to enjoy hearing Paula Vennels being taken apart?

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Is anyone else listening - radio 5 at the moment. Paula Vennels being slowly picked apart by an expert?

Watching the last five minutes of yesterday again. There was a noticeable change of tone, obsequious towards "Sir Wyn". And then her working face - her 'tears'/reaction seems to be as much from frustration and anger as sadness and contrition. It was a response to being laughed at and possibly belittled - as she might have seen it - by Wyn Williams saying she could come back to him in the morning if she needed more time to think about her answer to his question.

I’m still astounded by the fact that when asked yesterday about her infamous “I need to be able to say….” Email, she said Alice Perkins had told her how to formulate questions so she was following that advice. My blood pressure went sky high. What person who reaches even mid level management needs coaching on how to ask a direct question?

Tbh lots of middle management are a joke tbh. Many lack social skills, so not being able to ask a direct Q is definitely amongst that

She and many other senior post office staff need to at the very least lose their pensions, ideally prison, they lied, committed perjury and despite the tears don’t actually seem to give a damn about the lives they destroyed

i Mean the post office account not reconciling, the fact there was a slosh fund of excess unaccounted for monies.

From the program the view seemed to be that horizon just showed up something that had been going on for years.
horizon being the bible and absolute infallible truth.

I heard an interview with the writer of the drama saying they could only write what they had proof had been said from that persons words e.g interviews and emails etc and it made Paula a very difficult one to write as she had said so little.

I think part of it comes from having a generic business degree and not understanding their actual business. So they don’t know the processes, the questions to ask and how one department affects another

Has anyone seen this? Jarnail Singh, their senior criminal lawyer, said he didn’t know how to print or save documents so he couldn’t have seen the report of discrepancies that was emailed to him as an attachment and that he doesn’t know how his name on the print out trail shows he printed it.

Kudos to all the people who must have spent months going through thousands of documents, word by word, to find the key sections.

The problem for fujitsu is that they sold a system which was not fit for purpose. They pushed it live when it still had lots of problems. These problems were 'fixed' on the hoof in live. Contractors were then going into the sub-postmasters accounts and changing values to 'correct' them.

The individual Contractors were probably doing what they have done on other projects and not realising that people would go to prison as a result.

The Post Office will have signed off on the 'Go' decision. Did the PO stakeholders do any sort of review? Did they understand the project at all? Did fujitsu lie to the Post Office about readiness? Was so much pressure put on the project team to say the system was ready when it wasn't that they just rolled over?

Yes ..... incredible. Basically a group of 5 highly paid lawyers all recieved a very important note saying evidence presented in court was unsound (Clark advice). None of them managed to open attachment, none of them read it, non of them acted on it.

Misra prosecution went ahead using the witness they had been warned about. She was sent to prison, conviction later overturned.

Vennels asked about this yesterday.

The "clark advice" is one of the real hot issues.

Fucking hell thats atrocious.
I was a fresh faced straight out of school working in some big companies in the early 2000’s and yes some people didn’t know how to use a computer in my industry, but they soon asked and learnt the basics and embraced it for their roles.

i have never heard such bollocks in my life

I've spent a lot of time following this.

There are many, many other "fucking hell moments".

Look at Elaine Cottham ... she make Jarnail Singh look coherent.

In a previous role I helped design a computer system.
it had got through lots of people higher up in my company before falling to me to review. Within 5 minutes of their flashy presentation I had trashed it and told them it wouldn’t work because of all the complicated variants they hadn’t considered. Now I could do that as I knew the job inside our, higher up didn’t so signed it off.
it’s almost like Fujitsu didn’t do real life testing, or post office were naive (which did happen in early days of computer is god 2000’s) in their signing off.

Watching while trying to work

I’ve dipped in and out but missed those two “gems”.
I wish they’d do match of the day highlights at the end of each day

i have never heard such bollocks in my life

Indeed. Don't they have clerical staff. Could he not have asked someone to print it out for him?

Having worked on projects like this before I suspect most of the issues were on the Post Office side. Evidently the system wasn't fit for purpose in terms that most ordinary people would recognise, but I'd bet the PO people kept changing their minds, wouldn't make key decisions and didn't know what they wanted, except they wanted it done cheap and quickly and nothing else mattered. That's normally how public sector (and some private to be fair) projects work.

It seems almost as if there might be some bending of the truth going on?

I think Horizon was cobbled together from the remnants of sever similar projects that were commissioned and then cancelled. It was originally intended to be part of benefit system.

I think the Government basically wanted a working system so that they could at least get something out of all the cash that had disappeared down the Fujitsu plug hole.

It is quite unfathomable as to how he possibly thinks anybody is going to actually believe that rubbish. He is a lawyer, he has been presented with the facts and he counters the facts with this rubbish.

Paula Vennels' degree was Russian, French and Economics.

Back in the olden days when I did cashbook for a tyre and exhaust place and most people did actually pay in cash, a cash surplus was a red flag.

Customers don't hand over money to get nothing in return.

The problem for fujitsu is that they sold a system which was not fit for purpose. They pushed it live when it still had lots of problems. These problems were 'fixed' on the hoof in live.

which is a normal thing in project management.
usually a 'beta' test with a few users is done to test and recify major issues. and then there should be extensive customer support at the beginning to fix issues observed.

obviously there was a major issue with a) software/hardware issues being identified b) issues not being fixed c) issues not being communicated d) blame game

Am I the only one who is getting fed up with what Paula Vennell's is saying. "I don't remember, I wasn't involved." Blah, blah, blah. The KC must have the patience of a saint having to listen to this drivel.