Outgoing chief says Post Office ignored extent of IT scandal

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The Post Office’s outgoing chief executive has accused his employer of “living in a dream world” about the scale of the Horizon IT scandal when he was recruited to lead the state-owned company.

Nick Read said on Wednesday that, when he applied for the top role, the job description did not mention litigation being brought against the Post Office by 555 current and former sub-postmasters.

Many had been wrongfully prosecuted by the company over financial shortfalls. Just three months after Read joined in September 2019, a landmark High Court case established that accounting shortfalls alleged by the Post Office were based on faulty data from its Horizon IT system, and the company reached a £58mn settlement with the 555 sub-postmasters.

Asked at a hearing of the Horizon public inquiry on Wednesday if his description of the Post Office’s leadership in 2019 reflected a company that “was living in something of a dream world”, Read said: “It would be impossible not to conclude that.”

Read, who will leave as chief executive in March, said in a statement published by the inquiry: “I had no indication that a significant part of my role would be a profound cultural change of the scale needed, dealing with the litigation or its implications, or in delivering a large-scale IT transformation [to replace Horizon].

“These issues were never presented to me as priorities during the interview process,” he added.

The ruling by the High Court in 2019 paved the way for some sub-postmasters to have their convictions overturned, in what has since become a highly public scandal that exposed one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history.

This year, the previous Conservative government set out emergency legislation to quash en masse the more than 700 convictions between 2000 and 2014 of theft or false accounting that used flawed data from Fujitsu’s Horizon software. It also pledged to speed up compensation payments.

Although the prosecutions of sub-postmasters ended before Read took charge, he has been criticised for his handling of the fallout, including for accepting bonuses while sub-postmasters struggled to obtain compensation.

Sir Wyn Williams, inquiry chair, said on Wednesday that he understood a former sub-postmaster in Lincolnshire, Gillian Blakey, had died without receiving the full compensation to which she was entitled.

Blakey had lost her job and her husband had been prosecuted based on data from Horizon, Williams said.