Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells broke down in tears today as she was quizzed over the suicide of a postmaster who was wrongly accused of fraud.
The 65-year-old businesswoman took to the witness box today at the Horizon IT public inquiry into why hundreds of branch managers were wrongly prosecuted amid claims they stole from the business.
Hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 after Horizon, owned by Japanese company Fujitsu, made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
The scandal was deemed the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history, while Ms Vennells’ central role in it was portrayed in ITV’s acclaimed drama series Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, sparking public anger at what happened.
Ms Vennells, who was chief executive at the company from 2012 to 2019, began her evidence by turning directly to campaigners and victims, sat a short distance away and issued a grovelling apology, saying she was ‘very, very sorry’.
The ordained priest later wept and reached for a tissue as she was confronted with evidence she gave to MPs which said criminal cases always found in favour of the Post Office, despite cases of subpostmasers being acquitted.
Ms Vennells later broke down again as she was asked about her response to the death of Martin Griffiths, a subpostmaster who died by suicide after he was wrongly accused of fraud.
Ms Vennells described campaigner Alan Bates’ accusations of blame against the Post Office after Mr Griffiths’ death as being ‘unhelpful’ and claimed his language was ‘extreme’.
Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells is seen breaking down in tears as she gave evidence at the Horizon IT inquiry today
Ms Vennells dries her tears with a tissue as she gives evidence at the Horizon IT inquiry
Martin Griffiths, 59, who took his own life in 2013 after he was falsely suspected of stealing money from a Post Office in Ellesmere Port
The inquiry was shown an email exchange in September 2013, prompted by the incident involving Mr Griffiths’, in which he pointed out that the Post Office had ‘driven him to suicide’.
Ms Vennells wept and paused as she recalled another case of a Post Office colleague who took their own lives.
But in an internal email, Ms Vennells subsequently asked: ‘I know (sadly from experience in business and personally) that there is rarely a simple explanation for such deaths.
‘Can you let me know what background we have on Martin. I had heard but have yet to see a formal report that there were previous mental health issues and potential family issues.’
Asked by inquiry lawyer Mr Beer if she was asking her team to ‘dig’ into Mr Griffiths’ records, Ms Vennells replied: ‘I’m so sorry. I had as Chief Executive to pass this information onto group executives and board colleagues.
‘Mr Bates said the Post Office was to blame, but I did know from previous examples … it doesn’t matter, I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have used these words.’
Ms Vennells said tasking her team with looking into Mr Griffiths’ situation was because she wanted to find out about allegations the Post Office was responsible for his death, and not to ‘get on the front foot’.
She said: ‘What I was trying to do, quite simply, was to get the wider picture and … to understand particularly the very difficult challenges that Mr Bates had levelled at some Post Office colleagues.’
Vennells added that accusations of blame by Alan Bates after Martin Griffiths’s death were ‘unhelpful’.
An email from Mr Bates criticising the Post Office after Mr Griffiths’s death was shown, to which Ms Vennells said the campaigner was ‘rightly very, very angry about this’, but his language about her colleagues ‘was extreme’.
Jason Beer KC asked: ‘You say in your statement that “this was a time of great distress for Mr Griffiths’s family, and I felt the accusations of blame were unhelpful”… is that right that you felt that Mr Bates’s accusations of blame were unhelpful?’
Ms Vennells responded: ‘I think at this stage some of those accusations of blame were unhelpful, yes, because the Post Office needed to respond to this properly and at that stage, I had no understanding as to what had gone on.’
Paula Vennells seen arriving at the post office Enquiry this morning surrounded by police officers and members of the press
Paula Vennells is sworn in to the Horizon inquiry at Aldwych House today
Post Office boss Paula Vennells gestures as she gives evidence to the inquiry at Aldwych House, central London
As Vennells spoke, postmasters watching the inquiry livestream from Fenny Compton could be seen shaking their heads and laughing
One woman (centre) places her hands on her face as she watches the inquiry from Fenny Compton
Ms Vennells said she had no idea when she joined the company in 2007 that the Post Office was investigating its own staff, taking them to court, and trying to recover money from them.
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She said: ‘I didn’t understand that the Post Office was bringing its own criminal investigations. Investigations can be taken at all sorts of different levels.
‘I certainly didn’t read into this that the Post Office was conducting criminal investigations to the level that I later understood.’
She said she did not appreciate the situation fully until 2012, when she became chief executive.
Ms Vennells said: ‘I should have known and I should have asked more questions. I and others who also didn’t know should have dug much more deeply into this. It was a serious mistake that I didn’t understand before 2012 the extent of what this meant.’
She said she thought Post Office workers were instead prosecuted by ‘external authorities’. She said she and other colleagues ‘were surprised’ when they discovered about the prosecutions by the organisation.
Earlier this morning, Ms Vennells did not answer any questions as she entered Aldwych House, where the inquiry is taking place. At the beginning of her evidence to the Horizon IT inquiry today, Vennells was given a self-incrimination warning.
The warning made clear she could decline to answer a question and the chairman Sir Wyn Williams said her objection would be ruled upon thereafter.
Vennells continued: ‘I would just like to say, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this in person, how sorry I am for all that subpostmasters and their families and others who suffered as a result of all of the matters that the inquiry has been looking into for so long.’
‘I followed and listened to all of the human impact statements and I was very affected by them. I remember listening to one postmaster whose name I noted who said that he would like somebody to go and stand outside his old Post Office with him so he could tell them exactly what he had gone through. I would do that. I am very, very sorry.’
She also said sorry to the campaigners and investigators, whose work she said was made ‘so much harder’. She added: ‘My third apology is really about today.
‘I will answer the questions truthfully. I am very aware they will be very difficult to listen to, for you and for me, and I ask for your understanding in advance of that.’
Ms Vennells said she was ‘too trusting’ when Jason Beer KC, lead lawyer for the inquiry, opened his questioning by asking if she was ‘the unluckiest CEO (chief executive officer) in the United Kingdom.’
Ms Vennells said: ‘As the inquiry has heard, there was information I wasn’t given and others didn’t receive as well. One of my reflections of all of this – I was too trusting.’
She said she was ‘disappointed’ that information ‘wasn’t shared’ with her.
As Vennells gave evidence, postmasters watching the inquiry livestream from Fenny Compton could be seen shaking their heads and laughing.
Mr Beer asked: ‘Was there a conspiracy at the Post Office which lasted for nearly 12 years involving a wide range of people, differing over time, to deny you information and to deny you documents and to falsely give you reassurance.’
Ms Vennells smiled briefly as she replied: ‘No I don’t believe that was the case.’
She added: ‘I have been disappointed – particularly more recently listening to evidence at the inquiry – where I think I have learnt that people know more than perhaps they remembered at the time or I knew of at the time.
‘My deep sorrow in this is I think individuals, myself included, maybe didn’t see things, didn’t hear things. Conspiracy feels too far-fetched.’
She pointed the finger at unnamed ‘colleagues’ who ‘did know more information than was shared’.
There was a small ripple of laughter as Ms Vennells said she was sometimes criticised in team development events ‘for being too curious’.
She told the inquiry: ‘I asked questions, I oversaw the strategy which would have introduced changes where we felt it was appropriate to the organisation.
‘I probed, I worked in a structured way and an informal way.’
Ms Vennells, pictured giving evidence as part of phases five and six of the Post Office inquiry, which is looking at governance, redress and how the Post Office and others responded to the scandal
Paula Vennells, 65, was CEO of the Post Office for much of the time subpostmasters were being wrongly prosecuted
Ms Vennells denied continuing to blame the Horizon system for the failures in her witness statement which said ‘lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system’.
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Mr Beer asked: ‘Even after all the inquiry has revealed and the thousands of documents you’ve read, do you continue to think that the issue was with the computer system, the Horizon system, as opposed to the conduct, competence and ethics of those within the Post Office?’
Ms Vennells replied: ‘No not at all, and apologies if that is not clear.
‘What I meant to say is as a result of all of the matters relating to Horizon.’
She denied Mr Beer’s suggestion that the comment in her witness statement, submitted less than two months ago but read for the first time in public today, was ‘a perpetuation of a culture that ran through the Post Office of failing to take responsibility for the use of powers that it elected to use, and indeed use robustly, and instead blame the IT’.
Ms Vennells replied: ‘No, it isn’t that at all. ‘The tragedy we are dealing with today is the result of something much, much broader than an IT system.’
Ms Vennells said she believed there had been no miscarriages of justice – wrongly prosecuting any subpostmaster for false accounting due to faults with Horizon – by the time she left the organisation in 2019, four years after such prosecutions ceased.
Inquiry lawyer Mr Beer asked: ‘Did you believe right up until the point at which you left the business, there had been no ‘miscarriages of justice?’
Ms Vennells replied: ‘I was told multiple times … that there had been no evidence found. I was told that nothing had been found.’
Asked again if she believed when she stepped back from the Post Office that there had been no miscarriages of justice, Ms Vennells replied: ‘I think that’s right.’
Mr Beer asked: ‘Were you clear in your convictions that nothing had gone wrong in your time at the Post Office, so far as Horizon was concerned and the prosecution of subpostmasters was concerned?’
Ms Vennells replied: ‘No not at all, there were problems with Horizon all the way through my tenure.’
Mr Beer said: ‘Why were you telling Parliamentarians every prosecution involving the Horizon system had been successful and had found in favour of the Post Office?’
Ms Vennells, becoming tearful, said: ‘I fully accept now – excuse me.’ She then began sobbing before wiping her tears as she tried to continue: ‘The Post Office knew that (not every case was won).’
‘Personally, I didn’t know that and I’m incredibly sorry that that happened to those people, and to so many others.’
Speaking after her brief break down, a former subpostmaster accused Ms Vennells of making a ‘PR apology’.
Mark Kelly, 45, who was a subpostmaster in Swansea from 2003 to 2006, said: ‘The apology I think was quite well-rehearsed, the speech of the apology and also the response to the questions.
‘The reason why I think the apology was more like a PR apology was because all these years she could have made an apology like that.
‘Why did she have to wait until today to do that?’
Jess Kaur, 52, an ex-postmistress in Walsall who was wrongly accused in 2009 of stealing £11,000, said: ‘I was just thinking to myself when she started crying that we were crying like that at the time.
‘It was nice to see her tears, but at the same time she’s got a lot to answer for. She just needs to tell the truth.’
Mock-up of the email sent by former Post Office boss Paula Vennells after she received detailed case files of eight subpostmasters that had potentially been wrongly convicted
The probe previously heard Ms Vennells had hoped that there would not be an independent inquiry
Ms Vennells later said she was not aware of any system in place to record if the Post Office lost any of its criminal cases.
She said: ‘I don’t believe there was (a system), and there should have been.’
The inquiry previously heard Ms Vennells told MPs the Post Office had never been defeated at court when prosecuting subpostmasters.
Inquiry lawyer Mr Beer asked: ‘How did it come about that false information was perpetuated, regurgitated, deployed in this way?’
Ms Vennells replied: ‘I didn’t believe it was false information.’
Ms Vennells, wearing a grey trouser suit and orange scarf, was met by bustling crowds as she arrived at the inquiry centre in central London shortly before 8am, two hours before her eagerly-awaited evidence began.
Seema Misra, who ran a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, and was jailed in 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000, told reporters she urged Ms Vennells to ‘for god’s sake, speak truth’.
More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted for theft by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty IT system, known as Horizon, made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Many were sent to jail and bankrupted, while at least four are believed to have taken their own lives over it.
Prosecutions continued to happen under Ms Vennells’ watch despite repeatedly being told there were concerns about the reliability of the evidence.
Ms Vennells initially submitted a short statement to the long-running inquiry three years ago in which her legal team said she had been ‘deeply disturbed’ after judges ruled the prosecution of subpostmasters was ‘an affront to justice’.
Her statement added: ‘What has come to light, above all in relation to the conduct of private prosecutions of sub-postmasters over a lengthy period, was clearly unacceptable.’
But today marks the first time Ms Vennells, an ordained Anglican priest, has given live evidence to the inquiry – and offered her the opportunity to respond to a litany of allegations about her time at the Post Office.
Earlier, speaking ahead of her appearance, Ms Hamilton has said she Vennells ‘knew’ people were being wrongly convicted.
She told GMB she ‘almost fainted’ after pleading guilty to false accounting charges and being told she would not receive a custodial sentence.
‘I was so relieved, I had tears pouring down my face,’ Ms Hamilton said.
‘I think she has to have known it’s been going on, she can’t be stupid to be CEO and you have to know.
‘But how much she knew we’re going to find out, but she had to know what was going on because she was head of the tree.
‘I sat behind her in the select committee in 2015 and you could see from the body language, I believe she knew then in 2015.’
The probe previously heard Ms Vennells had hoped that there would not be an independent inquiry – even having her number blocked by ex-head of IT Lesley Sewell after seeking her help to avoid one.
The inquiry heard this included standing by the conviction of Jo Hamilton, and authorising the wrongful prosecution of Lee Castleton, both of which were featured in the ITV drama.
Ms Hamilton was falsely accused of taking the money from the Post Office branch she ran in South Warnborough, Hampshire.
She eventually pleaded guilty to false accounting in fear of going to jail – having twice re-mortgaged her house – and was prosecuted in 2006, but had her conviction quashed in 2021 when she was found to be a victim of the Post Office Horizon scandal.
In a letter to Lord James Arbuthnot, Ms Hamilton’s then-MP, in 2012, Ms Vennells wrote: ‘There has been no evidence to support any of the allegations and we have no reason to doubt the integrity of the system, which we remain confident is robust and fit for purpose.’
Lord Arbuthnot said Ms Vennells and senior colleagues ‘had become defensive, legalistic, and determined to keep from MPs information about which they had previously promised to be open’ when he and others began to raise concerns about the prosecutions.
The inquiry heard Ms Vennells likely signed off the trial bill of more than £300,000 to prosecute Mr Castleton, after a £23,000 shortfall during a 12-week period at his branch in Bridlington, East Yorkshire.
Mr Castleton repeatedly asked the Post Office for help but was sacked and sued for refusing to repay the cash. He was made bankrupt after a two-year legal bill and ordered to pay more than £300,000 for the company’s legal bill.
Speaking before Ms Vennells gave evidence, Mr Castleton said: ‘It’s a good platform for her to finally speak. She’s not been able to, for whatever reason, speak for all these years. I think it’s important that she is listened to and heard and then we can all judge that.’
He said he was hoping to hear ‘the truth’.
Asked what message he would send to Ms Vennells if he could, Mr Castleton said: ‘This is your chance to put it out there. The world’s listening, if you like. Do what you feel is right.’
The Post Office has come under fire since the broadcast of ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which put the Horizon scandal under the spotlight
Earlier this year, ITV bosses announced the first episode of Mr Bates vs. the Post Office had been watched by 9.2million viewers
Ms Vennells is said to have maintained Horizon was ‘robust’ and was so wedded to issues being a fault with the subpostmasters rather than the software that she falsely told a Government minister in 2012 that the courts found in the Post Office’s favour ‘in every instance’ when prosecuting subpostmasters for theft or false accounting.
She also suggested that ‘temptation was an issue’ for branch workers, and that some had been ‘borrowing’ money from the tills.
Ms Vennells forfeited her CBE for services to the Post Office and to charity earlier this year after ‘bringing the honours system into disrepute’ following the public backlash brought on by the TV series.
She was handed the honour in 2019, just a month before quitting the beleaguered government-owned company.
ITV News reported that the October 2013 email, as well as a recording of a phone conversation involving Ms Vennells, confirmed she was sent case files of eight subpostmasters.
The email from Ms Vennells to Ron Warmington, a forensic accountant with firm Second Sight who were drafted in to review independently the Horizon system, read: ‘Apart from finding them very disturbing (I defy anyone not to), I am now even better informed.
‘The form you have devised is very helpful as it removes some of the emotion and highlights very clearly areas we need to address as well as investigate for the mediation process, which I hope will bring closure for some of these people.
‘As I said… I take this very seriously…’
In 2015, she told MPs she had seen no evidence of miscarriages of justice and that there were no faults in the Horizon system.
Counsel to the inquiry are likely to probe Ms Vennells on whether she deliberately misled the business select committee.
The revelation has been described by Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi as the ‘smoking gun’ that is the cover-up of the Horizon IT scandal and has called on her to ‘finally admit the truth’.
Jason Beer KC previously told the probe she made a false statement in 2012 to then Conservative MP Oliver Letwin when she wrote about the prosecution of subpostmasters, in which she said: ‘In every instance, the court has found in our favour.’
Questions about the Post Office’s alleged ‘defensive and self-absorbed’ culture also loom over Ms Vennells – with the business’s current chief financial officer Alisdair Cameron speaking of an ‘unacceptable, self-serving’ relationship with subpostmasters.
He told the probe that Ms Vennells had been ‘clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong’ – adding that she did not believe there had been any miscarriages of justice.
She has not yet spoken in detail about her role in the scandal, but previously apologised for the ‘devastation caused to subpostmasters and their families’.
Ms Vennells was made a CBE in the 2019 New Years Honours List ‘for services to the Post Office and to charity’, but voluntarily handed the honour back after a petition attracted more than 1.2 million signatures.
The Metropolitan Police previously said they are looking at ‘potential fraud offences’ arising out of the prosecution of subpostmasters; for example, ‘monies recovered… as a result of prosecutions or civil actions’.
Two Fujitsu experts, who were witnesses in the trials, are being investigated for perjury and perverting the course of justice – but nobody has been arrested since the inquiry was launched in January 2020.
There are unlikely to be any criminal charges until inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams completes his final report, which is expected to be published next year.
In the meantime, hundreds of subpostmasters are still awaiting compensation despite the Government announcing that those who have had convictions quashed are eligible for £600,000 payouts.