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

Impressed that Nick seems to know the detailed timetable of staff he is throwing under the bus witness appearances in October and November - despite knowing so little about anything else.

Yes, interesting choices in his attention to detail....

I missed the afternoon. Just catching up now.

Mr Maloney asking questions, with Jo Hamilton beside him.

I love Mr Maloney.

He is going through the case of Jackie McDonald, who was sent to prison for 18 months.

Steve Bradshaw investigated Jackie and put in his performance review how his key achievement was influencing the POL lawyers to charge theft in this case.
Caroline Richards was the auditor, and was Jackie made a complaint about her behaviour, for bullying.

Mr Maloney asks if Caroline Richards works in the Remediation Unit. But Read won't answer that.
But he does agree that it is concerning 8if POL employees who were involved in the scandal are now working in the Remediation Unit.

Oh, and that was the end.

It looks like the SPMRs are still scuppered under the new management.

Unless the new chair and whoever takes over from Nick Read completely reform POL, it is going to continue to behave as it always done.

Yes - as there have never been any real consequences for POL .
Unlike their targets , tragically.

Here is a good summary from the BBC, of Nick Reads testimony

BBC News - Post Office scandal: Five things we learned from the boss
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79n4dngn5zo

Tomorrow we have

Mike Young – former Chief of Technology and Operations Services Director (Phase 5/6 evidence)

• this should be interesting as we are going back to phase 5/6 and as the former IT director what did he know about the bugs. I'll be waiting to see if Sir Wyn reads out the "self-incrimination" warning.

Simon Oldnall – Horizon IT Director at Post Office Ltd
As the current Horizon IT director what does he know about the bugs and SPMR still paying back shortfalls.

I am in particular looking forward to
Thursday - John Bartlett, the new head of the investigation team. How many current SPMR has he bullied into paying back supposed "shortfalls"?

Friday- Ben Foat, the current general counsel for POL. I think he is one of the "untouchables".
Is he the one who wrote the letter to the police, using Justice Frasers words that Horizon is now "relatively more robust"?
Is he one of the people who still think the SPMRS are a bunch of crooks?

I'm keen to see Mike Young. His name's been all over and I've often thought "so where's he?".

Ben Foat too, his been involved in all kinds of stuff.

It's all coming back to me now.

Mike Young is the guy the Inquiry couldn't find.
Paula Vennells said, in her testimony, that it was all his fault and that he knew there was bugs in Horizon but didn't tell her.
Sir Wyn asked if Paula knew where Mike is, and she said she didn't know.

Clearly, they have found him.

If memory serves, he is on all the emails back in the early 2000s when the bugs were being discussed in Horizon.

Ooh, this will be interesting.

Ahh, that's it. I had an awareness of him having a missing-jigsaw-piece quality and you've now reminded me why.

No Beer today.

Young has a familiar background, army-police-security in comms companies, and then moved into security management for IT seemingly without any substantive IT experience. Not sure when he joined Post Office. He gives off a a police vibe rather than an IT one.

Young says he was aware of Royal Mail prosecutions from when he was in the police and gaps in his knowledge about this were filled in when he joined Post Office so at least we can skip the but-how-was-I-suppised-to-know-about-prosecutions pantomime.

First line of fence established. Young didn't know what his direct report John Scott (Head of Security) was up to.

There's some doubt as to what Young's role was. He had a rag-bag of responsibilities, many of them security related, and IT seemed to be a minor part of his role, if at all. Seems his responsibilities never changed but he ended up with different job titles in a somewhat arbitrary manner. He left because he was demoted (in fact or was it just another job title change?) around separation from Royal Mail because he wasn't given a job on the board. He was lucky to bale out in 2012.

Young talking at length around the questions asked by counsel, particularly to avoid engaging with the extent to which he was aware of problems with (legacy) Horizon. He's leaning heavily on there being no particular coding errors identified. (Maybe he wasn't aware if this but Fujitsu were continually applying code fixes to the software.)

Having written my initial impressions, from later evidence Young does come across as someone capable of having a grip on management of IT projects at the top level. These interactions of his with Fujitsu do come across as focused and professional.

We'd do better if counsel Catriona Hodge didn't let Young be so expansive in his answers adding loads of extraneous detail that we could skip and save time.

Now we're heading into prosecutions of subposmasters (2010) which Young was either aware of or involved with.

Young is being less assured here. The essence of his defence is that now, putting together written evidence from the time, 2010, he can see some warning signs but he was too busy back then to have spotted what was happening.

There's a suggestion that potential problems were brought together for him by the Ismay Report. It's that that made him realise that Horizon data was being used in prosecutions of subpostmasters. No doubt he'll say next that the Ismay Report quashed his curiosity and concerns.

There it is. The Ismay Report gave him a Get Out of Jail card, he was able to use it at the time as a basis for No Further Action, and he's pleased to be able to rely on it now, 14 years later.

Young's point is that the Horizon Online pilot did not go well, he was concerned, he tried to apply pressure of Fujitsu to get more of a grip and to be more open with Post Office, Fujitsu evaded this, and the Ismay Report was the next best thing, in the absence of a more deeper analysis of the Horizon system, that it was functioning as it was supposed to. That gave him a reason to give up pushing things with Fujitsu and to have a There Is No Problem card to play if need be.

I'm attending today. Interesting to see in person, but in reality it's much like you see on YouTube.
I agree with the assessment so far. Initially I thought he was surely out of his depth in the role when they covered his background. But with a wide ranging remit he does come across as reasonable and professional. I bet he's very glad of the Ismay report.
Definitely very waffly.

This though is a narrative to paper over a more fundamental problem. Young rightly said in his witness statement, I think in paragraph 30, that large complex computer systems will always have bugs, errors, and defects, and an essential feature in running them is to have processes to manage when they have an impact. This thinking was discarded at Post Office and the issue was collapsed into the problem being either thieving subpostmasters or a faulty system, and Post Office orthodoxy was that the system wasn't faulty, for example as shown by the Ismay Report.

There was a significant discussion after the morning break. Counsel was showing that Young had been engaged in correspondence about a new accounting bug after roll-out. Young pushed back hard, and unsuccessfully tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the Inquiry by claiming that this had been a bug during the pilot phase. This was Young at his most hard-line and least convincing. It then became clear what was at stake. If after roll-out Young was seeing new bugs, then by not bringing them to the attention of his direct report, John Scott, Head of Security, he was enabling the dysfunction that led to wrongful prosecutions of subpostmasters.

I'd suggest that he wasn't seeing new bugs, and more importantly wasn't discussing them with his subordinates, because he didn't want to see them, and was relying on the Ismay Report that they couldn't be seen because it was "known" that they weren't supposed to exist.