Former Post Office minister (2007 – 2010) Pat McFadden didn’t have to say much to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, but he did have to say something. Being a campaign-hardened and experienced politician, he had no qualms about saying very little lots of times.

McFadden was asked (in a number of ways) why he did nothing to help Subpostmasters, despite receiving clear information from his fellow MPs and detailed allegations from the journalist Rebecca Thomson, sent in the form of an email whilst she was putting together her seminal investigation for Computer Weekly, which broke this scandal in 2009.

McFadden’s answers to the Inquiry can be boiled down to:

1. Ministers were prevented from getting involved in the affairs of the Post Office in a deliberate arrangement formalised in the 2000 Postal Services Act which guaranteed the independence of Royal Mail Group, and within it, the Post Office [nothing more than a convenient fiction as we discovered during Ed Davey’s evidence, but McFadden was not challenged on it].
2. The Post Office was “emphatic” in its responses over challenges to the robustness of Horizon.
3. The Post Office used the judgments of the courts as a “proof point” to demonstrate independent endorsement of the robustness of Horizon and criminality of the campaigning Subpostmasters.

McFadden used as an example a letter sent by the Post Office Managing Director Alan Cook in response to Thomson’s queries to McFadden’s office, which raised the cases of a number of Subpostmasters.

Cook wrote: “Post Office Limited defended the claim[s] vigorously and assistance was obtained from Fujitsu, who are the suppliers of the Horizon system, regarding the dates and times that the discrepancies were reported in each case. All of these reports proved that there was no problem with the Horizon system that would explain the discrepancies that were reported at these times. I am satisfied that there is no evidence to doubt the integrity of the Horizon system and that it is robust and fit for purpose.”

Sam Stevens was asking questions on behalf of the Inquiry. He wondered why McFadden repeatedly took these sorts of responses from the Post Office at face value.

“I’m not sure,” McFadden replied, “but if you ask me over the whole story here, of course I wish I had done more to question these responses, but I believe if I had – and I’ve thought about this quite a lot – I believe if I had, I’d have got the same response from the Post Office in terms of these two points about their faith in the system: it’s robust, there’s no evidence it’s wrong and so on, and a reference to court judgements.”

McFadden was at pains to point out that the Post Office’s “proof point” about convictions carried far more weight for a minister because of the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

Deliberate Conviction Confusion

He told Stevens: “All the ministerial learning you have is not to interfere with the courts. This separation of powers is well understood in the British constitution. If ministers do start questioning court verdicts, they are very quickly criticised for intervening or trying to interfere in the court process.”

Stevens wanted to ask McFadden about prosecutions, not convictions, and eventually clocked that McFadden was deliberately misunderstanding him. But he kept trying.

“Do you think,” he asked “during your time as Minister, the Government… should have done more to satisfy itself that post office was conducting its prosecutions properly and fairly?”
Before McFadden replied, Stevens made it clear. “I’m not talking about convictions – I’m talking about prosecutions.”
McFadden gave the answer he wanted to give.

“Look, when I look back on this and I think of the terrible human consequences for the Subpostmasters who were prosecuted,” he said, “even the ones who weren’t prosecuted but lost large sums of money or suffered damage in other ways, of course I wish I had asked more about this. But I do believe, given the emphatic nature of the replies and the Post Offices use of court judgements as a proof point for the robustness of the system… at this stage in the process, I’m not sure it would have got any further.”

Stein on his conscience

Sam Stein KC, asking questions on behalf of several Subpostmasters was more direct. He listed the allegations set out in Rebecca Thomson’s email, and said to McFadden:

“What happened next was your office went to back to the Post Office, who the Subpostmasters regarded as the abuser of them… and said ‘what’s going on?’ And you got a reply from the chief executive of the Post Office saying ‘well, no problem here, this is not happening’.”

Stein put it to McFadden: “Someone could have spoken to the Subpostmasters rather than just going back to the post office. Why did nobody do that?”

McFadden replied: “The right thing to do was to ask the people running the business… That structure had been set up some years before I was the minister. They were the people who ran the Horizon system, they were the people who had the information about it, and when I look at the correspondence in the round, what I’m really struck by is how emphatic their defence of the system was, and continued to be for a long time after this exchange of correspondence, not only an emphatic defence, but also the use of court judgements as a proof point.”

Stein tried again: “You’re saying that the right thing to do is to ask… Mr Cook at the Post Office… Why isn’t the right thing to do to ask the people that are saying they are being abused by the Post Office. Why miss out on them?”

McFadden tried a diversion: “Well, the National Federation of Subpostmasters – as is seen in evidence given by the then General Secretary to a select committee some years later – he says that at the time, he didn’t think there was a fundamental problem with the system either. So at the time, the representatives… of the Subpostmasters. They weren’t raising it as an issue either.”

Stein started to lose patience: “That wasn’t my question. My question was in relation to this correspondence, the trenchant and deeply disturbing allegations being made by Computer Weekly were not investigated by your department. They were simply circulated back to Mr Cook…. Just go back to Mr Cook rather than the people making these awful complaints. Have you got a better answer?”

He hadn’t. “I think it was the right thing to do to try to get, to raise these concerns with the Post Office who were running the system. The fact that the Post Office’s assurances proved to be wrong about the robustness of the system, and the fact that the court judgements that they were using as proof points proved to be unsafe and unsound and were later overturned, was not known at the time.”

Stein gave up. “I’ve asked that question… three times. I’ll stop now”, he said, and handed proceedings back to the Chair.

Read Pat McFadden’s witness statement here.

---

The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.