Jane Davies, the former Chief People Officer at the Post Office claims that Post Office management, led by CEO Nick Read, attempted to delay a key compensation target date in order to ensure they qualified for a bonus. Ms Davies said “changing this target would result in slower compensation payments, in favour of paying a bonus”.

According to Jane Davies’ witness statement to the Post Office Inquiry, the demand came on Davies’ first day of work at the Post Office – 2 Dec 2022. Read sent an email to Davies’ predecessor, Angela Williams, and copied Davies in. Read wanted Williams to “gather evidence” to back the “management view” that the target date for paying out 95% of claims to the Historical (now Horizon) Shortfall Scheme should be shifted from 31 October 2022 to 31 December 2022.

The 31 October target had not been met, but if the date was shifted to 31 December 2022 it might be met and the company-wide bonus agreed by the Post Office’s remittance committee (RemCo) could be paid.

Davies writes: “it did appear to me to be an odd bonus metric to apply across the whole of POL [Post Office Ltd], as only c50 people could influence the achievement of the HSS bonus metric”. Nonetheless she looked into the matter for Read.

“After further scrutiny of the broader Remuneration Committee minutes”, she writes, “and discussing this matter with Tom Cooper [former government non-executive director on the Post Office board], who was adamant the agreed target date was October, I felt comfortable the correct target date was October… It seemed odd that 9 months into the year, there was an attempt to change a bonus target and the focus being on payment of bonus, rather than the timeliness of compensation payments.”

In her witness statement, Davies, who is in dispute with the Post Office, lays bare the management obsession with milking the company for undeserved bonuses, desperately poor corporate governance and possible attempts to pervert the course of justice.

On joining the Post Office, Davies says she was supposed to have a two-week handover with Angela Williams, who had been employed on an interim basis for eighteen months. Instead Davies said she “found there was an unwillingness to provide me with any written documentation; rather I received verbal updates over Microsoft Teams calls… When I requested a list of documents/information by email, I was told not to make such requests by email, given the potential (Inquiry) disclosures, and instead to communicate through WhatsApp or Microsoft Teams, as these channels would not be subject to disclosure. It was these channels through which I understand [Williams] communicated with Mr Read.”

It gets worse.

“It came to my attention that Ms Williams had deleted at least six months’ worth of data on her work computer and telephone prior to her departure in December 2022. POL’s IT team did retrieve some of the data, but not all of it. Only certain Teams messages and emails were successfully recovered. The Data Protection Director had made me aware of the breach and said he would be investigating it. However, after several weeks of asking for updates, I did not receive any follow up.”

Before she left, Davies says she wanted Nick Read to ask Williams (who recently won HR Director of the Year 2024) to hand over her laptop and phone “so I could attempt to get up to speed on matters myself. This would be normal practice, to hand over company property. However, this did not happen.”

Read, instead, wanted Davies to focus on getting him a pay rise. During an informal meet up in October 2022, Read told Davies: “he felt his pay [£400,000 a year basic] was inadequate. He told me that when he was initially offered his role, the Treasury pulled his offer and reduced his salary. He had remained unhappy about this since.”

During her first two weeks in post from 2 December 2022, Read and Williams both allegedly told Davies her main job was to “place focus on Mr Read’s pay. I was told by Ms Williams (as I documented in my notebook from the time) that my priorities were to be as follows: to increase Mr Read’s pay or risk losing him, to focus on the letter from the Chairman to Grant Shapps / Secretary of State, remove Mr Cameron (then CFO) from POL; and ensure Mr Read appoints his own team.”

In a one-to-one meeting with Read on 13 December, the time was allegedly spent “focused on him justifying a pay increase, with him saying ‘I couldn’t have done a better job in the last three years.’ Mr Read shared his concerns over his pay and that he felt as though he was being ‘abused’.”

In terms of trying to work out what was going on, Davies had to fend for herself: “I was not given sufficient information as part of my induction to POL to understand the context of any of the matters being addressed by this ongoing Inquiry; on the Horizon IT System, the wrongful prosecutions of the SPMs, the GLO or ongoing issue of compensation. I was left to learn about such matters ‘on the job’.”

Davies was also told to “administer” the CEO Fund – a retention bonus plan, but says she “did not get to see the background or rationale, and whilst I asked, I was not at the time given any data on the ‘retention’ problems which this bonus was meant to address. I was told that the `Remuneration Committee’ had granted the CEO Fund £1m to spend on retention bonuses for those people deemed critical or flight risks within POL. I was told that I needed to administer the payments in the December 2022 payroll and organise the letters to individuals. I felt uncomfortable with the lack of formality around the process. When I asked to see the background, I was told by my predecessor Ms Williams that it had already been signed off by Mr Read and my role was simply ‘to make the payments and send the letters’.”

Davies details Reads attempts to manoeuvre Williams into the chair of RemCo, and the regular management attempts to secure themselves retrospective bonuses, despite self-evidently doing a bad job.

Under one subject heading, titled Belfast Exit Metric, Davies writes:

“The Belfast Metric was 10% of the bonus target for the Short-Term Incentive Plan (“STIP”). This metric related to a programme which should have resulted in the Horizon data centre being moved out Belfast. I was told the programme of work cost £30m and had failed, as reported in July 2022 Remuneration Committee. Tom Cooper in the Remuneration Committee meeting on 6th December 2022 stated that this was a key programme for POL and was still wanting to understand why it had failed. He was complaining that there had been no investigation, and no-one was being held accountable. At the same meeting, POL Management proposed that the value of this metric, 10%, should now be combined into the NBIT counter development metric, which alone was 10%, as one single target, i.e. making this latter target 20% (and effectively forget the Belfast Exit programme target). There was no recognition or acceptance from POL Management as to the governance of this failed programme, the cost impact, the wider impact on the NBIT roll out etc. The reasons for the Belfast Exit programme failure continued to remain unknown. The Remuneration Committee refused to change the target to combine it with NBIT counter replacement, however, again POL Management requested that the Committee agree to exercise discretion. It certainly felt odd to me that the focus was on changing the bonus metric, rather than investigating the reasons for what appeared to be a seismic failure.”

The section called Bonus Multiplier describes a process riven with conflict of interest, poor corporate governance and appears, frankly, corrupt. In her witness statement, Davies records a “shady” unauthorised bonus payment to Nick Read and a Post Office management “inconsistent and misleading” proposal to add “an increased multiplier to 100% of their own bonus arrangements” after the financial end-year (31st March 2022) to which the bonus applied. Thisd would, if approved, apply retrospectively to the previous years’ bonus plan. Davies writes: “I had not ever seen a bonus metric be proposed and amended in favour of Executives, who recommended the change to benefit themselves, after the financial year was closed. This contradicts most remuneration governance and HMG governance on this point.”

As well as putting forward the proposals to increase their own pay, representatives of Post Office management “were in attendance in the Remuneration Committee meetings when discussing this proposal. This is highly unusual practice.” Both Nick Read and Angela Williams “personally benefited from this proposed change by c£17000 and c£30,000 respectively. This conflict of interest was not highlighted nor formally recorded in the Remuneration Committee minutes.”

Instead the RemCo recommended the bonus multiplier be paid. As Davies says: “changes to pay, or [the] bonus of the CEO or CFO, are strictly governed by the Articles of Association, as both were ministerial appointments, where it is mandatory to seek Shareholder approval before any changes are made.”

The Post Office’s rewards director Paul Wood was apparently so enraged by this management coup, he refused to process the payments, so Angela Williams did it for him.

“All payments”, writes Davies, “were processed in the August 2022 payroll to all individuals, including Mr Read. I understood from Paul Wood… that my predecessor authorised her Head of HR Shared Services/Payroll Manager to process the payments, without receiving formal approval from the Shareholder.”

Davies says: “In all of my career, I had never encountered such a huge amount of operational turmoil; it was off the scale. In many instances, it felt self-inflicted and required strong leadership to step in and drive accountability. This latter leadership was lacking.”

Davies is a credible person alleging the deletion of documents, a determination to keep information from the statutory inquiry, plus the self-serving and corrupt manipulation of bonus targets. If there is not a serious investigation into her allegations by either parliament, the Inquiry or the NPCC’s Operation Olympos, then they might as well throw in the towel. They have a whistleblowing witness offering up documented evidence of serious wrongdoing at a publicly-funded organisation.

The Post Office says: “Any recommendations in relation to the remuneration for the Post Office CEO and CFO are made by the Post Office’s Remuneration Committee and are authorised by the Shareholder. Neither the Post Office CEO nor CFO have any ability to approve any element of their own remuneration or authorise payments that relate to their own remuneration. With regards to misconduct allegations that had been made against Mr Read by this individual, Mr Read was exonerated of all the misconduct allegations levelled against him.”

Angela Williams has been approached for comment.

Fun fact: Nick Read has been granted good leaver status by the Post Office.

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