Alan Bates: "no sympathy" for Paula Vennells after her day of testimony PA Media reports campaigner Alan Bates has said he has “no sympathy” for Paula Vennells after her tears today at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Speaking outside Aldwych House after Vennells gave evidence, Bates said: “The whole thing is upsetting for everybody, including for so many of the victims. I’ve got no sympathy really.” Asked if he thinks she is genuinely sorry, he added: “I wonder about these apologies, these are just words.” Lee Castleton, made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office over an alleged £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004, earlier said he did have some empathy for the former Post Office CEO. He said “She’ll never shed as many as I have, I’m afraid, or my family, or the rest of the victims or the wider group. Not that I have no empathy for that, because I do, I understand completely. I’d imagine a lot of it’s nerves too and doing her best. I think she’s got a need or want to do the right thing.” The Guardian’s chief reporter Daniel Boffey has written up his report on today’s hearing, which you can find here: Chair Wyn Williams praises "restrained behaviour" of watching subpostmasters as Post Office Horizon IT inquiry closes for day The inquiry has closed for the day. At the end of it Chair Wyn Williams praised what he called the “restraint” of those watching. He told the audience at the inquiry, which included at least 30 victims of the scandal and leading campaigners like Alan Bates, that “it would have been possible for there to have been a lot more verbal intervention than there has been from the floor.” Proceedings were occasionally broken by laughter at either Paula Vennells failure to recall key details or some of Jason Beer KC’s more loaded questions. Williams said: I’m very grateful to you for your restrained behaviour during the course of the day, but that’s not to encourage you to be less restrained. That is to encourage you to be, if anything, even more restrained during the remainder of this week. The hearing resumes tomorrow at 9.45am. Vennells: I would not have misled MPs over remote access to Horizon IT system Paula Vennells has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry she would not have misled a parliamentary select committee over the issue of remote access to the Horizon IT system. She said she believed there to be no such access, despite other documents shown to the inquiry suggesting she had been briefed on such functionality in 2011 and 2014. The inquiry saw a briefing document from 2015 in which it appears Vennells was told to say there was no functionality to do that, unless pushed by MPs in the secelect committee, in which case the Post Office would concede there was limited functionality that had only been used sparingly and with the knowledge of subpostmasters. Shown documents from 2011 and 2014 which appeared to have told her such functionality existed, Vennells said that her inexperience with IT and a reassurance from the Post Office CIO had led her, on the morning she appeared before MPs in 2015, to believe “it to be true that there was no functionality in Horizon for either branches, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it had been recorded.” The 2015 briefing document had explicitly said “There is functionality to add transactions.” Chair Wyn Williams said the effect of the briefing document was to make her very “guarded” about answering questions before the select committee, and asked her if that had been the intention of other senior leaders at the Post Office. Inquiry lead counsel Jason Beer KC said that “because of rules concerning parliamentary privilege, I’m not permitted to ask you questions, the effects of which would be to impeach or to question the evidence that you gave to parliament on 3 February 2015.” Vennells insisted she approached the 2015 select committee meeting “with an intention to answer their questions as openly and honestly as I knew,” and did not go into the appearance with a strategy. She told the inquiry: “I would respond to the questions as they were asked and I would respond to the select committee openly and honestly with what I knew and could recall at the time under the pressure of the select committee. Jason Beer KC has listed several occasions when it appears that Paula Vennells had been informed remote access was possible. She said “I did not reach a conclusion that meant that I was giving inaccurate information to the select committee, that is not something which I would have done.” She insists that because of initially a lack of technical understanding in 2011 and because she had been reassured by the CIO in 2014 that it couldn’t be done, “I had no idea at any time that a balancing transaction could have been used in the multiple ways that it was.” Jason Beer KC points out the briefing has at point three said “there is no access” then further on says if they are pushed on it, to concede that there is functionality. “Is that the way the Post Office operated?” he asks her. He then goes on to say that “because of rules concerning parliamentary privilege, I’m not permitted to ask you questions, the effects of which would be to impeach or to question the evidence that you gave to parliament on 3 February 2015.” He says instead the inquiry has asked Paula Vennells to address “what your state of mind, what your belief was at 10 o’clock on the morning of the third of February.” He then says: You say at 10am on 3 February 2015 I believed it to be true that there was no functionality in Horizon for either branches, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it had been recorded in a branches account. My belief was based on the material provided to me in advance of the Select Committee set out above, and that includes the addendum document that we’ve just looked at. How could you believe that there was no functionality to remove transaction data, once it had been recorded in the branch’s accounts in the light of the addendum briefing that you received? Which said that balancing transactions could be undertaken which involved editing manipulating or removing transaction data? She says she wouldn’t have considered a strategy like that. Paula Vennells says: You can’t do that. It’s like sitting here today. You can’t come into these sorts of very high pressure environments with a strategy of how you’re going to handle it. She says “I would respond to the questions as they were asked” Paula Vennells is being shown a briefing document which Jason Beer KC says shows she had four lines to hold on remote access when talking to MPs, and then more information to disclose “if pushed”. At the start of today’s proceedings Jason Beer KC asked Paula Vennells if she was the unluckiest CEO in the UK. If it turns out Rishi Sunak is about to call a snap general election on the day she started giving three days evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, she might turn out to have been very lucky indeed in terms of media attention that will be afforded to her. Paula Vennells is being directed to a document where she said she needed to be able to say remote access was not possible. Jason Beer KC asks “Why did you need to be able to say no, its not possible?” She says: I expected that this might be a question, as you explained before, that would come up, and my understanding was that it was not possible. And so I wanted to be able to say that. But what I also wanted to be able to do was to explain why I knew that was the case. I phrased this point very specifically … if you want to get the truth and a really clear answer from somebody, you should tell them what it is you want to say very clearly, and then ask for the information that backs that up. That was why I phrased this that way. Beer says “It’s an old way of going about things. It want to answer a question. Here’s the answer to the question. Tell me I’m wrong.” There is laughter again from those watching again. She says “this was a very genuine attempt” by her to find out the answer to that question. He says wouldn’t the “honest and straightforward thing” have been to put a question mark at the end of a question, instead of phrasing it the way she did. Six more former Post Office workers have convictions quashed after Horizon IT system failings Even as former CEO Paula Vennells is giving evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry it has been announced that six more former Post Office workers have had their convictions for offences including theft and fraud quashed today. The six had their convictions overturned on Wednesday at a Southwark Crown Court hearing which took place at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, PA reports. Solicitor Neil Hudgell said Wednesday’s exonerations are “a timely reminder of the huge harm done to the lives of innocent, hardworking members of the community, and why it is so important we get to the complete truth”. He continued: “Depending upon how quickly the government is able to progress its pledge to exonerate all who were prosecuted using Horizon-based evidence, and how that is eventually done, these may be some of the last people to go through the conviction appeals process and to have their day in court where their case is individually considered, and their names ultimately cleared.” This is very difficult ground for Paula Vennells now. Jason Beer KC is saying to her that in her witness statement she says she followed up about Fujitsu remote access in 2014, and after she confirms she had heard of it and discussed it with Lesley Sewell, the former head of IT at the Post Office, Beer says to her: You know that this issue that we’re addressing now is directly relevant to evidence that you were subsequently to give to parliament. There is a long pause. She replies eventually that it was only after she left the business she came to understand about a the facility to remotely access accounts without the subpostmaster knowing. Quite aside from all of that, you agree that on the face of the board briefing, you had no information at all on which to conclude whether and to what extent, Fujitsu had used balancing transactions before 2008. Senior Post Office figures repeatedly seemed to believe that the facility had been used only once in 2010, and with permission. Beer quotes one witness describing the situation before 2010 being “the Wild West” with Fujitsu’s ability to insert unregulated, unaudited and unauditable. Jason Beer KC has produced a “Horizon desktop review” document from 2014, the Deloitte briefing document which went to the board, and notes that in the limitations of the report it stated “we’ve not validated whether Horizon has been implemented or operated as described in the documentation”. No testing was undertaken. He says that was quite a limitation of the report. Paula Vennells agrees. He says the report just looked at pieces of paper about how Horizon was supposed to work, rather than look at what it actually did. The inquiry has now resumed for what is likely to be the last session of the day. It normally finishes about 4.30pm each day. Jason Beer KC continues to question former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. It is not just this live blogger feeling the length of the day, here is Nick Wallis who writes the Post Office scandal blog … The appearance of Paula Vennells at the inquiry has not impressed some of the most high profile victims of the scandal today. Seema Misra has said she believes there is still a “cover up and denial” going on. She told PA “It’s a cover up and denial, it’s still a cover up, that’s what my take is. Was she emotional due to the scandal or the warnings she had been given before? They still don’t accept it, how on earth did authorities in high positions not know how the company works?” Misra was jailed in 2010. Lee Castleton, made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office over an alleged £25,000 shortfall at his branch in 2004, said he did have some empathy for Vennells, though. “She’ll never shed as many as I have, I’m afraid, or my family, or the rest of the victims or the wider group. Not that I have no empathy for that, because I do, I understand completely. I’d imagine a lot of it’s nerves too and doing her best. I think she’s got a need or want to do the right thing.” He added “She’s got a huge opportunity to get what she sees as the truth out there. I think it’s a huge stage for her, I think the paperwork is fantastic, to see what was being written at the time it’s really, really important for us to see that. And what she remembers really is kind of a background for me, the actual verbal evidence is not really that important.” The inquiry is now taking a mid-afternoon break and will resume in ten minutes or so.