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Ed Davey: I would have ‘acted differently’ if ‘Post Office had told the truth’
Former postal affairs minister Ed Davey has said he would have “acted differently” if the “Post Office had told the truth”.
In his witness statement to the Horizon IT inquiry, he said:
With all issues in such a busy portfolio, you had to be able to rely on the advice of civil servants, and you were not in a position to dig into the detail of every question that came across your desk.
As I have stated publicly, I believe I was seriously misled by the Post Office. I do not know if one or more civil servants misled me during my time as a minister, or if they were themselves misled by the Post Office. I hope the inquiry can shed light on this.
However, if I had known then what we all know now – if the Post Office had told the truth – of course I would have acted differently.
Asked about this by Jason Beers KC, counsel to the inquiry, Davey said:
Yes, I now know I was being lied to. I follow this inquiry, and it’s pretty clear what they told my officials was not true.
Asked which executives had lied to him and his officials, Davey said:
The senior executives I dealt with were David Smith and then Paula Vennells. There may have been one or two others…. And they were the ones giving the information to my officials and to me. So they were the people passing information which was untrue.
Smith was the Post Office’s managing director between April and December 2010, and Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019.
Key events
Former subpostmaster Mark Kelly, who was falsely accused of stealing money from his post office in Swansea, said Ed Davey “should have done more” during his time as minister for postal affairs.
Speaking outside the inquiry room on Thursday, Kelly told the PA news agency:
He should have asked why (the number of prosecutions) jumped up so high. He was taking the easy way out as a minister and not looking too much, just taking civil servants as gospel.
He could and should have done more.”
Kelly also criticised Davey for his sunt-heavy style of campaigning in the run-up to this year’s election. He said: “It was quite offensive given what was coming up to today. It felt like a big joke.”
Government to announce plan for Post Office Horizon compensation in July
The government will lay out its plan for compensating subpostmasters affected by the Horizon scandal this month.
Business and trade minister Justin Madders said in the House of Commons on Thursday that the government would be outlining this by the end of July.
He said: “We intend to work cross-party, we believe that there’s absolutely no reason why that should not continue, because we absolutely agree the importance of delivering fast and fair compensation is at the heart of what we are all trying to achieve here.
“We will be making a statement by the end of the July.”
Madders said the statement would be made “by the end of summer recess”, but the Department for Business and Trade later confirmed that this was a slip of the tongue and he had meant to say “before summer recess starts”.
Davey added the Post Office being mutualised would enable post office operators to be in control.
He added we need to find ways to strengthen them and build trust in the institution, adding he “legislated for mutulisation and hopes it will be taken forward”.
Davey told the inquiry that one of the issues that arises from this “tragedy” is how the executive arm of the government department oversees arm’s length bodies.
He said the lessons from this situation is “we need to go even further and governance should look at all arm’s length bodies to ensure the governance is appropriate and the oversight is genuine, real and thorough.”
The day so far
The cabinet minister Pat McFadden has told the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal that he now wishes he had questioned the Post Office more over its “emphatic” defence of its flawed accounting software.
The Labour MP, a former postal affairs minister who is now chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster after helping mastermind Keir Starmer’s election victory, said “wrong” information on the Horizon system has had “terrible human consequences”.
The inquiry has heard months of evidence into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators on the basis of false data from Horizon. It called McFadden on Thursday because of his role in the last Labour government as a junior minister with oversight of the Post Office.
McFadden told the inquiry that ministers had no part in overseeing the Post Office’s prosecutions of post office operators, but acknowledged that he wished he had challenged those in charge at the state-owned body who insisted Horizon was robust when concerns were first raised.
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who was postal minister between May 2010 and February 2012, told the inquiry that he would have “acted differently” if the “Post Office had told the truth”. He also apologised to Sir Alan Bates for declining a meeting with him in May 2010.
UK wage growth slowed in May to the lowest level in two years amid a cooling jobs market, underscoring the challenge for the Bank of England as policymakers decide whether to cut interest rates.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show annual pay growth eased from 5.9% in the three months to April to 5.7% in the three months to May, matching City economists’ predictions.
Unemployment was unchanged from 4.4% in April, while the number of job vacancies fell by 30,000 led by dwindling demand in retail and hospitality amid a continued slowdown in hiring across the economy.
After a sharp fall in headline inflation over recent months, real wage growth taking into account the rising cost of living has strengthened. Total real pay, including bonuses, rose by 3% on the year in the three months to May. Growth was last higher in the three months to August 2021, when it was 4.5%.
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Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care! – JK
The inquiry has heard that Priti Patel tried to arrange a meeting with former minister for postal affairs Ed Davey in 2010 about concerns regarding one of her constituents having issues with the Horizon IT system.
A letter addressed to the then secretary of state asked if a meeting could be set up with the incoming postal minister (Davey). It is dated one day before Alan Bates’s letter.
Davey said the letter was not brought to his attention, though it probably should have been, and he was not aware she was “seeking a meeting”.
Ed Davey is shown a letter from Alan Bates on 20 May 2010, the day he took up his role as postal affairs minister, where Bates presents the issues and asks for a meeting. Bates said he was part of a group of close to 100 subpostmasters who “have found that there is nowhere else to turn for help”. He wrote:
In every instance the Post Office acts as a judge, jury and executioner and the individual is deserted by their reputedly representative organisation, the National Federation of Subpostmasters.
The inquiry is then shown Davey’s short response (less than half a page).
He agrees that it is a “terse reply” but insists that he does not remember reading Bates’ first letter, and may have just signed his response without seeing the original letter.
I do not remember reading his first letter. I remember the second letter … I have apologised and I repeat that apology for not meeting Mr Bates on the basis of his first letter.
In his written statement to the inquiry, Davey denied meeting Bates eventually for presentational reasons.
As far as I can remember, that briefing – long after the meeting had been arranged – was the first time that ‘presentational reasons’ for the meeting were mentioned to me.
They were certainly not the reason I decided to meet Sir Alan Bates following his second letter.
As set out above, I told officials I wanted to meet him because I could see he was cross at my initial response and wanted to hear his concerns directly.
Ed Davey: I would have ‘acted differently’ if ‘Post Office had told the truth’
Former postal affairs minister Ed Davey has said he would have “acted differently” if the “Post Office had told the truth”.
In his witness statement to the Horizon IT inquiry, he said:
With all issues in such a busy portfolio, you had to be able to rely on the advice of civil servants, and you were not in a position to dig into the detail of every question that came across your desk.
As I have stated publicly, I believe I was seriously misled by the Post Office. I do not know if one or more civil servants misled me during my time as a minister, or if they were themselves misled by the Post Office. I hope the inquiry can shed light on this.
However, if I had known then what we all know now – if the Post Office had told the truth – of course I would have acted differently.
Asked about this by Jason Beers KC, counsel to the inquiry, Davey said:
Yes, I now know I was being lied to. I follow this inquiry, and it’s pretty clear what they told my officials was not true.
Asked which executives had lied to him and his officials, Davey said:
The senior executives I dealt with were David Smith and then Paula Vennells. There may have been one or two others…. And they were the ones giving the information to my officials and to me. So they were the people passing information which was untrue.
Smith was the Post Office’s managing director between April and December 2010, and Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019.
Ed Davey apologises to Bates for declining meeting
Back to the Horizon inquiry.
Ed Davey said he was “deeply sorry for the individuals and families who have had their lives ruined” by the scandal, and that it took him five months to meet Sir Alan Bates, the subpostmaster who spearheaded a campaign for justice. The Liberal Democrats leader was postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012.
He apologised to Bates for declining a meeting with him in May 2010 and saying “I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose”.
He said in his written submission to the inquiry:
The Post Office Horizon scandal is the greatest miscarriage of justice of our time, and I am deeply sorry for the individuals and families who have had their lives ruined by it.
As one of the ministers over the 20 years of this scandal who had postal affairs as part of my ministerial responsibilities, I am sorry that it took me five months to meet Sir Alan Bates, the man who has done so much to uncover all this, and that I did not see through the Post Office’s lies when I and my officials raised his concerns with them.
Davey also said that he was not aware that the Post Office and Royal Mail Group themselves investigated, prosecuted and obtained convictions against sub postmasters. Some people in the room shook their heads when this was read out by Jason Beers KC.
Davey told the inquiry:
If I had known about it [the private prosecutions] I would have been surprised… It seems quite an old fashioned thing to do.
Now we know that it was wrong and it seems that power should be taken away. I wasn’t aware and it seems odd that they were.
ECB keeps interest rates unchanged
In other news, the European Central Bank has held interest rates unchanged, as expected. President Christine Lagarde will explain the bank’s thinking behind the decision in a press conference in half an hour, and markets will be hoping for clues on when the next rate cut might come – possibly in September?
The former postal affairs minister Pat McFadden also told the Horizon IT inquiry he does not believe making ministers “shadow chief executives” to prevent the bosses of state-owned companies going “rogue” would work in practice.
I’m not sure in practice, given the number of arm’s length bodies there are, that ministers really can act as shadow chief executives of them.
Which begs the question ‘what do you do when one goes rogue? – if it’s not a minister sitting on a chief executive’s shoulder, what is it?
I wonder if it’s worth considering some sort of body that’s established to do precisely this, that can be called in to launch an inquiry or take action when the level of allegations reaches such a point that it looks like that is the right thing to do.
This is a live and real policy question which has been exposed by this scandal and I’m glad you’re considering it going forward but I’m not sure making ministers shadow chief executives is going to be the practical way to do this.
Pat McFadden has also said that he is unsure when “blind faith” from the Post Office in its IT system turned into something “more sinister where people are just not telling the truth.”
He told the Horizon IT inquiry:
My reflection on this after all these years is clearly those responses were wrong.
The evidence being used in the court to prosecute the subpostmasters has turned out to be wrong and was proven to be wrong in the cases that overturned these judgments many years later.
What I’m not clear about is in what point in this story does blind faith from the Post Office in their IT system turn into something more sinister where people are just not telling the truth.
Now I don’t know at what point that happens but it’s something I’m sure the inquiry will want to get to the bottom of.
McFadden says he wishes he had challenged Post Office more, but it gave ’emphatic defence’ of Horizon system
Jasper Jolly
A lot of the pre-lunch questioning of Pat McFadden, a former postal affairs minister who ran Labour’s election campaign and is now a member of Keir Starmer’s government, focused on what warnings he received about possible problems with the Horizon system.
That included the letter from former home secretary Jacqui Smith on behalf of a constituent, and another from Brian Binley, an MP at the time, forwarding a letter from Computer Weekly journalist Rebecca Thomson. In that 2009 letter, Thomson wrote:
“The Post Office refuses even to entertain the possibility that their system could be going wrong.”
McFadden said that he wished that he had challenged the Post Office more on its insistence that the Horizon system was robust. However, he said he was reliant on the Post Office, which gave an “emphatic defence” of the system.
Asked about a particular letter, he said:
The Post Office kept insisting that the system was robust and fit for purpose.
The terrible thing is that those court judgments were found to be unsafe and unsound. I did not know that at the time.
With this particular letter, I’m not sure, because it was so emphatic, but if you ask me over the whole story here, of course I wish I had done more to question these responses. I believe if I had I would have got the same response from the Post Office.
Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was postal affairs minister between May 2010 and February 2012, is now being questioned by Jason Beer KC, counsel to the Horizon inquiry.
