The Horizon IT inquiry has heard that leading campaigner and former subpostmaster accused Ed Davey in 2010 of allowing the Post Office to be, “asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits.”
Mr. Davey—now Sir Ed Davey and leader of the Liberal Democrat Party—was the postal affairs minister between May 2010 and February 2012 in the coalition government under Lord David Cameron.
The Post Office has been heavily criticised since the broadcast of the ITV drama “Mr. Bates Vs The Post Office,” which focused on the Horizon IT scandal.
More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 despite growing evidence that Fujitsu’s Horizon IT system was faulty and was giving the misleading impression that money was going missing from sub-post office branches.
Mr. Bates gave evidence at the public inquiry into the scandal on Tuesday.
Mr. Bates—played by Toby Jones in the ITV drama—wrote a letter on behalf of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) group to request a meeting with Mr. Davey to discuss issues related to the Horizon IT system.
Ed Davey’s Response in 2010 Was ‘Disappointing’
Mr. Bates said Sir Ed’s response “appeared to be a standard template response” which had not taken into consideration the content of his original letter and he said it was “disappointing.”The inquiry heard Mr. Bates replied to Sir Ed on July 8, 2010 and wrote, “It’s not that you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter, after all you do own 100 percent of the shares and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.”
“It is because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits, and you have enabled them to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict,” he added.
The inquiry heard a Civil Service briefing note shown to the inquiry recommended a meeting was offered following Mr. Bates’s second letter for “presentational reasons against the background of potential publicity.”
Counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer, KC, asked why he took offence to the letter and Mr. Bates said: “It was because of the structure, wasn’t it. The government was the sole shareholder, they were the owners, as such, of all of this.”
He added, “How can you run or take responsibility for an organisation without having some interest in … or trying to be in control?”
Sir Ed and Mr. Bates finally met in October 2010.
Asked what happened during that meeting, Mr. Bates said, “I don’t recall the detail of the meeting and I’m quite certain that if there had been something positive that was coming out of it, I’d have remembered that.”
Mr. Bates said the Post Office had spent 23 years, “attempting to discredit and silence me.”
He said he was initially “quite positive” when the Horizon system was introduced but he said he soon became “frustrated” after finding “many shortcomings.”
Mr. Bates, who ran a branch at Llandudno in north Wales, had his contract terminated by the Post Office in 2003 after he refused to accept liability for shortfalls in the branch’s accounts.
The inquiry was shown slides from an undated presentation about Horizon integrity prepared by a former Post Office manager, Dave Smith.
The presentation read, “Bates had discrepancies but was dismissed because he became unmanageable. Clearly struggled with accounting, and despite copious support, did not follow instructions.”
He said he began a campaign after hearing others had suffered the same problems with the Horizon system and he said it became, “something you couldn’t put down.”
Mr. Bates said, “I have dedicated this period of my life to this cause which, sadly, has been necessary since Post Office Limited has spent this entire period denying, lying, defending, and attempting to discredit and silence me and the group of SPMs that the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) represents.”
Lib Dems Says Ed Davey Was ‘Lied to’
A Liberal Democrat party spokesman said, “Alan Bates is a hero for all he has done to represent subpostmasters through this horrific miscarriage of justice.”“Ed was the first minister to meet with Mr. Bates and took his concerns to the Post Office and the Federation of Subpostmasters. Ed, like Mr. Bates and so many others, was lied to,” he added.
The spokesman said: “No one knew the scale of these lies until the whistleblower from Fujitsu revealed the truth several years later. Ed has said that he’s sorry that he didn’t see through the Post Office’s lies, and that it took him five months to meet Mr. Bates.”
“The Liberal Democrats are calling on the government to ensure postmasters get full and fair compensation urgently, and Post Office executives who lied for decades are held properly to account,” he added.
