The Guardian’s chief reporter Daniel Boffey has written up his report on today’s hearing, which you can find here:

Jason Beer KC has listed several occasions when it appears that Paula Vennells had been informed remote access was possible.

She said “I did not reach a conclusion that meant that I was giving inaccurate information to the select committee, that is not something which I would have done.”

She insists that because of initially a lack of technical understanding in 2011 and because she had been reassured by the CIO in 2014 that it couldn’t be done, “I had no idea at any time that a balancing transaction could have been used in the multiple ways that it was.”

Jason Beer KC points out the briefing has at point three said “there is no access” then further on says if they are pushed on it, to concede that there is functionality. “Is that the way the Post Office operated?” he asks her.

He then goes on to say that “because of rules concerning parliamentary privilege, I’m not permitted to ask you questions, the effects of which would be to impeach or to question the evidence that you gave to parliament on 3 February 2015.”

He says instead the inquiry has asked Paula Vennells to address “what your state of mind, what your belief was at 10 o’clock on the morning of the third of February.”

He then says:

You say at 10am on 3 February 2015 I believed it to be true that there was no functionality in Horizon for either branches, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it had been recorded in a branches account.

My belief was based on the material provided to me in advance of the Select Committee set out above, and that includes the addendum document that we’ve just looked at.

How could you believe that there was no functionality to remove transaction data, once it had been recorded in the branch’s accounts in the light of the addendum briefing that you received? Which said that balancing transactions could be undertaken which involved editing manipulating or removing transaction data?

She says she wouldn’t have considered a strategy like that. Paula Vennells says:

You can’t do that. It’s like sitting here today. You can’t come into these sorts of very high pressure environments with a strategy of how you’re going to handle it.

She says “I would respond to the questions as they were asked”

Paula Vennells is being shown a briefing document which Jason Beer KC says shows she had four lines to hold on remote access when talking to MPs, and then more information to disclose “if pushed”.

At the start of today’s proceedings Jason Beer KC asked Paula Vennells if she was the unluckiest CEO in the UK. If it turns out Rishi Sunak is about to call a snap general election on the day she started giving three days evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, she might turn out to have been very lucky indeed in terms of media attention that will be afforded to her.

Paula Vennells is being directed to a document where she said she needed to be able to say remote access was not possible. Jason Beer KC asks “Why did you need to be able to say no, its not possible?”

She says:

I expected that this might be a question, as you explained before, that would come up, and my understanding was that it was not possible. And so I wanted to be able to say that. But what I also wanted to be able to do was to explain why I knew that was the case.

I phrased this point very specifically … if you want to get the truth and a really clear answer from somebody, you should tell them what it is you want to say very clearly, and then ask for the information that backs that up. That was why I phrased this that way.

Beer says “It’s an old way of going about things. It want to answer a question. Here’s the answer to the question. Tell me I’m wrong.”

There is laughter again from those watching again.

She says “this was a very genuine attempt” by her to find out the answer to that question.

He says wouldn’t the “honest and straightforward thing” have been to put a question mark at the end of a question, instead of phrasing it the way she did.

This is very difficult ground for Paula Vennells now. Jason Beer KC is saying to her that in her witness statement she says she followed up about Fujitsu remote access in 2014, and after she confirms she had heard of it and discussed it with Lesley Sewell, the former head of IT at the Post Office, Beer says to her:

You know that this issue that we’re addressing now is directly relevant to evidence that you were subsequently to give to parliament.

There is a long pause. She replies eventually that it was only after she left the business she came to understand about a the facility to remotely access accounts without the subpostmaster knowing.

Quite aside from all of that, you agree that on the face of the board briefing, you had no information at all on which to conclude whether and to what extent, Fujitsu had used balancing transactions before 2008.

Senior Post Office figures repeatedly seemed to believe that the facility had been used only once in 2010, and with permission.

Beer quotes one witness describing the situation before 2010 being “the Wild West” with Fujitsu’s ability to insert unregulated, unaudited and unauditable.

Jason Beer KC has produced a “Horizon desktop review” document from 2014, the Deloitte briefing document which went to the board, and notes that in the limitations of the report it stated “we’ve not validated whether Horizon has been implemented or operated as described in the documentation”. No testing was undertaken. He says that was quite a limitation of the report. Paula Vennells agrees. He says the report just looked at pieces of paper about how Horizon was supposed to work, rather than look at what it actually did.

The inquiry has now resumed for what is likely to be the last session of the day. It normally finishes about 4.30pm each day. Jason Beer KC continues to question former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells.

It is not just this live blogger feeling the length of the day, here is Nick Wallis who writes the Post Office scandal blog …

The appearance of Paula Vennells at the inquiry has not impressed some of the most high profile victims of the scandal today. Seema Misra has said she believes there is still a “cover up and denial” going on.

She told PA “It’s a cover up and denial, it’s still a cover up, that’s what my take is. Was she emotional due to the scandal or the warnings she had been given before? They still don’t accept it, how on earth did authorities in high positions not know how the company works?”

Misra was jailed in 2010.

Lee Castleton, made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office over an alleged £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004, said he did have some empathy for Vennells, though.

“She’ll never shed as many as I have, I’m afraid, or my family, or the rest of the victims or the wider group. Not that I have no empathy for that, because I do, I understand completely. I’d imagine a lot of it’s nerves too and doing her best. I think she’s got a need or want to do the right thing.”

He added “She’s got a huge opportunity to get what she sees as the truth out there. I think it’s a huge stage for her, I think the paperwork is fantastic, to see what was being written at the time it’s really, really important for us to see that. And what she remembers really is kind of a background for me, the actual verbal evidence is not really that important.”

The inquiry is now taking a mid-afternoon break and will resume in ten minutes or so.

This is a testy exchange here. Jason Beer KC is speaking about Paula Vennells’ witness statement and says:

This is one of the incidents that I refer to earlier as exculpatory evidence for you, i.e. you receive something in writing that’s very serious, and warrants attention. You say you spoke to somebody that reassured and calmed you, but there’s no record of it?

Jason Beer KC quotes a letter from an Ernst and Young IT audit of the Post Officer systems from 2011 and says:

The risk identified by Ernst and Young was that unrestricted access to privileged IT functions increase the risk of unauthorised or inappropriate access, which could lead to the processing of unauthorised or erroneous transactions. It’s implicit in that, that a form of remote access by Fujitsu is possible, isn’t it?

Paula Vennells says:

Reading that today, with everything we know, yes absolutely. I am not sure at the time that I would have understood that.

She goes on to say “this was the first time I had come across an IT audit. And I think this is the time that I asked for a briefing document to explain to me the issues that were being raised in the audit. I accept fully that this is what the document said. How much of that I really understood at the time I’m not sure.”

Wyn Williams intervenes and says in a way that suggests he hasn’t found this passage from Vennells entirely credible:

Just so that I understand, is the gloss you’re putting on it – can I summarise it in this way? – anyone with the relevant knowledge and expertise in the Post Office reading that Ernst and Young report would have understood it as Mr Beer described, [but] you are introducing from your personal point of view, in effect, a caveat as to whether you understood it in that way at that time.

Jason Beer KC is telling Paula Vennells that the Post Office seemed to have loads of “folklore” about the Horizon IT system and prosecutions that were effectively false statements, that it had never lost a court case, that Horizon had no faults, that the contract meant subpostmasters had to “make good” all losses, and that no remote access is possible for either the Post Office or Fujitsu. All of these things turn out to be false, he says.

Vennells says:

So the answer for all of them would be to look for where the expertise sat within the organisation as to the genesis. It’s a serious issue if folklore develops, which in fact has no foundation in fact, I agree.

Jason Beer KC is now to address the question of what Paula Vennells knew and when about the remote access that Fujitsu had to the Horizon IT system.

There is laughter in the room again when Paula Vennells says she does not recall what she did after an email from campaigner Tim McCormack in 2015 that said he had concrete proof of a fault in the Horizon IT system,

In it he said the options were his letter to her, he go to the press, or everybody waits until she has to appear before “the inevitable judicial review where you will be personally exposed and perhaps leave yourself open to criminal charges.”

She told the inquiry:

You will find an email from me, I don’t know if it’s a response to this, where I say to my team, we must take M. McCormack professionally. And I can’t remember the other words I used, no matter how rude people were. And sometimes it felt like that, because he would say other things.

She continued “in hindsight, he was … I think he was right.”

She is then shown another internal email where the document has been forwarded on and McCormack is called by Rodric Williams a “bluffer”, and is asked if that was her view. There is more laughter when Jason Beer KC then says:

In his email, he said, you, the chief executive, are not getting the right advice from the people you surrounded yourself with. This email then gets forwarded to the people that you’ve surrounded yourself with. Can you see a problem?

Awkward moments for Paula Vennells here as she is being asked about documents that have been seen several times before by the inquiry. She replied to her staff about one complaint about scratchcards from a branch in Chesterfield that “this complaint simply shouldn’t have reached me”. It goes on to talk about not wanting any additional “noise” about the Horizon IT system.

She says the words were “unwise” but “It did not in any way mean that I personally didn’t take issue seriously when they got to me. I regret this here, but there was an understanding that the system worked.”

Jason Beer KC is now trying to establish whether Paula Vennells took more seriously complaints when they came via an MP rather than when her office was directly contacted by a subpostmaster.

She says she believes there was a system that flagged up correspondence from MPs to keep a wider group of people in the loop. She says she can’t be sure if she saw the letter in question. She said personally it wouldn’t have made any difference to her feelings that it was from an MP.

She was asked “Was there a way of keeping you informed, essentially, of the temperature of the business in relation to this issue?”

She replied “This could have been done much better. There wasn’t a regular report on it,” and suggests that when you put all the complaints together it paints “a very different picture” to people receiving them among all other correspondence over a long period of time.

One thing that has been notable about Paula Vennells testimony today is she has referred back to comments made by other witnesses at the inquiry, suggesting she or someone on her legal team have been following proceedings quite closely. Not all witnesses have given that impression.

Paula Vennells is being shown an email by Tim McCormack which outlined intermittent problems with Horizon IT system, and is asked how she responded to it and what to do about it.

She says she believes they picked up and responded to all his queries, but she also says that his tone “became difficult to deal with”. She says “I understand today exactly why that’s the case.”

Paula Vennells says she cannot recall now what she understood the wording of the subpostmasters contract to have been at that time, saying “I would have completely relied on the people whose job it was to determine what the contract did or didn’t say and how it was applied. I trusted this was a process that had been in place for many years, and it was run by an experienced team.”

Jason Beer KC’s first line of inquiry this afternoon is around a complaint that was sent to Paula Vennells’ office, and which is about the widely understood contractual obligation for subpostmasters to “make good” any losses. This was widely understood by the Post Office to mean that “subpostmasters had to make good all losses, ie irrespective of the cause of them” which isn’t actually what the document said, but appears to have been what the Post Office enforced out of court for years.

In her first written witness statement to the inquiry, which is 775 pages long, Paula Vennells said the first she was aware that anyone was questioning Horizon was after a Computer Weekly article was published in May 2009.

She said the article was raised by Mike Young at a meeting of the executive management team who said it was “critical of Horizon and had been picked up by a Welsh language television station”.

Vennells added: “I remember this reasonably well because Mike was dismissive of Computer Weekly. I recall he said it was a trade magazine that did not know what it was talking about in relation to Horizon. Mike said he was handling it.”

Jason Beer KC is now going through a number of complaints that were sent to Paula Vennells during this period, and a thematic summing up of them sent to her in a spreadsheet. At the time Vennells said she found eight cases sent to her as “very disturbing.”

She also apologised to subpostmasters again, saying she understood the fact that cases had been anonymised to be numbers had caused offence and made people feel dehumanised and she said that wasn’t the intention, but the intention had been to protect personal details.

She breaks down again after Beer asks her “What happened between you finding these eight cases very disturbing and you shutting down the mediation scheme. When did they cease to become very disturbing?”

PA Media has a full transcript of an exchange that earlier raised laughter in the room, with at least 30 victims of the scandal present at the inquiry.

Paula Vennells said she did not agree with a sentiment expressed by former managing director Alan Cook when he sent an email she was copied into referring to “subbies with their hands in the till”.

Jason Beer KC asked: “Was that a sentiment that you agreed with?”

Vennells responded: “No, I never used the word subbies, I thought it was completely the wrong word.”

Beer then provoked laughter by asking: “What about the more important thing about them having their hands in the till?”

Vennells replied: “I beg your pardon, I wasn’t avoiding answering that question – neither – either calling them subbies or having their hands in the till.”

Paula Vennells is being shown a passage of her witness statement which mentions there being 600+ bugs and defects in the Horizon IT system and being asked where she got that number from.

She says “I can’t remember, but its a recent understanding.”

Jason Beer KC shows her a paper from 2018 which suggested there were “672 bugs in Horizon over the last 18 years” and asks if she got the number from there.

Beer appears to be clarifying that this is “after-acquired knowledge” rather than something she knew at the time. This appears to have been a bit of a dead end.

Paula Vennells is being shown an email chain from 2009 sent to her which includes the phrase “There’s a steady building nervousness about the accuracy of the Horizon system” and also “the author of the email below was a very senior subpostmaster who I know well, but whose wife was found to be defrauding us, and we have prosecuted.”

Her attention is particularly drawn to having read the words “we have prosecuted” with that emphasis, and she is asked by Jason Beer KC what she thought was meant by that.

She said “[That the] postmaster was prosecuted by external authorities and the case was made by the Post Office. I wouldn’t have read into that that the Post Office was the prosecuting authority.”

Beer says he know wants to explore her knowledge of “bugs, errors and defects”.

The inquiry has restarted for the third morning session.

Sky News has been interviewing some victims of the scandal. One has said that this was “an opportunity for her to show humanity” but they were not “real tears” and described it as “a mega-performance” and “lies from the start”.

John Hyde, deputy news editor for Law Society Gazette, is at the hearing and he says that Alan Bates is looking “rather pleased with how things are going”.

Paula Vennells says it was “completely unacceptable” that she didn’t know the Post Office handled its own prosecutions after she is asked by Jason Beer KC who “this little backwater of activity” was going on “without anyone at a senior level seemingly knowing about it.”

My only explanation for that is that it had been going on for so long, that it was an accepted reality. It was a status quo when I joined.

A lot of witnesses to the inquiry tangentially related to the prosecutorial function have all maintained they thought it was being done by somebody else.

The chair Wyn Williams stages one of his rare interventions to ask his own question. He asks the very simple question of how it can be that Seema Misra’s case attracted a large amount of publicity in 2010, yet nobody in senior management seemed to understand amid all that it was the business bringing the case, not the CPS or another authority.

He then also raises that during the whole process of separating out the Post Office and Royal Mail as different business entities, there must have some discussion about who would be continuing to carry out the prosecutions.

Vennells insists this was never discussed at board level.

Beer has drawn laughs from the attendees at Aldwych with the question:

Why didn’t you say to John [Scott, former head of security], I’ve been in the organisation five or six years now, I didn’t know you had a team of 100 people that were investigating up and down the country subpostmasters and sending them to prison. How come I didn’t know?

When the laughter subsides he continues with this line:

Dozens of prosecutions occurred when you were network director. Dozens of prosecutions occurred when you were managing director. Collectively hundreds of prosecutions went on, conducted by the Post Office, having been investigated by the Post Office, and you didn’t know about it until 2012?

The inquiry has broken for another short morning break.

“Who did you think was doing the investigating” Paula Vennells is asked, as she is shown minutes of a meeting in 2008 where she is being briefed about Post Office investigators. Jason Beer KC is trying to draw out of Vennells how she can maintain she did not know about the prosecuting powers until later when she must have known the Post Office employed investigators.

Paula Vennells agress that when she joined the Post Office she had “no understanding of the board’s responsibility for the oversight of criminal investigations process, and nor did in fact, you appreciate you say even that it brought its own prosecution assessment.”

She goes on to say that “When I joined, I was not aware that there were differences in terms of the different nations in the UK having different approaches to that.”

In England and Wales the Post Office acted as prosecutor, but in Scotland it was the procurators fiscal who did so under Post Office advice. Scottish subpostmasters have their own legal representation at the inquiry who may question Vennells during the course of this week. Previous witness appearances have established that the corporate centre of the Post Office, based in England, did not appear to have anybody who specialised or had trained in the law of Scotland.

Jason Beer KC is asking Paula Vennells whether she prioritised brand and reputation over the subpostmasters’ suffering. “Were you preoccupied with the notion of protecting public money?” he asks.

Jason Beer KC says he now wants to move on to the nature of memory in the witness statements of Paula Vennells.

He says “Why is it that in your witness statements when you refer to a recollection of a conversation that’s unlimited or undocumented, not referred to in any email, there are always things that exculpate you, that reduce your blameworthiness.

She says “that isn’t the approach I’ve taken.”

Beer continues “Some might say that that has been the same approach by others who have given evidence in the inquiry. They have great difficulty in remembering things unless it paints them in a favourable light.”

Vennells says “My approach to this is, I hope, with integrity.”

Those of you who have been watching the inquiry for any length of time will appreciate the slight exasperation in Beer’s voice here, as the evidence has been littered with people insisting they do not recall meetings or conversations, did not read emails or documents sent to them, or did not understand the functions of parts of the business that they were responsible for.

Beer is now turning to ask about Vennells’ experience when she was recruited into the role of CEO at the Post Office.

Paula Vennells tells the inquiry that all she was trying to do in 2013 after Martin Griffiths took his own life was “to get the wider picture and not to be able to understand particularly the very difficult challenges that Mr Bates had levelled at some Post Office colleagues.”

In a letter to Post Office executives Alan Bates had said Griffiths attempting suicide was a “prime example of the thuggery being exerted on defenceless subpostmasters … by arrogant and uncontrolled Post Office personnel”.

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Just a reminder one of the reasons this case is considered so egregious by campaigners is because the Post Office subsequently put Griffiths’ widow under an NDA and appeared to string out. My colleague Jane Croft wrote this when Angela van den Bogerd gave evidence in April:

The inquiry heard that Griffiths and his mother had both written to the Post Office earlier in 2013 about the “severe pressure” and “worry” that he was experiencing due to the £39,000 shortfall, which he blamed on software errors.

Griffiths’ parents had used their life savings to repay back thousands of pounds of his purported shortfalls, the inquiry heard. The Post Office was also demanding Griffiths pay back £7,500 after an armed robbery at his branch for which he had been partly blamed because he had failed to follow certain security procedures, the inquiry heard.

Griffiths attempted suicide on 23 September 2013 and died in hospital weeks later.

The Post Office eventually offered his widow, Gina Griffiths, £140,000 in a settlement agreement and insisted she sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). An internal document said “staged payments” had been agreed “which we asked for as an incentive for Mrs Griffiths maintaining confidentiality”.

Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, asked Van den Bogerd whether the Post Office was using the “drip feeding of money” to Griffiths’ widow “as a means of ensuring she keeps it [his case] hushed up”.

“‘You don’t get any more money unless you keep quiet.’ That’s what this is, isn’t it?,” Beer put to her.

Paula Vennells is arguing that at the time of the death of Martin Griffiths, who took his own life, it was “unhelpful” that Alan Bates and the Justice For Subpostmaster Alliance were apportioning blame.

Vennells says Bates was “rightly very, very angry about this” but “I wanted to both understand and care for Post Office colleagues, but also the relationship with Alan because we were in the process of trying to work with Alan and Second Sight on some of the issues.”

The documentation that Jason Beer KC is showing are emails within the Post Office trying to establish if there were “other factors” in the death of Griffiths.

Vennells is shown that at one point she wrote “Can you let me know what background we have on Martin, and how and why this might have happened. I had heard, but have yet to see a formal report. that there were previous mental health issues, and potential family issues.”

She says to the inquiry “I had as chief executive to pass this information on to group executive board colleagues. Mr Bates had said that the post office was to blame …"

She tails off and there is a long pause before she says “It doesn’t matter. I simply should not have said it. I shouldn’t have used these words.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The Communication Workers Union has posted to social media to contrast Paula Vennells crying at the inquiry with a previous lack of concern. It wrote:

No tears when postmasters were tragically taking their own lives due to stress. No tears when postmasters were being jailed. No tears when postmasters had their whole communities turning against them. Tears now are too late. Paula Vennells must be held to account.

Paula Vennells says she is sorry about Martin Griffiths, and that “just sounds too shallow”. There is a long pause while Vennells cries at this point.

She says “Every email you will see from me about Mr. Griffiths I start with him and how he was, or his family. The Post Office took far too long to deal with it.”

Jason Beer KC is now looking at correspondence surrounding the death of Martin Griffiths. He was a subpostmaster who took his own life after he had been pursued for a supposed shortfall amounting to £100,000 at his post office in Cheshire, which had also been the location of an armed raid.

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Jason Beer KC has asked if there was any system in place for the board to be informed if a criminal or civil case was not successful. Paula Vennells said reports of that nature never came to board level. “I don’t believe there was [a system],” she says, “and there should have been.”

Beer is trying to find out where Vennells got her 100% success claim from. She says it is important to remember that at the time she did not think it was false information.

“It must be clear I’m not implying anything here at all in terms of Susan Crichton,” says Vennells, before pretty much implying it was Crichton’s fault that Vennells presented false information to MPs.

The inquiry has resumed its morning session. I’ll bring you key lines as they emerge.

In her short statement at the start of the hearing, Paula Vennells made reference to victim impact statements heard by the inquiry. Here is a video of some of them put together by the inquiry.

Chair Wyn Williams complains something is dripping on him in the Aldwych hearing room. Jason Beer KC quips that he doesn’t think it is acceptable for the chair to be water-tortured during the hearing and they opt to take a break. It is a timely moment for Paula Vennells, who appeared to start crying as it was being put to her that she had misled MPs in 2012 about the Post Office’s 100% success rate with convictions in cases involving the Horizon IT system.

Paula Vennells disagrees with evidence Jason Beer KC reads out from Alisdair Cameron, Post Office group chief financial officer, who said that he believed that even when she left the Post Office in 2019 Vennells “did not believe that there had been any miscarriages of justice.”

She is being pressed on having said to MPs in 2012 “every case taken to prosecution that involves the Horizon system thus far has found in favour of the Post Office.”

Beer lists a number of acquittals prior to that date.

Vennells is emotional for the first time visibly, and says “The Post Office knew that. I completely accept that. Personally I didn’t know that. And I’m incredibly sorry.”

She is now being taken to a briefing pack she was given ahead of that meeting. Beer is asking where in the pack did it say any of the things Vennells had said in the meeting.

Paula Vennells says she finds it “unacceptable” that her colleagues at the time did not fully disclose to her legal advice about the use of Fujitsu expert witness Gareth Jenkins, who the Post Office was advised to stop using as he had failed to disclose bugs in Horizon at a court case.

Jason Beer KC asked whether she thought people were protecting her from “information that you would find difficult to hear.”

He said “the account that you give him is very different from what the documents reveal.”

“This reads badly today” Paula Vennells says of an email shown to her when reports of Horizon problems were being dismissed because, as she puts it, “the vast majority of people operating in the business had not encountered the same issue.”

The note says “our priority is to protect the business and the thousands who operated under the same rules and didn’t get into difficulties.”

Jason Beer KC has put it to her that even her apology puts the prosecution scandal down to Horizon IT system, rather than the senior people involved.

He asked whether the message from the Post Office to subpostmasters was “The system works for everyone else. It’s just you that’s the problem, not the system.”

She says she is very sorry if that was the case. We have repeatedly heard that the Post Office helpline told subpostmasters experiencing problems with the Horizon IT system were the only ones it was happening to.

Jason Beer KC has asked Paula Vennells whether she has been adopting a “wait and see” attitude to the inquiry. Did she, he says, run with the idea of “Let’s see what comes out in evidence. See what I’ve got to admit to. And then I’ll admit that.”

He seems somewhat frustrated that she took seven months to submit a 775 page witness statement, when, to his reading, it doesn’t contain reflection. He tells Vennells “you not have reflected on what you should have done fully and differently within the witness statement.”

As a reminder, last week, Beer was frustrated that Vennells had supplied a tranche of a further 50 documents to the inquiry. Late disclosure of documents has been a persistent theme of the inquiry.

In a testy exchange Paula Vennells has argued that she couldn’t be responsible for not finding out things that weren’t being revealed to her. She said:

That there is an issue of unknown unknowns. If you don’t know something exists, it’s difficult to ask questions about it.

She is arguing there was no “corporate memory” to have informed her decisions, saying:

One of the biggest lessons for governance in this was when I joined the Post Office in 2007 there was absolutely no corporate memory … of the inception of the horizon system. I had no idea that it was a system that had been designed for completely different purposes.

Jason Beer KC has pushed back on that:

You say the corporate memory didn’t exist. All of the documents were there. We’ve got them.

At the moment it would appear that Vennells is going to push the line that information was withheld from her, and keeps casting forward as if the inquiry is looking to make general recommendations about corporate governance, rather than potentially deliver a verdict that might lead to the police and CPS being interested in some of the witnesses, including herself.

Here is the exchange of messages the inquiry has just seen between Paula Vennells and Moya Greene.

Jason Beer KC is showing a recent exchange of messages between Paula Vennells and Moya Greene, former CEO of Royal Mail, in which Greene suggests Vennells must have known more than she was letting on about the Horizon IT system and its unreliability, saying “How could you not have known?.”

Beer has been critical here of the fact that Vennells has exchanged a lot of text messages with people involved in the inquiry. Alwen Lyons yesterday told the inquiry she ended up blocking Vennells’ number because she was contacting her over the last couple of years.

Jason Beer KC is summing up what Paula Vennells has just said, that she didn’t have “line of sight” of the impact of how people could be impacted at an individual level. He put it to her:

You don’t believe that was a conspiracy to deny you information and documents. The reason such information and documents didn’t reach you was the way that the company was organised and structured.

Vennells repeats that she has now seen documents which she says show “I think colleagues did know more information that was shared.”

Jason Beer KC opened his questioning of Paula Vennells by asking her, in light of all the documents and statements and reports she claims she did not see in her witness statement, whether she was “the unluckiest CEO in the UK.”

He has then listed a large number of documents, reports and advices that the inquiry has seen many times, and is establishing that Vennells appears to be claiming that she did not see or read any of these key documents while she was CEO, and saw them or read them for the first time when they were disclosed to her as part of this inquiry.

Vennells said “As the inquiry has heard, there was information I wasn’t given and others didn’t receive as well. One of my reflections of all of this – I was too trusting.”

After Paula Vennells was given the reminder about self-incrimination by Wyn Williams, she said that she intended to answer all the questions. The warning has been given by the chair to several witnesses. Journalist Nick Wallis, who has been reporting on the scandal for years, notes on social media “This indicates she is a person of interest to the police and CPS.”

Jason Beer KC is asking the questions today as expected. They are going through some corrections and changes to Vennells’ two witness statements. The first statement she gave to the inquiry was from March of this year and is 775 pages long. The second was from April is an additional 23 pages.

Vennells has said she would like to make a short statement in person before the questions.

Several of the victims of the scandal will be at the hearing in person in London today. Former subpostmaster Seema Misra called on Paula Vennells to “speak truth”.

Misra, who ran a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, was jailed in 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000. She was pregnant at the time.

Asked what she would say to Vennells, Misra told the PA news agency outside Aldwych House on Wednesday: “Please, for god’s sake, speak truth. That’s what we all deserve, we’ve been fighting such a long time. We want to know exactly what happened.”

Former subpostmaster Lee Castleton said he is “really looking forward” to Vennell’s evidence.

Castleton, from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004. He was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office.

He told the PA news agency: “I’m really looking forward to listen to what she has to say. It’s a good platform for her to finally speak. She’s not been able to, for whatever reason, speak for all these years. I think it’s important that she is listened to and heard and then we can all judge that. Let’s hear what, why and when, and who – who was involved in those decisions, why those decisions were made.”

He urged her to “Do what you feel is right.”

PA reports Vennells arrived at 7.45am and did not answer any questions as she walked a short distance up to the venue. The hearing is due to start at 9.45am. The live video feed has a three minute delay on it.

Jane Croft also told Rupert Neate back in April that the question of Fujitsu having remote access to the system is a key thing the inquiry is trying to understand the chronology of, and will be something to look out for in Vennells’ testimony in the coming days:

In 2015 the Post Office told a House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, a high court judge ruled in a landmark court case four years later.

In fact, staff at Fujitsu were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard.

A recording from 2013, unearthed by Channel 4 News, shows Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s head lawyer, confirm that Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could remotely access the Horizon system and adjust branches’ accounts. The recordings suggest Vennells was aware of claims that remote access to branch accounts was possible two years before prosecutions were halted against post office operators.

In 2015 Vennells told the Commons business select committee that “we have no evidence” of miscarriages of justice.

My colleague, Jane Croft, has been covering the scandal since 2018, and earlier this year for our First Edition newsletter she spoke to Rupert Neate about what to expect from this phase of the inquiry. She told him:

“The impact this scandal has had on thousands of people’s lives has been truly devastating,” Jane says. “These are ordinary people, without money and connections that have been caught up in this real David and Goliath battle.”

In personal impact statements to the inquiry, the victims have spoken about losing everything. “It’s not just their money,” Jane says. “It’s their liberty, their partners, their families, their homes. Some spoke about their children being bullied at school, being shunned by their local community, and being referred to as ‘the postmaster who stole old people’s pensions’.”

“They want justice and for the truth to come out,” Jane says. “It feels like the Post Office knew the Horizon IT system wasn’t working properly, but they continued to prosecute these innocent people anyway.”

The subpostmasters want to know what Post Office bosses, executives from Fujitsu (the Japanese company that developed the IT software), and government ministers knew about the faulty Horizon system. The judge in a high court case in 2019 concluded that “bugs, errors and defects” meant there was a “material risk” Horizon was to blame for the money missing from post office operators’ accounts.

Paula Vennells is likely to be asked why she decided to spend millions prosecuting the post office operators when the company was already aware of the Horizon problems.

At the weekend Tim Adams for the Observer wrote a profile of Vennells ahead of her appearance today, asking how did Paula Vennells, an ordained priest, fall so far and so fast from grace?

Vennells’s role in the Post Office’s efforts at rebuttal and cover-up has, like much of the evidence at issue, been hard to extract from the public body at every stage. On Friday, Jason Beer KC for the inquiry revealed that Vennells had only that morning supplied 50 new documents relevant to it. Late and incomplete disclosure has been a repeated cause of criticism from chair of the inquiry, retired judge Sir Wyn Williams. Vennells came to her role promising transparency and openness in Post Office’s dealings. One of the first questions she will no doubt be asked on Wednesday is: whatever became of that commitment?

And not least because it seems so at odds with her public persona and utterances. Vennells grew up in what she describes as “working-class Manchester”; her father was an industrial chemist, her mother a company bookkeeper and volunteer with Citizens Advice. Vennells joined Unilever as a graduate trainee in 1981, and, in those corporate boom years, had jobs with L’Oréal, Dixons, Argos and Whitbread. She was hired initially as group network director by the Post Office in 2007, saying later: “I saw something in the Post Office that was bigger and deeper, maybe it was something about giving back. People care desperately for the Post Office. Very often it’s the subpostmaster or mistress that notices that an elderly customer hasn’t turned up recently and finds out what’s happened to them.”

Read more of Tim Adams’ profile of Paula Vennells here: Post Office scandal – how did Paula Vennells, an ordained priest, fall so far and so fast from grace?