Paula Vennells was back in Phase 5/6 of the Post Office Inquiry and now we're at Phase 7 - thread 5

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread about the Post Office Inquiry:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5105378-paula-vennells-is-history-but-now-at-the-post-office-inquiry-is-fujitsu-distinguished-engineer-gareth-jenkins-thread-4

The Inquiry is at Phase 7 which is about how things stand now and looking to the future. Here's the timetable:

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/phase-7-timetable

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

I'm.just at that bit now.

Re-reading John Bartlett (head of investigations) email to Fujitsu, it is really unprofessional.
He is somewhat trying to pass himself as someone very important, even more so than the police. And trying to bully Fujitsu into providing a witness statement to the City of London Police.

If I understand Police investigations, the "victim", in the case allegedly POL, does not have the right to demand witness statements from Fujitsu or anyone.
That is between the police, CPS and Fujitsu.
POL need to stay out of it.

The PO do not seem to be able to change their culture that they are no longer directing investigations.

Even the Police are pissed off that the PO seem to be interfering and trying to influence the CPS charging decisions

Nick is full of shit.

They are talking about Eliliott Jacobs, SPMR NED, investigation.
We heard from Elliott about how he was investigated first by the John Bartlett and his investigation team and how it was a horrible experience.
It was only when he was passed to the POL accountant and had a proper conversation about his accounts, was the shortfall sorted.

Yet, here is Nick conveniently trying to PR spin the investigation as a great thing for Elliott and it all went brilliantly.

Does Nick really think we are all stupid, or we didn't listen to Elliott's witness testimony?
I did a very long TD:LR in how Elliot was treated by the investigation team.

This is really awful.

Recently, the Police have decided to drop their investigation into a SPMR and not charge them, primarily due to the fact Horizon cannot be relied upon.

Yet POL lawyers are not happy about this and have sent the police a long letter asking them to change their mind about dropping the criminal charges.
Unbelievably, POL are using Justice Frasers comments in the GLO to support that the new Horizon is robust!

But that's not what Justice Fraser said. He said the new Horizon system installed in 2019, is relatively more robust than the previous one.
POL.are purposely twisting Justice Fraser words. Just because something is relatively better, doesnt mean it is 100% robust. It doesnt prove Horizon is now reliable.

It's like me saying my new diet is relatively better than my previous diets. All that means is I lost 1lb more than I did before, but im still stuffing my face full of chocolate. 😁

As, always Nick Read.knows nothing about this letter from POL.to the Police.
Why do I get deja vu from Paula Vennells?
And why do POL keep hiring CEOs who don't know what's going on in the organisation?

There was some comic relief at the Inquiry with SWW saying that this was exactly the kind of thing his earlier intervention had been about:

That was in the broader context of SWW expressing frustration that Horizon not being reliable is an established fact from the High Court judgment, and he feels he's experienced continual efforts to make this inconvenient fact sort of disappear.

Cue much rueful laughing in the room.

That's what seems so crazy to me @nauticant

Do POL live in such a bubble that they think everyone will just forget that Horizon is not reliable?
Or do they think they can convince us that the 2019 Horizon update is now 100% robust?

Part of me thinks they truly believe they are smarter than SWW, the inquiry and everyone, and can just say whatever they want.

The afternoon session had a substantial discussion of how, or whether, Post Office will arrange for prosecutions of subpostmasters from now on.

This relates to the particular relationship between subpostmasters and Post Office in which the accounts of the former are controlled by the latter, because the former are dealing with the latter's (the public's) money. No matter what system is used there will always be discrepancies and so there will always need to be investigations into the accounts of subpostmasters. In fact, Post Office have a duty to do this because the money at stake is public money.

This takes us to the fundamental problem. Investigations will need to be based on Horizon data. But Horizon data is so discredited that no one will ever feel that it can be assumed to be sufficiently reliable. No matter how much effort might be put in, the Horizon brand is just too tainted. Even for serious cases of actual fraud in Post Office branches, prosecutions will be uncertain undertakings because defence barristers will be able to wave endless amounts of documents showing that the system is rubbish. In fact, there was a point today when SWW expressed surprise that shortfalls were being "recovered" on the basis of Horizon data. The impression he gave was there should be no shortfalls recovered at all because the data cannot be assumed to be reliable.

The only way this can be solved is for Horizon to go in the bin and for a completely new system to be created, and set to work, and then have a sustained period of confirmed reliability.

Beer deviates from his planned start and asks why, if Read, together with Post Office, has long held the view that Post Office shouldn't be responsible for redress schemes, has this never been communicated to the Inquiry, or indeed anyone? When there has been years to make this clear.

Read has no answer.

Sir Wyn is not happy about POL not telling him they shouldn't be in charge of the compensation/redress schemes.

Have you noticed how Nick answers questions.
When it is something good, he says "I did this...I introduced that..."
Yet when it is bad, all of a sudden its "We".
I.e "We should have communicated to the inquiry POL should not be in charge of the redress schemes"

No Nick - You, you should have told Sir Wyn back in 2022 that POL should not be in charge of the schemes.

He always tries to remove himself from the piss poor decisions. Either he didn't know, wasn't there, or it was a corporate responsibility.

Oh ffs, there is a Project Panther.

Wtf!

So Nick did know that POL are using Justice Fraser's "relatively robust" comment from the GLO, when giving Horizon evidence to the Police.

Yesterday, he denied all knowledge.

This is an awkward section in which there is a document defining how information is to be provided to the Police but Read, and I suspect the rest of the senior people, has no idea how this is done in practice and how the Board is to be involved, as the document states should be the case.

They just don't know what they're doing. They're in the grip of paralysis.

He seems like he is making it up

To put it another way, there are these guidelines being produced in Post Office, but they're a sham because the machinery behind them, that is needed to make things happen, doesn't seem to exist.

I think he is half making it up.

He know what the policy is to disclose documents to the Police. But he hasn't got a scooby-doo clue how it works in practice, so he is making that part up.

SWW and Beer are on to him.

Why is he surprised that there are 33 Police investigations?

I thought he says the process was that the investigation team have to tell the Board, and get approval, before they report a SPMR to the Police?

If that's the case, then surely he should already know how many police investigations there are and why the police are asking for documents.

This isn't adding up.

The evidence from yesterday about the Fujitsu-Post Office correspondence shows how it's a sham. When evidence was needed to go to the Police, a lower level Post Office employee made up a process and went at it in bull in a china shop mode and caused a big row in the higher-ups. He didn't do things according to the guidelines because they're just there for show, not to actually be useful.

At the heart of this is that investigations cannot meaningfully happen. There can go on as a pantomime but everyone knows that them ending up in court is a bad idea, even if it's the Police running the show rather than Post Office. The main effectiveness of investigations is to get subpostmasters to "repay" shortfalls as a sort of protection racket. Which yesterday SWW expressed disapproval of.

You've described it perfectly @nauticant
protection racket

I was thinking of that yesterday.
Currently, the Police and CPS know they cannot get a conviction on a SPMR if the evidence is based on Horizon data.

POL know this too.

So, instead they are going to use other tactics to get SPMR to pay for shortfalls.
We've already heard from Elliott Jacobs who described his experience with the Investigation team. How they used tactics to bully him and essentially it was a quasi-police interview.
Elliott was fortunate, he can afford specialist legal and accountancy advice, but I fear for SPMRs who don't have the resources to fight against POL.

What Beer seems be doing here is to show that in the wake of the High Court judgments, Post Office have produced a huge number of documents in response, and defined all these processes, but the documents don't seem to engage with the problems revealed by the judgments, and the processes don't seem to function. In other words, there's all this window-dressing but it's often meaningless. 5 years down the line in many ways Post Office still hasn't "got it".

Or to put it another way, the solution is to replace Horizon with a system that people can build up confidence in, but that seems to be stalled, and would involve an injection of a huge sum of money by the government that everyone is doubtful about, and so Post Office is putting on a show that Beer is currently pulling to pieces like it's tissue paper.

Beer is also pulling apart POLs poor decision making in allowing employees who were involved in the scandal to now be working on the compensation/redress schemes.

Nick seems to be suggesting POL are using the inquiry to gather the evidence into POL employees involved in the scandal.
Yet, Beer has pointed out that 1. Its been 5 years since the GLO, why didn't investigations start back then, and 2. POL have already given the POL employees thier defence "we were only following orders".

Discussion of a meeting between senior Post Office people and civil servants and Kevin Hollinrake. Clearly Nick Read and co wanted to pay off the bad apples to avoid there being embarrassing employment tribunals while Hollinrake was saying he wouldn't mind this turning into a row breaking out in public.

I very much had Jacobs in mind when I wrote "protection racket" minou123. Also, the significant number of subpostmasters mentioned in the YouGov report who would rather give Post Office money from their own pockets than face the grim task of going through a dispute with the fact that maybe this would result in a black mark against them being reported somewhere.