No desire to point fingers over Horizon scandal

The Post Office’s former boss Paula Vennells has told the final day of an inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal that her senior team failed to inform her of key information but said “she has no desire to point the finger at others”.

In a closing statement, Ms Vennells’ lawyer named a number of ex-colleagues – including Angela van den Bogerd – who she claimed did not tell her about pertinent facts linked to the scandal.

Sub-postmasters at the inquiry greeted Ms Vennells’ words with groans and, when the former Anglican priest said she did not want to blame others, with laughter.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for shortfalls in their accounts caused by bugs in the Horizon IT system.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the government said it would pay compensation to sub-postmasters who suffered losses due to shortfalls in the Post Office IT system prior to Horizon, which was called Capture.

The government said that it has asked the Post Office to “urgently review its files” so criminal cases review bodies can “ensure no one was wrongfully convicted of a Horizon-style injustice”.

The Capture accounting system was used between 1992 and 1999, when it was replace by Horizon.

At the inquiry into Horizon, Ms Vennells’ lawyer Samantha Leek KC said her client “cannot, and does not, try to hide from the fact that while chief executive she did not manage to uncover the truth about the extent of the bugs, errors and defects” in the software.

But “she simply did not get the information which she ought to have been given by her senior team, whom she trusted and to whom she delegated responsible roles”.

“Ms Vennells does not know why key information was not passed on to her,” she added.

Ms Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019. She was previously network director at the organisation for five years.

Her statement is one of the last to be heard in the long-running inquiry into the Horizon scandal which was set up in September 2020.

It has heard from 298 witnesses, received 780 witness statements and dealt with more than 2.2 million pages of disclosure.