The postal minister when the Post Office stopped prosecuting branch owner-operators has said she was never told an important factor behind the decision was that the state-owned body could no longer find an expert witness willing to testify in defence of its Horizon IT system.
Lady Neville-Rolfe was speaking to the public inquiry into the hundreds of prosecutions on the basis of flawed data from the accounting software, described by MPs as the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK legal history.
The hearings have already heard evidence that the Post Office stopped prosecutions after internal advice concluded that the testimony of Gareth Jenkins, a Fujitsu engineer whose testimony formed the backbone of the Horizon integrity defence against branch owner-operators, was materially misleading and in breach of court rules.
Neville-Rolfe, the former long-serving Tesco executive, who was postal minister in the 14 months until July 2016, told the hearing on Tuesday that she only found out that was the reason when it was revealed as part of the public inquiry.
“I didn’t know any of that at the time,” said Neville-Rolfe, who within three months of taking office asked the then new Post Office chair, Tim Parker, to look at the Horizon scandal with “fresh eyes” and examine the concerns about the IT system with an independent review.
“Looking back at hindsight I was getting unending, always the same, advice from the Shareholder Executive [the body that manages government-owned assets]. It was very black and white. I wasn’t aware [of the reasons prosecutions ended] until the inquiry. These were civil servants, I’d been a civil servant. You have a duty to be objective and truthful.”
Neville-Rolfe also held meetings with Paula Vennells, who was the chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, that also served to reinforce the line that the Horizon IT system was not faulty.
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“I was told in all directions there wasn’t an issue,” she said. “I was trying to find a way through to get further work done. I was aware there were murmurings, especially among a few MPs, of some particularly troubling cases. I was worried I wasn’t getting broad enough advice from officials, the department or more broadly.”