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Former police officer who headed Post Office operations did nothing to help innocent deputy postmasters

Monicel
Former police officer who headed Post Office operations did nothing to help innocent deputy postmasters

A former Post Office chief operating officer (COO) did nothing to intervene in wrongful prosecutions when it became clear to him that the company’s court practices were unfair.

Mike Young, the post office’s chief operating officer from 2008 to 2012, said he was concerned about the burden on deputy postmasters to provide proof of their innocence, as well as the reliance on Horizon supplier Fujitsu to to expert evidence.

But speaking at the latest public inquiry hearing into the Post Office Horizon scandal, Young, who was giving evidence for phases 5 and 6 of the inquiry, admitted doing nothing about it despite his experience as police officer

He did not raise alarm when he learned that the burden of proof falls on deputy postmasters when they were prosecuted for unexplained shortages, which they believed were caused by computer errors.

In an internal post office email exchange shown during the inquiry, which was copied to Young during his tenure at the post office, there was a discussion of how the deputy directors prosecuted had not provided strong evidence that their discrepancies were caused by Horizon errors.

Investigating barrister Catriona Hodge asked Young if, with his “police hat on”, he believed it was right for the burden of proof “to fall back on the deputy postmasters to show that Horizon was at fault for causing these accounting discrepancies”.

He said he didn’t know if that came up as an issue of concern at the time. “I suspect he probably did,” he said, admitting, “I don’t think he did anything.”

Guilty workload

The former COO blamed his workload for failing to act on a problem that would be obvious to a former cop. “It’s not an excuse by any means, but when you’re flooded with three or four hundred emails a day and you’ve got the world in front of you in terms of what you need to do, you can’t catch all the nuances of an email .”

Young also did not raise concerns about using employees of Fujitsu, the supplier of the Horizon system, as expert witnesses in cases where prosecution teams use software data as evidence. “I would have expected to see in proceedings of this nature an independent expert commenting on Horizon data and audit records,” he said. “It felt a bit like poachers turned gamekeepers and it doesn’t sit well with me as a former police officer.”

He told the inquest he could not recall whether he raised any concerns, but added: “The likelihood is not. I was clearly told, ‘Let the process be the process.’

Young had opportunities to raise concerns with Post Office bosses and had the ear of former Postmaster General Paula Vennells. At an earlier hearing, Young was named, among others, by Vennells as someone she had “trusted too much” and had accepted what he had told her.

Contemptuous attitude

In his witness statement, he wrote that when Computer Weekly investigated and reported on Horizon in 2009, revealing serious concerns, Young was dismissive. “I remember him saying it was a trade magazine that he didn’t know what he was talking about in relation to Horizon,” he wrote. “He assured me that there was nothing wrong with the system and that the article was nonsense or words to that effect.”

But Young said Vennells “misunderstood” what he said. During his trial, he told the inquest that it was two calls from Computer Weekly in 2011, regarding claims by deputy postmasters against Horizon and proposed legal action against the post office, that brought him to question the integrity of Horizon.

He also claimed that he was the one who instigated the investigation into the Horizon system by the forensic accounting firm Second Sight. Young said he acted on the call by contacting Vennells and the head of Fujitsu UK at the time, Duncan Tait, to encourage them to investigate Horizon “thoroughly”.

“Honestly, I got to the point, I’d had enough,” he told the inquiry. But at the time, the subpostmasters’ campaign group, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, led by Alan Bates, was preparing legal action against the post office. In addition to the media attention, there was pressure from parliamentarians representing the deputy postmasters.

Second Sight was hired in 2012 and investigated the system, completing two reports. The interim report in 2013 revealed serious concerns, including the existence of errors, and the final report in 2015 was scathing, concluding that the Post Office had prosecuted deputy postmasters for unexplained losses before ‘investigate the cause. Almost immediately after Second Sight’s final report, the Criminal Cases Review Commission launched an investigation into possible wrongful prosecutions. As a result, hundreds of deputy directors prosecuted for crimes based on Horizon evidence have had or are in the process of having their convictions overturned.

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven deputy postmasters and the problems they suffered because of the Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread judicial miscarriage of British history (see below for chronology of Computer Weekly articles). on the scandal since 2009).

• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •

• Also watch: the ITV documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The True Story •

• Also read: Correus and Fujitsu’s malevolence and incompetence mean a huge bill for taxpayers •

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