Inquiry reveals UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

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https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/29/ ... n_inquiry/

Officials at the government department responsible for the Post Office sent out misleading information to MPs about court cases relating to the Horizon IT system, an inquiry into one of the UK's greatest miscarriage of justice has heard.

Appearing at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry late last week, former minister Vince Cable said he was "very reliant… on the competence and integrity of the people that are giving advice" when replying to correspondence from MPs concerned that their constituents had been victims of the scandal before it became public knowledge.

Cable was minister for business, innovation and skills, which oversaw the Post Office, a publicly owned corporation, between 2010 and 2015. Horizon is an EPOS and backend finance system for thousands of Post Office branches around the UK, first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company later bought by Fujitsu. From 1999 until 2015, 736 local branch managers were wrongfully convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame.

A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice launched in 2021 is ongoing.

This week, Jason Beer, counsel for the inquiry, drew Cable's attention to a reply to a letter sent to him in January 2011 from Norman Lamb MP, who later became minister for postal affairs.

The reply, on behalf of Ed Davey, the Post Office minister at the time, denied the failing IT system had been part of a recent court case. Lamb was appealing on behalf of a constituent, Allison Henderson, who had pleaded guilty to false accounting.

Davey's letter makes clear that ministers or departments cannot intervene in court cases or Post Office operational matters. But it went on to say that "at no time during the case were any problems with the… Horizon IT system raised by Mrs Henderson, or separately identified."

"We know [this] to be false," Beer said. "She had raised in the course of proceedings on two occasions including informal documents her suggestion that the losses were caused by the IT system."

Cable responded that there should have been an interrogation of the claim by the Post Office. "But having been satisfied, as apparently the civil servants were, it was perfectly reasonable to incorporate that kind of comment in an outgoing letter," he said.

The letter was one of several about the Horizon fallout from MPs addressed to Cable's department, which he would not have seen personally, he said. MPs campaigning for subpostmasters did not raise the issue with him personally in Parliament, he said.

In his witness statement, Cable said he recognized the description of Post Office's middle management as "thugs in suits," a description previously offered by Sir Alan Bates, who led the campaign to expose and rectify the miscarriage of justice.

Davey had previously said he was misled by the Post Office and has apologized for failing to "see through the Post Office's lies" when offered "categorical assurances" about the Horizon system. ®