Former Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable has agreed with the description of Post Office managers as ‘thugs in suits’ while giving evidence to the Post Office public inquiry into the Horizon system and the wrongful prosecutions of subpostmasters.
As business secretary in the coalition government between 2010 and 2015, Cable revealed that officials did not consider Horizon issues to be serious enough to bring to his attention. He conceded he should have been better briefed.
He said he had not known at the time who Alan Bates (the leading subpostmaster campaigner) was. As for Post Office management, he told the inquiry that “Mr Bates has, I believe, described them as ‘thugs in suits’ and I recognise the description.”
He said it was only in 2015, close to the end of his time in office and after the Second Sight independent investigation into the scandal had been sidelined by Post Office chiefs including chief executive Paula Vennells, that he began to “smell a rat”. Until then, he had not been briefed that there was a risk factor with Horizon or that subpostmasters were organising to challenge the hundreds of prosecutions that were taking place because of the faulty computer system.
It would have helped, he said, if MPs working on behalf of subpostmasters, such as James Arbuthnot, had approached him directly and held in-person meetings with him about the issues rather than sending him “polite” letters.
In 2015, Arbuthnot, who had campaigned on behalf of those wrongly prosecuted since 2009, criticised Cable for listening to the Post Office but not MPs and the branch owner-operators affected by what has been described as the UK’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice.
“What is strange about this whole episode is that none of these 140 MPs ever came to talk to me,” Cable told the public hearing on 25 July. “All MPs realise that writing polite letters is not necessarily the way to get through to people in government. You have to talk to them face to face.”
When Jason Beer, counsel for the inquiry, asked whether personal meetings with the MPs would have made any difference, given government officials and the Post Office had managed to maintain a line that there was no issue with Horizon, Cable said: “Probably, there would have been a different outcome. I would have realised much earlier than March 2015 that serious problems were not being properly addressed by the Post Office and the department and would have started to interrogate it much more aggressively, as I did on quite a lot of other issues when MPs came to see me.”
Cable said he sought to rebalance the relationship between management and branch owner-operators during his time in office and that when he campaigned to save branches before entering government in 2010 the Post Office had “dealt with us in an arrogant way.”
Despite a desire to rebalance the relationship between the organisation and branch operators, the issue of the faulty Horizon IT system, which resulted in more than 700 owner-operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting by the Post Office, was rarely ever raised with him.
“Problems with Horizon barely came across my desk,” he said. “When they did, it was usually in a very uncontroversial way and not drawn to my attention as an issue I should focus on. The general reason is that the officials who were briefing me and ministers on the subject hadn’t seen it as a particular problem.”
Cable admitted that he should have been more thoroughly briefed on the Horizon system at the time.
At a hearing earlier this month, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, postal affairs minister from 2010 to 2012, told the inquiry that when in the role he wasn’t aware that the Post Office carried out prosecutions against sub-postmasters. He added that he was “lied to” about serious flaws in the IT system – someone senior must have known the truth, he said.
Following Cable’s evidence, former business secretary Greg Clark (2016-2019) told the inquiry he also had a negative view of Post Office management. He said bosses were insensitive, dismissive and even rude to sub-postmasters. He added that the Post Office prosecutions were brought in a way that was corrupt and unreliable. He had considered removing the entire board, he said, and had wanted to the Post Office to settle all claims in 2019 after losing the group litigation. However, Post Office chiefs had continued exploring legal options, as Clark lost his job for political reasons during the Brexit chaos of that year.