Ed Davey has questions to answer,
He certainly does. But he is not the only one.
Sunday Times today has details of all Alan Bates' correspondence with ministers. Remember that it was a Blair administration which finally approved Fujitsu's Horizon software in 1999.
Extracts from the ST reporting :-
" He had been trying to raise concerns with the Labour government unsuccessfully until, in November 2009, he joined together with other victims to form the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) to prove their innocence."
"Sir Ed Davey: postal affairs minister, May 2010 – February 2012-By the time he joined government, questions were already being raised publicly about Horizon, the computer accounting system owned by Fujitsu which had been rolled out across thousands of post offices over the previous decade.
There had also been a number of high-profile prosecutions of sub-postmasters. On May 11, 2009, the magazine Computer Weekly published the first major piece on the scandal, revealing the plight of seven sub-postmasters — Bates included — and raising concerns about Horizon."
"Bates, in his first of at least five letters to Davey, on May 20, 2010, revealed the JFSA group had now grown to “close to 100” members whose hounding by the Post Office, he said, stemmed “from the flaws of the Horizon system the Post Office introduced and which they refuse to admit has ever suffered from a single problem”.
Urging Davey to intervene, he added: “The evidence is there to be found by anyone in a position of being able to unlock doors instead of placing barriers in the way of those pursuing the information. An independent external investigation instigated at ministerial level would be the most appropriate, and would without any doubt easily find evidence of the error-ridden system.”
On May 31, 2010, Davey told Bates: “The integrity of the Post Office Horizon system is an operational and contractual matter for POL [Post Office Ltd] and not government [and] whilst I do appreciate your concerns … I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose.” Davey added that the decision to treat the Post Office as an “arm’s length” body meant it had the “commercial freedom to run its business operations without interference”.
Bates wrote again to Davey on July 8, 2010, noting that his response to the “very serious issues I had raised was not only disappointing but I actually found your comments offensive”. While there were “new politicians in post”, Bates said that Davey’s letter was “little different to the one” sent by Stephen Timms, the former Labour minister with responsibility for postal affairs, “seven years ago”.
“It is because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship … [that] you have enabled them to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict,” he continued.
Urging Davey not to simply listen to “your civil servants” and to accept without question the Post Office’s claims that “Horizon is wonderful, that there has never been a problem”, he added: “You can meet with us and hear the real truth behind Horizon.”
Davey relented and the pair met. In a follow-up letter sent on October 14, 2010, Bates sought to elaborate on a number of issues they had discussed, including how clauses in the employment contracts of sub-postmasters had been “employed to try to stop me and others raising concerns over Horizon”.
He also raised concerns that individual terminals operated by sub-postmasters could be accessed remotely and that this “may be the cause of these major unexplained losses that suddenly occur in sub offices”. The issue of remote access would prove pivotal to JFSA’s successful legal challenge against the Post Office several years later, but at the time when Bates was writing to Davey, it was fiercely denied by the Post Office.
Bates concluded that there was a “genuine willingness at this time to work with you and your department to help resolve these problems if you are prepared to do so”.
Seven days later, on October 21, 2010, Bates wrote for a fourth time to notify Davey of “yet another victim”. Seema Misra, whose prosecution is now considered one of the most egregious of the Horizon scandal, had that day been convicted by a jury after she was accused by the Post Office of false accounting and stealing more than £70,000 from her West Byfleet branch.
Davey replied that December, confirming that officials were following up Bates’s concerns with the Post Office, in the case of Misra and the other two sub-postmasters, Davey said “as I made clear at the meeting” neither he nor the department could intervene in cases currently before the courts or where a legal judgment had been reached.
On Horizon, he added: “POL continues to express full confidence in the integrity and robustness of the Horizon system and also categorically states that there is no remote access … which would allow accounting records to be manipulated in any way.”
In his fifth and final letter to Davey, dated August 20, 2011, Bates said: “Needless to say that having nailed your colours to POL’s mast, from the JFSA standpoint there was little point in continuing a dialogue with you or your department at that point.”
Bates notified him that JFSA members had taken the first step in bringing legal action against the Post Office and warned that the eventual financial liability — for the taxpayer, should the Post Office lose — “has the potential of being astronomical”. He ended by stating that Davey’s decision to “ignore our offer to work with you and your department” had left the group with “no option other than to seek redress through the courts, which is now where the real truth behind Horizon will be exposed”.
February 3, 2012, Davey was promoted to the cabinet and became energy secretary."
"Norman Lamb: postal affairs minister, February 2012 – September 2012-Despite Lamb’s short tenure, Bates told The Sunday Times he was the one Lib Dem minister he warmed to and who appeared “quite concerned about it”. Lamb also had prior knowledge of the scandal, having written to Davey in 2010 to raise concerns about his constituent Allison Henderson, who was one of the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted. But he, like Bates, was told by Davey that “neither I nor the department can intervene” and that at “no time” during her case were any problems with Horizon identified."
"Jo Swinson: postal affairs minister, September 2012 – May 2015-Bates wrote to her on April 17, 2013, -He also asked to meet her.
On May 1, Swinson sent a 122-word response in which she sought to direct Bates elsewhere. While she “noted” the JSFA’s concerns about the “progress and direction” of the review, she said Bates should “follow these up” with James Arbuthnot, a backbench Tory MP for North East Hampshire who was assisting the group and acting in a “liaison role”.
Two months later, Second Sight’s interim report was published, finding that two IT bugs in the Horizon system had caused accounting shortfalls of up to £9,000 at 76 branches. This ran contrary to the Post Office’s claims that the system was “absolutely accurate and reliable”.
The next day, July 9, 2013, Swinson gave a statement to the Commons in which she claimed that “contrary to misleading media reports, the review explicitly confirms that ‘we have so far found no evidence of system-wide problems with the Horizon software’”.
"That day, Bates emailed her. She replied on July 11, 2013, recommending that he raise concerns with a working group being set up by the Post Office as part of a new complaint and mediation scheme to try to settle disputes with former and serving sub-postmasters."
"Sir Vince Cable: business secretary, May 2010 – May 2015 During this five-year period, Vince Cable was Davey and Swinson’s boss'
In March 2015, Adrian Bailey, the chairman of the Commons business select committee, wrote to Cable expressing concerns about the mediation scheme.On March 26, Cable wrote back, repeating the same line that had been stated ad nauseam by his juniors: the scheme was independent of government, it was not appropriate to intervene and that since “these issues were first raised over two years ago … it remains the case there is no evidence of systemic problems with Horizon”.
So both parties are culpable here over many years and it is encouraging therefore to read this report ( ST) :-
"Kevan Jones, the Labour MP for North Durham, and David Davis, the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, will lead the charge, calling for swift justice for hundreds of sub-postmasters whose lives have been destroyed by the scandal.
Jones, who sits on the Horizon compensation advisory board, said: “It is quite clear from the evidence presented to the public inquiry and in court, that the victims of this scandal should have their convictions quashed and their good names restored.”
Davis will also call for the Post Office managers responsible for the scandal to be identified and prosecuted, for Fujitsu, the provider of the defective computer system to be blocked from government contracts, and for the Post Office to be stripped of its power to start private prosecutions.
Fujitsu has secured nearly 200 public contracts with a value of about £6.7 billion over the past decade and last year it won a £485 million contract to provide IT services to schools in Northern Ireland."
And this perhaps the best news of all ! :-
"There are also growing calls for Paula Vennells, who served as chief executive of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019, to be stripped of her CBE. Last night a petition demanding she lose the honour had garnered more than 760,000 signatures."
I note too that Alex Chalk is reviewing the special ability of the PO to mount these prosecutions ( the ITV play indicated that they acted almost as a private police force ). I hope that this monstrous destruction of people's lives and state sponsored corruption brings the focus on some of these so called "arms length " bodies which enjoy such freedom from scrutiny.