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The Post Office is still struggling to gain the trust of staff as they continue to report problems with its scandal-struck Horizon IT system, the state-owned company’s outgoing chief executive has admitted.
Nick Read on Wednesday said the Post Office had “more to do” to win over sub-postmasters after hundreds were wrongfully convicted between 2000 and 2014 of theft or false accounting, based on faulty data from Fujitsu’s Horizon software.
Read’s comments to the public inquiry into one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history came as continuing tensions between the Post Office and the Japanese technology company were laid bare.
“We’re obviously not getting through to everybody,” said Read, who will leave the company in March. “We have more to do to try . . . and win the confidence of postmasters”, who run Post Office branches.
The comments by Read came after he was pressed on a YouGov survey of 1,483 Post Office sub-postmasters that found almost 70 per cent had experienced an unexplained financial shortfall on the Horizon system since 2020. The Post Office is at present trying to replace the system.
About three-quarters said they had resolved the problem using branch money or by themselves, with some using their own money to rectify discrepancies.
Emails between the Post Office and Fujitsu from this year, which were seen by the inquiry, showed a recent investigation by the City of London Police into a Post Office branch.
Read insisted the Post Office would never again take postmasters to court, as it had via private prosecutions, but said it would seek assistance to comply with requests from the police, even if its relationship with Fujitsu was “defensive and suspicious”.
Although the prosecutions of sub-postmasters ended before Read took charge, he has been criticised for his handling of the fallout, including accepting bonuses while sub-postmasters struggled to obtain compensation.
Read told the inquiry that, when he was appointed chief executive in September 2019, the job description did not mention litigation being brought against the Post Office by 555 current and former sub-postmasters.
Three months later, a landmark High Court case established that accounting shortfalls alleged by the Post Office were probably based on faulty data from Horizon, and the company reached a £58mn settlement with the 555 sub-postmasters.
Asked if his description in a written statement 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.”
Earlier this year, the then Conservative government set out emergency legislation to quash en masse convictions of sub-postmasters and pledged to speed up compensation payments.