Hello!
I’ll start with some good news. Campaigning Subpostmaster Noel Thomas is going to get an honorary degree from Bangor University! More here. Also – campaigning MP Kevan Jones, who stood down at the last election, is being elevated to the House of Lords. Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance founder Sir Alan Bates told Computer Weekly:
“It’s good news that Kevan has been elevated to the house of Lords. I am sure he will continue with his support from the Lords with James Arbuthnot. They have both been great supporters of us for many years.”
Congratulations to both Noel and Kevan.
The Inquiry this week
Some of the business leaders-cum-civil service execs with their fingers in this scandal will be giving evidence on oath over the next few days.
Mark Russell (above left) is up this morning, followed by Robert Swannell (above right) this afternoon. Tom Cooper, who actually sat on the Post Office board is on tomorrow, followed by Patrick O’Sullivan from ShEx (the government’s Shareholder Executive), later UKGI (UK Government Investments) in the afternoon. On Friday we will hear from Cooper’s predecessor, Richard Callard.
Mark Russell is currently Chair of the MoD’s procurement organisation, but was CEO of ShEX/UKGI from 2013.
ShEx (sometimes referred to verbally as Share-Ex) then UKGI have had an exec on the Post Office board since 2012, which means they were one of the conduits between the Post Office and the government during the scandal.
In fact, I’m rather hoping the Inquiry will seek to build a picture of how information and responsibility flows between the Business Department, UKGI and the Post Office. The Business Department (DBT) “owns” the Post Office, with the Secretary of State for Business nominally holding the government’s single share. The senior civil servant within DBT (formerly Alex Chisholm) is the Post Office’s Accounting Officer, yet it’s UKGI (“owned” by the Cabinet Office) which gets to put an exec on the Post Office board.
Robert Swannell is currently Chair of M&S and has been since 2011. He was also a director of ShEx and became Chair of UKGI in 2014.
Bofty Lollocks
I am expecting a lot of lofty bollocks from both Swannell and Russell about believing the information they were being given by the Post Office and the reassurances they were getting from the Post Office board via the UKGI representatives, Susannah Storey, then Richard Callard, then Tom Cooper (more on them here).
This is all very well, but UKGI and DBT were wholly negligent in their handling of the Post Office throughout the scandal, something uncovered by Eleanor Shaikh in 2019.
Allow me to explain. In 2010 the Post Office was known as an Arm’s Length Body (ALB).
That year, the Institute for Government set out a 10 point programme of embedding sustained accountability for ALBs, and the 2014/5 Public Administration Select Committee report Who’s Accountable? Relationships Between Government And Arm’s Length Bodies recommended setting out “accountability arrangements” in documents:
“known as ‘framework agreements’ or ‘framework documents’ and in ‘Accountability System Statements’ or ‘Statements of Accounting Officers’ responsibilities’. This is a formal agreement which ought to exist between all Departments and their ALBs, to be regularly updated and publicly available.”
In 2019 Eleanor went looking for the Framework Agreement/Document/System Statement which details the relationship between government and the Post Office and found it didn’t exist.
Despite the problems of accountability and oversight of ALBs being specifically highlighted since at least 2010, despite a solution being posited by the Public Administration Select Committee and despite clear evidence throughout the last decade that the Post Office went rogue in its treatment of Subpostmasters, no one in government or the civil service had, by 2019, written a framework agreement which might have, at the very least, given a structure for better oversight of what the Post Office was up to..
That’s negligence. Read more about it in a five year old blog post I wrote here. God bless Eleanor Shaikh.
Free coffee for Subpostmasters
The lady in the far distance in that photo above is Eve from One Temple, a coffee bar at Temple tube stop, the closest underground station to Aldwych House, home of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.
Eve got in touch via Direct Message on twitter to say she had been following this scandal for a while and was moved by the plight of the Subpostmasters involved.
She wrote to tell me that any Subpostmasters attending the Inquiry can avail themselves of her kiosk and take her up on the offer of a free coffee any time. Eve says:
“just tell whoever is there you are with the Inquiry and you can have what you like. I’m so sorry for what happened to them and I am so sorry I can not do anything to give them justice. I’m very grateful to Sir Alan and James Arbuthnot and everyone who worked to get some sort of justice for them.”
I popped by to say hello on my way to the Inquiry this morning and can confirm Eve is a lovely lady as well as being the newest secret emailer to join the fold. Do drop round if you have the chance and support your local small business!
Champion Beer
There is a profile of and interview with Barrister of the Year Jason Beer KC in The Lawyer this week. Beer is lead counsel to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and now an established cult hero for his measured manner and ability to pin a witness down until he has got a satisfactory answer.
According to Annabel Tinson, who wrote the Lawyer piece, when Beer got his Barrister of the Year award last month he received “the loudest round of applause of the night”.
Tinson notes Beer “is fast gaining celebrity-level status for his role in the inquiry. Outside of traditional social media, in which many describe Beer’s performance as “masterful”, he receives around 20 emails daily, letters in the post, and you can even find a Mumsnet thread about him.”
Mumsnet knows where it’s at.
Matinée added to Otley date
Tickets for the upcoming Post Office Scandal: the Inside Story talk at Otley Courthouse (near Leeds) on Friday 22 November are disappearing fast. So fast, in fact, Otley Courthouse has added a matinée at 2pm on the same date.
Former Subpostmaster Janet Skinner has kindly agreed to speak at both events, and I am delighted to inform you that if you have already bought a ticket for the evening and the matinée works better for you, the Courthouse will swap your ticket, no problem. I know this because a correspondent has succeeded in doing just that.
Buy tickets to either the matinée or evening session here.
To Aldwych
This was only meant to be a short newsletter – apologies for going on a bit. I’ll be live-tweeting Flanders (sorry, Russell) and Swannell from the Inquiry, then I’ll attempt to get a short blog post reporting on their evidence up this evening before the France vs Spain game.
Have a good day
Nick