and Crozier’s dishonesty…

Good morning from a so-far-not-very-sunny Devon

I’m meant to be error-correcting the latest proof of TGPOS but there has been a recent flurry of activity amongst activists, campaigners and from the Post Office itself, so I thought I would send you a secret email update.

Interim payments imminent

The biggest news is that the Post Office has started the process of assessing and handing over the government’s promised £100,000 interim payments in advance of full compensation.

One former Subpostmaster contacted me to say he has received written assurance from the Post Office he will get the full £100k. He is one of the 39 Subpostmasters whose conviction was overturned on 23 April this year.

The Subpostmaster in question (who asked me not to reveal his name) said the Post Office payment came with a warning: “They pointed out that if my final claim was settled at less than £100k then I would have to pay the difference back”, nonetheless the interim payment was definitely “a payment on account and will not detract from the final figure which they are working on.”

The Postmaster in question did not go to prison as a result of his guilty plea, which suggests at the very least that those who were given custodial sentences should be a shoo-in for the full £100,000 interim payment, which I know for some will not just be welcome, but immediately necessary.

Whither the 555?

It does look as if those Subpostmasters who manage to overturn their criminal convictions will finally get something close to the compensation they deserve.

Where, then, does that leave the Subpostmasters who weren’t convicted, but whose legal victory at the High Court in 2019 led to those convictions being overturned?

Although the 555 claimants beat the Post Office hands down, the vast majority of the cash secured as a settlement from the Post Office went in legal and success fees to the lawyers and litigation funders who backed the case.

The Post Office CEO Nick Read has himself said this seems unfair and has called on the government to properly compensate the 555.

Arbuthnot weighs in

Today, on the influential Politics Home website, James Arbuthnot keeps that call going by making the case for full and proper compensation for all the claimants involved in the High Court case. This link to his piece should be live from 8am today.

I think it offends most people’s sense of natural justice that the campaigners who worked so hard for more than a decade to bring the Post Office to book are the only ones not to have got proper redress. As Lord Arbuthnot points out, the Prime Minister has already said: “we’ll have to make sure that people get properly looked after because it’s clear that an appalling injustice has been done.”

I understand from one well-placed source that there are discussions ongoing within government as to how the claimants could be “properly looked after”, but without a proper co-ordinated media campaign from the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance and MPs, the mandarins at the Treasury might decide the public opinion fallout from not compensating Subpostmasters will be worth the cash savings. If you see Alan Bates (founder and Chair of the JFSA), tell him to get in front of a camera and start leading from the front.

What are the JFSA up to then?

Last week Alan Bates sent a circular to the JFSA membership telling them he didn’t have much to report other than what sounds like painfully slow progress with the Parliamentary Ombudsman complaint, and a reiteration of the JFSA’s red line with regard to the statutory inquiry into the Post Office Scandal. Mr Bates says: “unless the Inquiry is to include the lack of financial redress for the [555 claimant] group then the JFSA will not be taking part.”

According to Mr Bates, Sir Wyn Williams, who is chairing the inquiry, will be publishing the draft list of issues the inquiry intends to look into at the end of this month.

Will there be a Post Office in the future?

The Financial Times has put together a long piece about the Post Office and its problems called “Post Office struggles to recover from a bruising scandal“. The numbers don’t look good. Many familiar voices appear in the piece, but the line that stuck out to me was that Nick Read, the current CEO of the Post Office, doesn’t think his company’s scandalous prosecution of dozens of innocent people is that big a deal, arguing (according to the article’s authors) that the reputational damage is limited.

Adam Crozier in the frame

A recent puff piece about Adam Crozier in the Guardian annoyed at least two readers. Crozier is the new chairman of BT, and the Guardian article described his seven year tenure running the Royal Mail as a “success”. Crozier was there between 2003 and 2010, when the Post Office (then part of Royal Mail group) was indiscriminately prosecuting Subpostmasters. The article does not bother mentioning the fact that one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history was happening on Crozier’s watch. The balance was redressed by BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine, who tweeted that the Guardian: “needs reminding of victims of the Post Office computer scandal” and a letter writer, Mike Lucraft from Saltdean in East Sussex, who points out: “Adam Crozier did not steer the Post Office out of any corporate crisis. He steered it headlong into one.”

The news of Crozier’s appointment also irritated the mother of one Subpostmaster whose conviction was overturned recently. She sent me an extraordinary BBC Sport article from 1999 which reveals that whilst Adam Crozier was working for the Daily Telegraph in 1987 he falsified advertising sales figures. In the piece, Crozier confirms he did so “in order to enhance my reputation”. As a result he was shifted from the Daily Telegraph’s London offices to Scotland, and left the business shortly afterwards. When the news was made public in 1999, Crozier’s then-employer, the Football Association, dismissed the dishonesty as the “youthful indiscretion” of a man with “outstanding ability and integrity”.

I wonder what Mr Crozier thought about all those Subpostmasters being criminally prosecuted for alleged crimes of dishonesty whilst he was running the Post Office. How lucky he is never to have had to answer questions about it.

James Christie rides again

Regular readers of this blog will know I am something of a fan of James Christie, whose criticism of the Post Office’s internal audit function and software management has been unsparing. In this video interview with the ONRecord team (who are promising a series of videos on the Post Office scandal), Mr Christie goes into some detail about the failings of the Post Office’s internal teams and lays bare just how many people were failing to do their jobs on a scale which should really be front and centre during the Williams inquiry. It’s a good watch.

Yet another Post Office director appointed

After appointing a Post Office director, Declan Salter, in August last year to “to implement the claims schemes and a programme of operational measures to reset Post Office’s relationship with postmasters” the Post Office then went about appointing two serving Subpostmasters (Saf Ismail and Elliot Jacobs) to the Post Office board.

Last week they appointed yet another Non-Executive Director to deal with the continuing fallout from the scandal. His name is Ben Tidswell and he is a lawyer. A bit of a big shot lawyer by all accounts, as the Post Office tells us Mr Tidswell: “has spent most of his legal career at Ashurst, a global law firm with 29 offices in 17 countries. He retired from Ashurst at the end of July 2021, after 21 years as a partner and the last eight years as the firm’s Global Chairman. In his career, he has been involved in a wide range of complex and high value disputes across several sectors, including financial services, retail and technology.”

I have looked in vain for any information as to what this might mean for Declan Salter, but his name appears to have been wiped from the Post Office website, as does the statement welcoming his appointment. I’ve emailed the Post Office press office to ask what has happened to him.

Readers will be pleased to know that Tim Parker (Chairman), Alisdair Cameron (CFO), Carla Stent (Chairman of Audit, Risk and Compliance Committee) and Tom Cooper (chief government UKGI mandarin), all of whom oversaw the Post Office’s litigation strategy remain happily in place.

Thanks

Thanks as ever to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to point me in the direction of new information, either on or off the record, and hello and thanks to the dozens of people who have been signing up to this newsletter in recent weeks as a result of buying a pre-sale copy of my forthcoming book. We are still hoping to publish in October, which draws ever nearer.

Once I get back from holiday I’ll be straining every sinew to make sure I hit that deadline with a book which will hopefully have some impact. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has supported me this far. Pre-sale copies make a huge difference to the post-publication orders made by Amazon and other booksellers – so thank you for trusting me to make a half-decent fist of things.

Right – back to the family fun. My fingerpads are currently very sore as I ended up joining my (far more hardy) daughter in a day-long climbing lesson on Hound Tor yesterday. The granite rock has sliced its way through the ends of one or two of my fingers, which are far more used to bashing out copy than struggling to take my bodyweight. I hope this email is less painful to read than it has been to write!

At least the sun looks like it’s finally coming out…

Best regards

Nick