When Paula Vennells was appointed chief executive of the Post Office in 2012, it felt like a true meeting of minds. The Post Office had long prided itself as the most trusted brand in Britain and here was a woman who, unusually among chief executives, was unashamed in emphasising, above all else, her personal ethical values.
Vennells was a committed Christian, an ordained minister, who gave sermons at her local parish church, in Bromham, Bedfordshire. A confidant of the archbishop of Canterbury (Justin Welby reportedly supported her – unsuccessful – candidature to become bishop of London in 2017) she had no hesitation, in her seven years as head of the 350-year-old institution, in moralising about the fundamentals of her leadership, while overseeing a billion-pound revamp of Post Office operations. As the keynote speaker for a Faith in Business forum in 2016, Vennells referenced the wisdom of King Solomon, in exercising her responsibilities as CEO (for which she was paid about £5m during her tenure): “Now, Lord my God … give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong … in administering justice …”
The extent to which those prayers were ever answered will be examined this week in the more down-to-earth forum of the government’s statutory Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Over three days, Vennells will explain her role in the scandal.
As the inquiry has repeatedly heard, justice afforded to innocent subpostmasters and mistressesbefore and during Vennells’s watch was often summary and brutal. As revealed in the indefatigable campaigning efforts of Alan Bates and his Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (dramatised in ITV’s extraordinary Mr Bates vs The Post Office) more than 900 employees were, over 15 years, prosecuted for crimes including theft and false accounting, based on evidence from the flawed Horizon system. Of those, 96 have had wrongful convictions overturned, with more to follow; many others had their lives ruined by bankruptcy and public disgrace. The scandal has so far cost UK taxpayers well over £1bn.
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.”
As CEO, she was tasked with making the loss-making organisation viable after it was split from Royal Mail. She promoted three core values – care, commitment and challenge – insisting that all the head office team worked in branches at Christmas to help them understand the grassroots business. In a 2017 TEDx talk to the sixth formers at Bedford school, where she was a governor, she reflected on the value of “rethinking the norm”: “About being curious, and about being open to opportunities and persistent in following them up.”
On the evidence heard so far, her curiosity about the Horizon scandal seems to have failed her quite early on. In evidence on Friday, her former chief financial officer, Alasdair Cameron, told the inquiry: “She seemed clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong. She never, in my observation, deviated from that or seemed to particularly doubt that.” Vennells started, it appears, with good intentions. One of her first acts was to appoint an independent investigator, Second Sight, to find the truth “at all costs” behind the wave of prosecutions that had begun a decade earlier. There is evidence to suggest that determination did not survive the investigators’ interim report.
A key line of inquiry with Vennells this week will concern the question of exactly when she became aware that the supposedly “closed” Horizon system could be accessed and manipulated remotely. An investigation by ITV last month discovered a tape of a secretly recorded meeting with Post Office executives, including Vennells in July 2013, explicitly concerning allegations that accounts could be accessed remotely by Fujitsu, a fact denied up until 2019 by the Post Office.
In 2015, Vennells appears to have acknowledged that distortion in an email to Mark Davies, her head of corporate communication, seeking guidance prior to a select committee appearance. Specifically she wanted to know whether the Fujitsu Horizon system was secure: “What is the true answer?” she asked. ”I need to say ‘no, [remote access] is not possible …”
Two years earlier, the inquiry has heard, in the evidence of the Post Office’s then senior in-house lawyer, Chris Aujard, it was Vennells who insisted that prosecutions of subpostmasters continue, despite contrary evidence raised in Second Sight’s interim report. Susan Crichton, Aujard’s predecessor as general counsel, had resigned after being excluded from a meeting about that report after, she said refusing to “manage or manipulate the [information] in the way that Alice Perkins [former chair of the board] was expecting me to.” In meeting notes about Crichton’s departure, Vennells wrote that the lawyer had “put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business”.
Two weeks after that meeting, Vennells received an email from Alan Bates detailing a “prime example of the thuggery” being visited on a subpostmaster over shortfalls in his Horizon account. The man in question, Martin Griffiths, had earlier that day stepped out in front of a bus. He died three weeks later. Bates forwarded a note from Griffiths’s father-in-law, about the culpability of the “bully boys” from the Post Office investigations unit. “May god forgive them,” he wrote.
In some respects, even before this week, Vennells’s public fall from grace has been enacted. After the first round of convictions of subpostmasters were overturned on appeal in 2021, she stood down from her role as chair of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. She also gave up her parish duties at the Church of St Owen in Bromham. The bishop of St Albans, her diocese, expressed his distress at the suffering of post office employees, particularly as his own father had been a subpostmaster. Finally, after the ITV drama aired, Vennells returned her CBE, saying: “I am truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system.”
It remains to be seen what justice for that devastation will look like. In the inquiry last week, one of the barristers, Julian Blake, asked Mark Davies, the former Post Office spin doctor, if he had ever asked himself that meme-friendly question: “Are we the baddies?” You don’t imagine it is a question that Vennells has often felt moved to address, but this week might be that moment. As King Solomon also observed: give me the gift of a listening heart.
