Paula Vennels says she’ll hand back CBE

[Andthereyougo]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304

Sorry about gobbledegook title. Phone is playing up.

As a lot of people have said, where was the investigation into where the money had actually gone - did forensic accountants look at postmasters' bank accounts or did the PO just accept the Horizon figures? because if you're taking money out of the till then you're hiding it somewhere.

One thing I'm not clear on is whether any money had gone missing or if the system was reporting a nonexistent discrepancy.

Because if there is money missing, given that the postmasters don't have it - who does?

@MumblesParty the justification for it was that it was a cover up. Fujitsu and Post Office knew there was a problem with the system but they denied it because they wanted to protect their reputations.

Fujitsu make a shit load of money from contracts luke this, if it got into the public domain that their systems were dodgy, they'd loose money.

Likewise, if the Post Office's systems were exposed as not fit for purpose, they could loose contracts worth billions with the passport office, DWP and DVLA.

It's all about money and making the weak and vulnerable scapegoats.

<from my memory of things I have watched/read> One of the lead campaigners accepted a plea bargain where PO said they would 'drop' the theft charge, if she pleaded guilty to false accounting. But later in the campaiging process her file showed the investigator never had any evidence of theft - presumably because they could never find any evidence of money moving to anywhere.

Plus people actually reimbursed the PO to cover these shortfalls - and that money apparently ended up in the PO profit/loss account!

One theory is there was an error around stock levels within the system.
Another is it was a data entry error - but once you had made an error a postmaster/mistress couldn't go back to recheck as the records only existed in Horizon.

Also @ErrolTheDragon
Because if there is money missing, given that the postmasters don't have it - who does?

There may not be anything missing - if I should have £20 cash, but the accounting system says I 'should' have £30, no money is missing, but there is still a discrepancy.

What!? No get out clause or small print specifying their rubbish product has to actually work and do the job?

Whoever signed that contract needs the chop as well.

It was signed off in 1994/95, Peter Liley was the minister in charge at the time.

Some of the issue was Fujitsu could access the system and make real time coding changes, whilst transactions going on, the product itself may have been fine.

In any case, it was the nature of the Govt contracts that was the problem, they tied sub post masters into contracts where they were 1000% responsible for any losses...no exceptions.

In the drama, there was a postmaster who was financially responsible for money taken in an armed robbery. Was this based on a true case ?

There's a great timeline of events here:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/timeline-post-office-scandal-when-started-170059825.html

Adam Crozier was head of the Royal Mail group from 2003 - the year when Alan Bates had his role terminated and lost £60,000 savings he'd invested in the business.

Alan Bates first wrote to Computer Weekly in 2004. It wasn't until 2009 that an article there described what had happened to seven postmasters.

Ed Davey refused to meet Alan Bates in May 2010. He then met him in October later that year. The same month that Seema Mistra was snetenced to 16 months in prison.

Paula Vennells became chief exec of the Post Office in 2012 - she'd been their group network director prior. This was the same year that Second Sight submitted an interim report.

December 2013 is when Martin Griffiths commits suicide.

In 2015 Vennells told a parliamentary committee in there had been no evidence of any miscarriage of justice. Vennells earned £4.5 million during her time as boss.

A key figure in all this is multimillionaire Tim Parker who joined the Post Office 2015 as chairman - he ended up stepping down in 2022 due to this scandal.

Another one is Gareth Jenkins, chief IT architect for Fujitsu. He even had the gall to the public inquiry for immunity against incriminating himself...

Since Ed Davey there have been many ministers who had the post office as part of their brief but trying to find them all ie a bit of a pain as they keep changing the name of the role and often it's tied up with other roles:
Jo Swinson
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Margot James
Kelly Tolhurst
Kevin Hollinrake
Paul Scully
Jane Hunt

They are the ones I found before giving up.

The whole things is a massive cover up and I hope every single person who lied about the efficacy of those machines gets named and shamed and taken to court but cannot see it happening.

Absolutely. This has been infuriating for do many years. I almost couldn't watch the drama because I had been folliwing the story through Private Eye, Radio 4 etc who were talking about this for years. It's not as if no ine knew about this. It really made me feel insecure weirdly because they were people who were just going about their business and just were pursued and pursued with no evidence and the establishment lying and lying. I remember one poor woman gave birth in prison. Awful

we seem to be governed by what the papers are covering. It started during covid where ideas would be tested in the press run with depending on public opinion. Or they’d wait until the public uproar was too much. It’s the same with this and the petition.
i Could think of a few more documentaries we could do with

It didn’t start with Covid. It’s been the way for decades.

“News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising.” - George Orwell.

RM being privatised and the rest was under Vince Cable's watch, IIRC.

Mail recently had a letter from a postmaster who had a discrepancy of £ 3k and the auditors made him sack an employee they held responsible and pay the money. When he handed the branch over the accounts were found to be £ 3k over. So it looks like a massive system error and/or internal adjustments being made, question is, by who?

Interesting as well that the discrepancies are ALL in the PO's favour. Are there any where the system shows the branches as having more money than they should?

Interesting as well that the discrepancies are ALL in the PO's favour. Are there any where the system shows the branches as having more money than they should?

I wondered that too.

The Clarke advice was written in 2013, so why is this still rumbling on? Oh hang on, the post office shoved it away and forgot to let anyone else know.

Vince Cable was the Business Secretary for Government. Crozier was the CEO for Royal Mail until 2010 when they had already had 1 failed attempt at privatisation. Greene then took over Royal Mail and they were then successful in getting privatisation for RM and The Post Office was split from RM.

Ultimately, it is the original order of the Horizon software which is to "blame"

the testing, the trials of the system couldn't have done properly, in normal rollouts, they'd have say 100 users, maybe 12 to 18 months, iron out the bugs in real time, not on a test bench.

Was any of this done in the mid 90s?

The priority seems to have been to get the system in to control Benefit fraud.

Personally i'm not in favour of picking on Vennels or Davey or Cable, dozens of people bear responsibility, not just people who where in office for a relatively short time.
Even if you go for Cable or Davey, why stop there? who was their boss? Cameron? i expect this may well have been bought up in Cabinet, it was spoken about numerous times in the 'commons why didn't several PMs act???

What about the courts? why give them a free pass? they believed the PO & convicted, so why is it so wrong that Cable etc to have also believed them????

Those asking where the money went - one of the problems I've read about was that the screen would sometimes freeze so the instinctive thing is to keep pressing enter until something happens. While thos went on the system kept updating multiple times. So in some cases there never was money to go missing it was double counted transactions.

There clearly wasn't any money actually missing. I think the more pertinent question is where has the money gone that the Post office thought was missing, which they then pursued postmasters for?

That's East. PO profit

Particularly if this were to happen more than once (which, if it was a bug, it would): surely data on the Horizon entries would show patterns of these being unusual transactions?

So you press enter once and the screen freezes, but the pattern that should record in the realms of the IT data is that you have 4 or 5 of the same kind of figure done in a very short period of time just around the end of cashing up, or a figure that doubles due to refreshing or whatever, but within a minute or 2 at closing time. It's kind of easy to imagine even if this were to happen on a personal banking screen or something. It is very unlikely to suggest a fraudulent pattern. Even in the early days of EPOS systems, I can't believe they would been unable to suss this very quickly. There is such a big pile of steaming cover up here.

There’s a call now to have her stripped of the £2k+ million in bonuses she received.

I read that Welby was supporting her to become Bishop of London.

She will be hung out to dry, a very handy scapegoat for a lot of other people.

Panorama did 2 programs on this scandal, one in 2022, why didn't the Govt act then.

I would imagine that some people knew what the problems were buy for whatever reason didn't want to admit to it. I should imagine that probably ran fairly high in 2 organisations. Having implemented new corporate accounting software on a few occasions I can't see how they didn't know.

Private Eye were banging on about thus since 2015. Deliberate blindness comes to mind.