The former chair of the Post Office has accused unnamed senior executives at the state-owned body of “misleading” its board over problems with the Horizon computer system that led to the largest miscarriage of justice in British history.
Alice Perkins on Wednesday told an inquiry into the scandal that she did not try to bury evidence of problems with Horizon.
The inquiry is examining how the state-owned company prosecuted and in many cases ruined post office operators, who were accused of stealing money from the branches they ran. Despite campaigns and complaints, it took years for the Post Office to admit that faults with Horizon, developed by Japan’s Fujitsu, were behind many of the shortfalls.
Perkins was chair of the Post Office from 2011 to 2015, when the problems were emerging. She received briefings on the issues soon after starting the job, but said that she missed the importance of those warnings, and argued that the board was not kept properly informed.
“Briefings that we were given by senior executives on Horizon issues were, at critical points, incomplete, ambiguous and sometimes misleading,” she wrote in a witness statement published on Wednesday.
She also wrote that the Post Office was “being provided with inaccurate information by Fujitsu”, which was uncovered only thanks to the “tenacity of the sub-postmasters” and the work of a judge in one of the cases, who questioned their evidence.
Much of Perkins’ time as chair overlapped with Paula Vennells, who was chief executive from 2012 to 2019, and who has faced intense scrutiny over her decision to keep fighting against operators who took legal action to overturn their convictions.
Perkins wrote that she and Vennells “believed what we were saying” when they claimed there were no problems with Horizon. In tearful testimony to the inquiry last month, Vennells named five executives who she claimed had failed to provide enough information on the Horizon problems.
In her witness statement, written in March, Perkins wrote: “It would seem now that the board was indeed not given the full picture on many different occasions.”
Perkins, a former director of airports operator BAA and catalogue business Littlewoods whose husband is former foreign secretary Jack Straw, faced questions on Wednesday over why she failed to act on early warnings about problems with Horizon’s evidence, and why she appeared to try to delay the publication of an interim report by independent consultants appointed by the Post Office after pressure from MPs.
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Perkins told the inquiry she was concerned that the interim report, carried out by forensic accountancy firm Second Sight, may have contained “loose language that would be interpreted negatively for which there wasn’t a proper substantive base” and that its publication may have been “premature”.
“I was not at any point trying to bury information that might reveal that there was something wrong with Horizon,” she wrote in a witness statement published by the inquiry on Wednesday.
Perkins acknowledged the pain caused by the scandal, writing that Post Office operators’ families lives had been “wrecked”. “I am profoundly sorry for this,” she wrote. “I sincerely regret that I was unable to get to the truth of what had happened despite the actions I took to do so.”
