, Ms O’Dell said she had researched how to take her own life, and suffered from depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
The inquiry (led by retired Welsh judge Sir Wyn Williams) was to hear evidence about the design of the defective computer system which made the mistakes (or allowed the unauthorised access), as well as the failings in the investigation. In all there were 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting, and Ms Vennells has put the blame squarely on Fujitsu.
Mr Bates is depicted in the broadcast finding it depressing as he reads a report that she was awarded the CBE for her “services to the Post Office”.
Mr Kelly, who was one of those accused between 2000 and 2014, said: “I can’t really socialise as much as I used to and I can’t actually manage some tasks – I can’t handle stress”. He has described how he went to senior managers at the organisation, believing he had worked out how the errors were happening, but he said the company “didn’t want to know” and wanted to “bury it”.
He eventually resigned, losing the business and then his house, and it meant he and his wife decided not to start a family. He proclaimed: “We originally hoped to keep the office going and we would start a family – it was a four-bedroom house. But after the breakdown, we lost the house from it all, we thought we couldn’t have a family ’cause we had no house and no stability”.
Mr Kelly, who now runs a mobile phone repair and accessory shop in Neath Market, hopes his story will “help everyone”.
A further victim of the PO’s tactics, Tim Brentnall, from Roch in Pembrokeshire, said the scandal led to the breakdown of his marriage because of “trust issues”, and he was prosecuted in 2010 after a £22,000 ‘shortfall’ was discovered at his branch, but his conviction was overturned. Mr Brentnall has told how his sister, who ran a local hotel at the time, was also affected because “people tarred her with the same brush”. And he said in the years that followed his conviction, there was a “whispering campaign”, in the community with people calling him a “thief” and a “fraudster”.
Following the overturning of his convictions, he is now working in the Roch shop again, but said the business would never recover financially with its turnover down from £500,000 to £100,000.
In addition to apologising, the PO stated: “In addressing the past, our first priority is that full, fair and final compensation is provided and we are making good progress”.
Evidently this ‘good progress’ may not be fast enough for ministers, who are now exploring legal options to completely exonerate all the innocent sub-postmasters and mistresses who were wrongly jailed for ‘stealing’ public money.
Including those from Wales…
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s, remarkable decades long award-winning career in journalism as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book (including looking behind the headlines of important events like this), called ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
