The outgoing Post Office chief executive said he was told he “did not need to dig into the details” of the Horizon IT scandal when he joined the business despite it having led to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters.
During what was the first of three days of evidence at the Horizon inquiry, Nick Read testified that on starting at the Post Office he was told by the firm’s general counsel that the prosecutions of sub-postmasters were “presented to [him] as a historic issue that had ceased before 2015”.
“[I was told] I did not need to dig into the details of what had happened at the Post Office in the past as this conduct had ended,” Read said in his witness statement.
Read replaced Paula Vennels as chief executive in 2019, two months before a High Court judgement ruled that the Horizon IT system used post offices across the country was faulty and had many “bugs and defects”.
Read, who has attracted criticism during his tenure as Post Office boss for being “obsessed with his pay”, confirmed during cross examination from lead counsel Jason Beer that managing the fallout from the scandal was not flagged to him as an issue on joining the firm.
He also said he was not told of the “scale and enormity” of the scandal, and confirmed that it was the company’s general counsel Ben Foat, who is currently on a leave of absence, who told him he did not need to dig into it.
After the High Court judgement was handed down, Read confirmed there were “no urgent calls or panicked discussions” between senior leadership and the Post Office’s Board, and agreed with Beer that bosses were inhabiting “a dream world”.
Hundreds of sub-postmasters, the self-employed workers who run post office branches across the UK, faced wrongful prosecutions between 1999 and 2015 after bugs in a new IT system introduced by the Post Office suggested they were stealing from their branch.
During a lengthy hearing, Read also admitted that some staff at his organisation still feel there will be sub-postmasters guilty of stealing who have had their convictions wrongly quashed as part of the fallout of the Horizon IT scandal.
“There will be a view that not every quashed conviction will be innocent postmasters,” he told the inquiry.
“The majority of the organisation would agree that the action that has been taken is absolutely the right action and whether there are guilty postmasters that have been exonerated really is no longer an issue.”
The Post Office announced last month that Read will step down as its boss in March next year, with the firm’s interim chief operating officer, Neil Brocklehurst, expected to replace him.