Former postal affair minister regrets not challenging Horizon

Former postal affairs minister Pat McFadden today (18) told the Horizon IT inquiry 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.

McFadden, who was Labour’s election campaign co-ordinator and is now a powerful figure in Keir Starmer’s government, gave his evidence to inquiry today. He was minister for postal affairs between 2007 and 2009 under Gordon Brown.

Early signs of something is not right with Horizon began appearing in 2009. Computer Weekly published its first article about convicted Post Office operatives in May that year, and Bates formed his Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance a few months later.

More than 700 post office operators were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 because the Japanese firm Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon IT system made it look as though money was missing at their branches.

During the inquiry, McFadden said an email from a Computer Weekly journalist in 2009 asking for comment on allegations made by subpostmasters was the first time he became aware of complaints about the manner in which the Post Office conducted its investigations. He added that a handover note given to him when he took on the postal affairs minister role in mid-2007 “did not mention anything” in relation to subpostmasters’ complaints about the Horizon system.

McFadden said, "As far as I can tell from the documents this was the first time I was made aware that the Post Office was prosecuting its subpostmasters in respect of these shortfalls. It was also the first time I became aware that there were complaints regarding the Post Office’s investigation of the issues."

On being asked by counsel to the inquiry, Sam Stevens, about the process by which ministers make statements and write letters on the Post Office, McFadden said ministers have to trust that the information being given to them is accurate.

Decisions were made on the basis of information passed on by officials both in the department and from the Post Office itself, McFadden said. Ministers have very little room for manoeuvre if that information is incorrect or false.

He further added that ministers “took no part in the decision to prosecute” post office operators by the Post Office.

McFadden was asked about the oversight by ministers - the ultimate owners of the Post Office - of those prosecutions. He said that he did not remember ever discussing prosecutions, and that ministers would have trusted that the private prosecutions brought by the Post Office would meet the same standard as public prosecutions.

Stevens asked, "Where does ultimate accountability for the actions of an arm’s length body such as the Post Office, that is owned by the government, lie?

McFadden replied, "I’ve thought about this a lot because of this issue and this whole question of the arm’s length relationship and what happens when that goes wrong and what you can do about it. If it’s state-owned, ultimately the accountability will lie with the government because it’s state-owned.

"But I do want to stress that the legislation that had been passed and the postal services act had deliberately created this separation."

McFadden was repeatedly asked why no-one in the government spoke to the subpostmasters directly, rather than just going back to the Post office.

He replied, "The right thing to do was to ask the people running the business and… that structure had been set up some years before I was the minister, they were the people who ran the Horizon system. They were the people who had the information about it.

"And when I look at the correspondence in the round, what I’m really struck by is how emphatic their defence of the system was, and continued to be for a long time after this exchange of correspondence, not only an emphatic defence, but also the use of court judgments as a proof point."

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.