Post Office provided ‘misleading’ information to inquiry and disclosure of documents has been ‘sub-optimal’, lawyer admits – live | Politics

Ben Quinn

All major parties face questions about why it took an ITV drama to provoke meaningful political action on the Horizon scandal.

Campaigners have spent decades seeking justice for wronged post office operators, including at least 700 people who were prosecuted by the Post Office and other bodies between 1999 and 2015 based on the botched Horizon IT system.

But progress towards addressing one of Britain’s worst miscarriages of justice and providing compensation has been painfully slow.

“All three political parties had a role to play,” one former postal affairs minister, the Conservative MP Paul Scully, said this week.

We look at the role played by the three main parties:

Daniel Boffey

The Post Office’s leadership has been accused of showing contempt for victims after its lawyers informed a public inquiry into one of the nation’s worst scandals that it was not reasonable to expect them to “leave no stone unturned” in getting to the truth of what happened.

The inquiry into the false convictions of 900 post office operators was further told it was unrealistic for the lawyers representing the Post Office and responsible for handing over internal documents to “continue to work during the evenings and over weekends”.

The latest revelation from the inquiry, chaired by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, emerged out of letters from the Post Office’s lead legal representative, Chris Jackson, a partner at the law firm Burges Salmon LLP.

Jackson said his comments in correspondence sent late last year were part of a request to “please discuss” the future processes for disclosing evidence to the inquiry, which has been repeatedly delayed by the failure of the Post Office to promptly hand over documents.

Asked whether he believed, on reflection, that his position in his letters was flawed, Jackson said: “No.”

The former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis said the attitude of the Post Office and its legal representatives was a “disgrace” and that the organisation’s employment of expensive lawyers to thwart justice was an affront to the victims.

He said:

They should ensure that every effort is made to disclose all the documents. The alternative to their own lawyers doing it is that we impose lawyers upon them to sift through their documents.

Liam Byrne, the chair of the business select committee, which next week will interview the chief executive of the Post Office, Nick Read, said justice required those representing the organisation to work “round the clock”.

He said

This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, so, bluntly, parliament and the public will expect and demand the Post Office leaves no stone unturned in providing the evidence required so the truth can finally be known. If that requires the Post Office working round the clock to make sure the facts are on the table, then that is what is required. The truth has already taken too long to emerge. There cannot and must not be any further delays.”

Read more here:

Jackson has admitted the Post Office’s disclosure of documents to the public inquiry has been “sub-optimal”.

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, the lead counsel Jason Beer has been questioning Chris Jackson, the lawyer acting for the Post Office on disclosures to the panel.

Beer pointed out that on 19 December, the Post Office said the disclosure of documents in relation to investigator Stephen Bradshaw’s evidence was complete, before doing a U-turn last Friday and saying 924 further documents would be disclosed.

Beer said it “doesn’t make for happy reading” that hundreds of new documents were released at the last minute.

It was later found that at least 420 of them were duplicates that had previously been provided.

Beer asked Jackson if he agreed that the chain of correspondence had been “rather chaotic”.

Jackson replied:

You used the phrase before the lunch break sub-optimal, it is clearly that.

It must be frustrating, particularly for the inquiry, and for witnesses and I suspect for those at the other end trying to get it right.

The hearing has ended for the day and the inquiry will resume again next Tuesday.

A Post Office legal representative has said he understands the “profound mistrust in many quarters” following a litany of disclosure failings throughout the Horizon IT inquiry.

A further disclosure setback in November, in which around 363,000 emails were found on a “legacy” mailing system, resulted in witnesses being delayed, PA news reports.

In his witness statement submitted to the inquiry before giving evidence on Friday, Chris Jackson, a partner at the law firm Burges Salmon, said the Post Office sent its apologies for the most recent delay.

In November, Jason Beer KC said the latest disclosure failing added to a long list of further failings which were “etched” in the minds of the inquiry’s counsel.

Before the latest disclosure failings, the inquiry had been delayed by hard copy documents being found in new Post Office locations and the misuse of search terms in the disclosure exercise.

Another failing which previously delayed the inquiry was an improper “de-duplication” exercise, meaning relevant emails were not disclosed.

Other failings have included a failure to consider “families” of documents, not disclosing the names of those blind copied into emails, and the failure to disclose documents held on back-up tapes.

Addressing the disclosure issues in his statement, Jackson said:

The current situation is not one that anyone would wish to see continue.

Post Office has asked me to convey its apologies for the current situation and to assure the inquiry and other core participants that it is a Post Office priority to get to a position where hearings (and planning and preparation for hearings) can take place from a stable basis with the risks of further emerging data source issues minimised and managed so far as is practicable.

He continued:

I am conscious that emerging problems with, and frank updates to the inquiry on, Post Office’s disclosure have been deeply and understandably frustrating to the inquiry, to postmasters and their families … and to those witnesses who have been affected.

I understand fully the reasons for those reactions and for the profound mistrust in many quarters, which is the starting point for any exchanges on disclosure given the underlying earlier events relating to Horizon that the inquiry is charged to investigate.

However, I confirm that all my experience acting for Post Office since May 2023 indicates to me that all the professional advisers working for Post Office on the inquiry … are behaving properly and professionally, working intensively and with significant resource, to provide all requested evidence to the inquiry.

Were it ever to be suggested otherwise, that would be a matter of profound professional concern.

Beer previously told the inquiry it was “the conduct” of the Post Office that was “standing in our way” of calling witnesses.

He told the inquiry in November:

We as your counsel want to get on with the business of calling witnesses.

We as your counsel want to get on with the business of progress in this inquiry.

But the conduct of one of the core participants is presently standing in our way.

This is of course the latest in a series of disclosure failings by the Post Office – they may be forgotten to many, they are etched in the memory of those who sit on this side of the room.

The inquiry is now taking a break for lunch, resuming business in an hour.

Rowena Mason

Away from the Post Office inquiry, MPs have declared a number of interesting donations and second jobs on the latest register – aside from Andrew Bridgen’s £4m loan.

• Keir Starmer accepted £25,000 of hospitality from the government of Qatar for private jet travel from the Cop summit in Dubai to meet the Emir of Qatar in December.

• The chief executive of Palantir in the UK, Louis Mosley, has given £5,000 to the housing minister Lee Rowley. Palantir has been under the spotlight recently after the controversial US-based firm linked to spy agencies won a £380m NHS data contract. It is understood Mosley and Rowley are former colleagues in the financial services industry and the donation was made on a personal basis to support the MP’s work.

• Mark Pritchard, a Tory backbencher, has got a new £9,000-a-month job working for an arms company, ATS Group, based in North Macedonia, which specialises in ballistics and ammunition.

• Sir Bob Stewart, the MP, raised almost £20,000 in crowdfunding to help cover legal costs and a fine associated with his conviction for racially abusing an activist.

The Post Office provided “inaccurate and misleading” information to the high court, one its lawyers has admitted to the inquiry into the Horizon scandal.

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, the lead counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer referred to an initial witness statement by Chris Jackson, the lawyer acting for the Post Office and asked if it was right to say that “inaccurate and misleading” information was provided in an important disclosure questionnaire.

The questionnaire was initially provided to the high court and later resubmitted to both the court of appeal and the inquiry.

Jackson agrees there was a replication of inaccuracies.

The inaccuracies were to do with email archive data and the transferral of emails.

The public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal has been repeatedly halted by obstacles such as a “series of disclosure failings” and claims of lost emails by the Post Office.

Jessica Murray

The independent MP Andrew Bridgen has declared receiving £4.4m in loans from the Reclaim party funder Jeremy Hosking.

In the register of members’ financial interests, Bridgen said he had received the money between 2020 and 2023 for “legal services provided in relation to a civil case”.

The Times previously reported the loans were to help Bridgen, who represents North West Leicestershire, fund a legal battle with his brother over the family’s potato farm.

Bridgen had not declared the loan when he joined the Reclaim party and became its first MP in May last year, after being expelled from the Conservatives for comparing Covid vaccine side-effects to the Holocaust.

Reclaim, a rightwing populist party led by Laurence Fox, is almost entirely funded by Hosking, who helped create it in 2020.

The parliamentary code of conduct states MPs must declare any financial interest which might reasonably be thought by others to influence their actions, speeches or votes in parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a MP.

Bridgen quit Reclaim in December citing a “difference in the direction of the party”.

He has been involved in a long-running multimillion-pound legal dispute with his relatives over the family business, the vegetable supplier AB Produce, which the Times reported led to him being evicted from his country house and found by a high court judge to have lied under oath.