The Post Office was already mired in the Horizon IT scandal when its deeply- religious chief executive, Reverend Paula Vennells, agreed to take part in a panel discussion about business ethics.
The talk, attended by City firm executives, was held at London’s Canary Wharf in May 2018. Apparently undeterred by the crisis unfolding on her watch – and certainly making no mention of it – Ms Vennells declared herself ‘proud of the Post Office… a really special organisation in terms of its values’.
After explaining how her values came ‘from the glory of God’, she turned to the subject of making mistakes.
‘When we mess up, which we do every day,’ she told the audience, ‘my faith tells me that I can be forgiven, that shortfalls are a perfectly human thing to do and that I can always start again; always, always, always, start again. You can put things right.
‘And for me, I found that very liberating because… you can get it wrong and you can move on.’
The Post Office was already mired in the Horizon IT scandal when its deeply- religious chief executive, Reverend Paula Vennells (pictured), agreed to take part in a panel discussion about business ethics
Ms Vennells, who faces accusations of covering up the Horizon scandal by refusing to properly investigate faults in the system, is facing a massive public backlash in the wake of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office. Pictured: Convicted postmasters celebrate as their convictions are quashed
Ms Vennells is facing a massive public backlash in the wake of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office
It comes as ITV’s new drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has drawn a renewed interest in the scandal after airing last week, with Mr Bates being played by Toby Jones (pictured in the role)
Alas! If recent events have shown anything it is that, in the temporal world at least, forgiveness is not quite so easy to come by.
Ms Vennells, who faces accusations of covering up the Horizon scandal by refusing to properly investigate faults in the system, is facing a massive public backlash in the wake of ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.
Amid intensifying pressure, the 64-year-old mother of two, who was the Post Office’s chief executive between 2012 and 2019, announced on Tuesday she would hand back her CBE, awarded to her at the start of 2019 for services to the Post Office and charity.
Even at the time there were rumblings about Ms Vennells getting a gong because of the situation, and Sir Ian Cheshire, then the chairman of the sub-committee that recommended her for a CBE, was said to have ‘brushed aside’ concerns by other committee members, according to a report in yesterday’s The Sunday Times.
Meanwhile, a source close to Sir Ian, now the chairman of Channel 4, denied he had done this and said both the sub-committee and main honours committee had been reassured by civil servants about her suitability.
Giving back her honour, Ms Vennells said she was ‘truly sorry for the devastation caused to the sub-postmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system’.
But, crucially, she stopped short of admitting responsibility for the debacle which saw more than 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted for crimes they hadn’t committed. Hundreds were left bankrupt, humiliated or in prison. Among those convicted, four committed suicide and 33 others have since died without seeing justice.
Giving back her honour, Ms Vennells said she was ‘truly sorry for the devastation caused to the sub-postmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system’
Rishi Sunak (pictured) said that the Government is looking at exonerating all subpostmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal
‘Forgiveness comes when you admit the mistakes you’ve made and atone for them,’ Tom Hedges, a 70-year-old former sub-postmaster in the village of Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire, told the Mail.
Mr Hedges, who is also a lay minister and church warden, was wrongly convicted in 2010 of £60,000 worth of theft and false accounting and given a seven-month prison sentence. His conviction was overturned at the Court of Appeal in 2021.
‘It’s not as simple as saying sorry and moving on,’ he added. ‘We’ve had apologies from her before but they’re all couched in words along the lines that none of it was her fault. Before we can forgive, we need to hear the truth.’
So who is the russet-haired sexagenarian at the centre of this terrible fiasco?
Ms Vennells said: ‘I have listened and I confirm that I return my CBE with immediate effect’ (Stock image)
Ms Vennells, the eldest of three children, grew up in Denton, five miles east of Manchester. Her father was an industrial chemist and later a research fellow at Manchester University. Her mother was a bookkeeper.
A keen Girl Guide, she won a funded place at private Manchester High School and, after graduating with a degree in French and Russian at Bradford University, was accepted on to Unilever’s graduate scheme before climbing the managerial ladder at companies including Lunn Poly, L’Oreal, Dixons Retail, Argos and Whitbread. She joined the Post Office in 2007 as group network director.
Ms Vennells, who likes to ski and sails dinghies, lives with her husband John, an engineer, in a £2million farmhouse in Bedfordshire.
Despite giving back her gong, she is now facing demands to hand back the £2.2million bonuses she got during her tenure as Post Office chief. Including her salary, she took home a total of £4.5million for that period.
In the weeks ahead, she is due to give evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Preparing her is the law firm Mishcon de Reya, which once represented the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
While many of the wrongful prosecutions against sub-postmasters took place before Ms Vennells joined the Post Office in 2007, her detractors claim she played a key role in prolonging and covering up the scandal, continuing to defend the Horizon IT system even as its faults were being exposed.
As the Mail has discovered, as early as 2009 Ms Vennells sent out a company-wide ‘Horizon defence piece’ containing what has been described at the public inquiry as ‘a written rebuttal and position that the business was adopting’.
In 2012, after she was promoted to chief executive, she brought in forensic accountant firm, Second Sight, to conduct an independent inquiry into the Fujitsu software. Before agreeing, Second Sight’s managing director Ron Warmington had a face-to-face meeting with Ms Vennells and the Post Office’s £100,000-a-year chairman, Alice Perkins, wife of former Labour minister Jack Straw.
In the weeks ahead, she is due to give evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Preparing her is the law firm Mishcon de Reya, which once represented the late Diana, Princess of Wales
Paula Vennells, 65, pocketed as much as £5million for being in charge during the Horizon IT scandal in which hundreds of postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted
The Mail understands that after asking both women twice if they were really committed to finding the truth, they replied they were.
Mr Warmington told the Mail: ‘But as soon as we started discovering stuff, the howitzers were brought in and shells were being fired across at us. The Post Office tried to discredit us. Everything they did was underhand, unscrupulous, amateurish trickery.’
A source close to the audit admitted shock at the number of errors being made within the company.
‘I remember thinking they’d be better off making decisions with a dart board because they were getting everything wrong all the time,’ the source said.
‘They couldn’t even get post codes right on some outgoing letters. And there were thousands of documents which had misspelled Paula Vennells’ name.’
As for Ms Vennells herself, the source found her to be ‘dim’ and ‘over-promoted’ and ‘like dealing with a mosquito’.
‘If you’re going to take that top job with the bucks that go with it, you’d better be as sharp as a tack. And she wasn’t.’
Second Sight’s final report described the Horizon system as ‘not fit for purpose’ and warned of ‘potential miscarriages of justice and misconduct by prosecutors acting on behalf of the Post Office’.
But the Post Office insisted that there was ‘absolutely no evidence of any systematic issues with the computer system’.
Ms Vennells left the Post Office in 2019, months before a damning High Court judgment ruled that Horizon was not ‘remotely robust’ and had ‘bugs, errors and defects’.
Ten months after her departure, the Post Office agreed to settle claims with a tranche of 555 sub-postmasters, admitting for the first time that it ‘got things wrong’.
Meanwhile, as well as taking jobs as a non-executive director of Morrisons supermarket and retailer Dunelm – which brought in £140,000 a year – Ms Vennells was appointed as an adviser to the Cabinet Office, made a member of the Church of England ethical investments committee and became chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, a paid post.
She was even being considered for the role of Bishop of London, one of the most high-ranking positions in the Church of England.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is how those in authority continued to promote her despite the very visible chaos left in her wake.
An NHS whistleblower, retired consultant psychiatrist Dr Minh Alexander, told the Mail she wrote to the NHS Trust and Care Quality Commission in 2020 to question whether Ms Vennells was a ‘fit and proper person’ to become chairman in light of what had happened at the Post Office.
‘It is very damaging to NHS patients’ safety culture when those who are prepared to cover up are appointed to senior positions,’ said Dr Alexander.
She was stunned to receive a lengthy ‘private’ email from former BBC Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross, who at the time was a non-executive board member at the trust, telling her: ‘I truly fear you may come to regret your attempts to have Paula Vennells sacked from her existing roles,’ and adding: ‘I worry that, for the best of intentions, you are pursuing a vendetta that may backfire on you.’
Two months after that December 2020 email exchange, Ms Vennells stood down. In April 2021, following the quashing of 39 sub-postmasters convictions, she resigned as an Anglican priest and from her Morrisons and Dunelm directorships. She also stepped down as governor of private Bedford School, where her two sons were educated.
Poonam Bajwa, who has worked for 15 years in the post office in the Bedfordshire village where Ms Vennells lives, told the Mail that while it was right she had handed back her CBE, ‘more needs to be done, considering her role at the time. It should be dealt with properly. Customers have been coming in speaking about it because she lives in the area’.
The findings of the public inquiry remain to be seen. But Ms Vennells is by no means the only senior figure who must give an account of themselves.
Former sub-postmaster Mr Hedges said: ‘She is now experiencing the wrath of public opinion that I and all the other innocent people felt when we were convicted and thrown out of our post offices.
‘My human and Christian side feels for her for that. But the other side of me thinks that she brought it upon herself.’