Paula Vennells was done the other week, the Post Office Inquiry is now questioning associates and others - thread 3

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5081592-paula-vennels-being-questioned-at-the-post-office-inquiry-followed-by-others-thread-2

When the hearings are going on, live-streaming can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/featured

All of the previous hearings can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/videos

Oh, Jo is there. Can just see the top of her head.

Sir Wyn Williams showing a very particular interest here and is willing to go over time. The mediation scheme is going to get one hell of a kicking in his report.

Mr Beer looks like he enjoyed that 🙂

Lead story on ITV 10pm news.

Interesting interview with Ron and Ian on the News. What a day.

I've had a really interrupted day. People keep coming and being HELPFUL – the bastards!

Surely I didn't really need that groceries delivery? Or the electrician suddenly turning up for a safety-critical job? Don't these people know I have an inquiry to watch!

All caught up at last, now.

It's the turn of Gareth Jenkins, described as 'former Distinguished Engineer at Fujitsu Services Ltd' all next week (Tues-Fri). I can't really afford the time but I so want to watch ... I guess I'll be playing catch up for a long while.

Yes, I'm the same. Can't wait to hear what he has to say . . .

I'm guessing Jason Beer KC will be questioning Mr (?Dr) Jenkins?

I hope Jason Beer will be in action for some of the Jenkins appearance - although a technical specialist barrister might be given the job?

Today we have Richard Christou and Duncan Tait of Fujitsu. Should be starting any minute.

After yesterday's evidence, I'm feeling a little sorry for Gareth Jenkins. From Second Sight's evidence, he sounds like one of those backroom engineers who just wants to get on with making stuff work, and that he's been sucked in to do the dirty work of the people politicking around him.

That said, if he told an actual lie on oath, rather than being fed words and having them seized on and misused, as Second Sight described happening to the them with "systemic problems", then he is culpable.

Shall await with interest.

Yesterday was so consistent with all we've seen of Paula Vennells' manipulation techniques, especially that email (perhaps not directly from her) telling SS, "The answer you need to give is no," when it clearly wasn't!

And POL's insertion of the term "systemic problems" into SS's investigation, right at the start. As SS said, it wasn't their term, but they used it because PO were using it; then the moment they used it in their interim report (which was just intended to be a holding report, to show the MPs they were actually getting work done), POL seized on it and pretended that was their clean bill of health.

Reminds me of Rupert Murdoch's misuse of an "investigation" they commissioned from lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis. The lawyers were hired to look for wrongdoing A, didn't find any of that but plenty of wrongdoing B – and Newscorp seized on their report to claim they'd been given a clean bill of health.

[Edited as I'm losing track of what day it is!]

“Systemic” is one of those words organisations use regularly to distract from reality.

“Strategic” = we will pay you way more than everyone else because you don’t worry about the detail because you don’t understand it.

I'm going to reserve judgement about Gareth Jenkins. I don't know whether he was under pressure to provide the evidence he gave or whether he was enthusiastically going above and beyond. The evidence of Alice Chambers is informative in this respect.

Also, I wonder whether there was some kind of communication gap present with a technical person's view of flaws within a system not being the same as a different meaning existing in a legal context.

I'm not convinced that Fujitsu is the villain here, all of the bad stuff could have been avoided if Post Office didn't decide that any acknowledgement of flaws in Horizon would be a disaster for its brand, when it had chosen to use this as the basis for its war against the subpostmasters. The heart of the scandal was how Post Office decided to treat the subpostmasters and that was entirely within its control.

Richard Christou trying to bore the Inquiry into submission. It's quite a dry topic to start as well, with the Inquiry barrister (is this Mr Blake?) taking the witness through evolving corporate structures of parent and subsidiary companies, and Christou's roles.

I'm going to join later on and watch at 1.75x playback speed, dropping to normal speed if I notice anything of particular interest.

What is the difference between 'Present' and 'In attendance' regarding who is at meetings? I can only guess that some people may be physically present in the same room together and others may join online, but the actual terms being used seem to mean the same thing.

I'm not convinced that Fujitsu is the villain here,

I am not convinced that they don't bear some responsibility. From what I read in Private Eye they were selected on the basis of the lowest tender, not on the basis of whether they would deliver what the PO needed. Pay peanuts and get monkeys applies here.

https://www.2tg.co.uk/profile/sam-stevens/

I think we should be grateful the Benefits depatment (can't remeber what they were called then) refused the Fujitsu system

A bit of context for the role of Fujitsu in all this:

Horizon was a joint venture between the Post Office, the Benefits Agency (as the DWP was then called) and ICL, a subsidiary of Fujitsu.
The intention was to create a swipe card system for benefits and pensions to be paid out at Post Offices, replacing paper payment books.
The project began in 1996, but by 1999 the Benefits agency had lost all faith in the system ever working and pulled out, leaving the taxpayer with a massive £700 million bill with nothing to show at the end of it.
In desperation, the project was repurposed to allow electronic bookkeeping to replace paper accounts in post offices.

So it was deeply flawed and had cost millions before it ever arrived in any PO branches….

And to add to the above, the PO was losing major areas of business as benefits such as child benefit and pensions were being paid directly into bank accounts.

That internal Fujitsu report!

Someone has written a piece of code to make d=-d.

The report's comment is (approx): "whoever wrote this code has no idea of the basic tenets of programming, and no idea of the basic tenets of mathematics."

Christou getting tetchy now. 'It's a technical issue' that 'wouldn't have been raised with the board' ... 'at that level of granularity'.

Thanks for ID of the barrister, nauticant.

Your software is shit = 'oh that's a technical issue, don't bring it to me'.

Is this guy even aware that the Benefits Agency walked away, or doesn't he care?

Listening to his evidence, you have to wonder what the function of a Board is. Sit around and have expensive lunches, perhaps?