Crozier’s claim he was unaware of Post Office scandal undermined by letters

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BT chair Adam Crozier received letters from several MPs about problems with the Post Office’s Horizon IT system when he ran Royal Mail, undermining his insistence he was “not aware” of the scandal.

The correspondence obtained by the Financial Times includes a 2009 email from the current chancellor Jeremy Hunt raising constituents’ concerns about the Horizon system and asking how widespread the problems were.

Crozier at the time was chief executive of Royal Mail, which owned the Post Office. More than 900 Post Office branch managers were convicted in cases involving flawed data from the Horizon accounting software between 1999 and 2015, including more than 700 brought by the Post Office itself. 

The correspondence addressed to Crozier from Hunt and three other MPs calls into question the BT chair’s assertions that he had not been aware of problems that became what is now viewed as the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern British history.

In a written statement to the Post Office inquiry in February, he said: “It is a matter of huge regret for me that I was not aware of the tragic situation for Post Office sub-postmasters and their families during my time at Royal Mail.” 

Crozier added he “was not aware of any widespread issues with the functionality of Horizon during my tenure” and that he could not recall issues related to audits of the branch accounts or actions against sub-postmasters having been brought to his attention.

While shadow culture secretary in October 2009, Hunt wrote to Crozier saying: “It has been brought to my attention by some of my constituents who work for the Post Office that there have been problems with the Horizon IT System”.

He requested information about the type of issues that had arisen and “whether any problems were reported nationwide and what the current situation is regarding resolving these difficulties”.

The correspondence obtained through a Freedom of Information request shows that Crozier told Hunt he would ask the Post Office’s managing director at the time, Alan Cook, “to write back to you as quickly as possible”.

Three other MPs at the time — Lord Francis Maude, then a shadow minister, David Drew and Lord Henry Bellingham — also wrote to Crozier to raise concerns about the system in 2009, the FOI response revealed.

The documents show that a response to Drew from Cook stated that Crozier had asked the Post Office managing director to “investigate and respond to” the MP’s concerns.

Bellingham said that, during his time as MP for North West Norfolk, he handled three Horizon cases, each of which was taken up with the relevant minister and with the CEOs of the Post Office and Royal Mail.

“It is inconceivable that they can’t recall this correspondence,” he said.

Maude said he had nothing further to add. Hunt and Drew both declined to comment.

Three Post Office employees also contacted Crozier to make him aware of issues relating to Horizon, the documents showed.

Crozier, one of the UK’s most prominent businessmen, has largely managed to escape public blame for the scandal that ruined lives over decades and sparked widespread outcry this year.

He ran the Post Office’s parent company between 2003 and 2010. Today Crozier is chair of FTSE 100 companies BT and Whitbread, owner of Premier Inn, as well as research company Kantar.

The Horizon system developed by Fujitsu was introduced in 1999. The accounting software used by branch managers had bugs and defects that caused cash flow discrepancies that made it wrongly appear as though money was being stolen.

In oral testimony provided to the public inquiry into the scandal last month, Crozier suggested there was a strong degree of separation between parent company Royal Mail and the Post Office, which limited information about issues with the IT system being passed to him.

The Post Office had its own board, he noted. The businesses were fully separated in 2012 ahead of the privatisation of Royal Mail, leaving the Post Office under government ownership.

He told the inquiry he did not recall anyone within the Post Office executive, board or operations team drawing his attention to any bugs, errors or defects in Horizon.

A spokesperson for Crozier said in a statement to the FT that the former Royal Mail chief executive had “already given evidence in full to the Post Office inquiry”.

They added: “Relevant correspondence, including some of these letters, was made available by the inquiry to Adam and is consistent with his evidence to it.

“Under the separate governance of the Post Office, all correspondence and matters relating to the Post Office would have been automatically passed on to the Post Office management team to be dealt with,” the spokesperson said.

In his witness statement to the inquiry, in which he said he had been shown correspondence from which he understood that a letter had been addressed to him from one sub-postmaster in 2008, Crozier said he did “not recall receiving other letters from sub-postmasters on this topic”.

He added: “In any given week I would receive hundreds of letters, and as a result I could not read every letter, and inevitably I would have to promptly pass on correspondence to others”.

“I trusted the [Post Office] team and fully expected that my direction would be followed and any investigation would be carried out fairly,” Crozier said.