September 20 2023

On Monday the government finally came up with a “take it or leave it” compensation offer to the subpostmasters. £600,000. It was described by Kevin Hollinrake, Minister for Postal Affairs, as “providing a generous uplift” on compensation payments already made. Let’s see how generous it really is.

• Some subpostmasters were convicted as long as 23 years ago, between 2000 – 2015, the majority in the earlier years. That is compensation of between £26,000 and £75,000 pa. The sums on offer are less than what they would have earned had they not been wrongly convicted.
• It is an uplift only by reference to compensation payments described as inadequate and criticised by the Inquiry judge.
• It takes no account of the losses suffered by those made bankrupt and those who lost homes and businesses.
• Nor does it compensate for time spent in prison / injury to reputation and legal costs incurred in fighting criminal cases and appeals.
• Will it be tax-free? One subpostmaster who managed to get compensation then found that much of it was taken away in taxation and payment of bankruptcy leaving him with so little he was unable to heat his home last winter. The structuring and tax treatment of compensation payments and how this has been misdescribed to subpostmasters has been one of the (many) criticisms made of one the Post Office’s many legal firms.
• It is also unclear whether this is a floor – leaving some able to pursue the Post Office through the courts for more to reflect their actual losses. If this were the case, it might have some merit. If not, it is effectively presenting subpostmasters with Hobson’s choice: inadequate compensation or the prospect of spending more time and money trying to fight an organisation determined to do the minimum possible and unable (or unwilling) to comply with its legal requirements.
• Above all, it is limited to those who manage to overturn their convictions in the courts. Note that the Post Office is still opposing many of these appeals, even where the evidence came from the Horizon system. This also excludes those who pleaded guilty because they felt unable to challenge the Horizon evidence and were unaware of the Post Office’s disclosure failings. Despite all the evidence about Horizon’s failings and unfitness for purpose, despite knowing – as the Minister put it – that Horizon data was “unreliable” (a gong please for the civil servant coming up with that description for data more accurately described as “untrue“), despite all the failings in its disclosure to defendants, the Post Office is still trying to argue its case.
• Finally, compare it with the bonus of £485,000 the Post Office CEO recently received for one year, a part of which was for complying with the inquiry, a compliance which did not occur, infuriated the judge, was lied about in its accounts and signed off by the Board. This Board then commissioned a report which managed to say that everything was tickety-boo but, no, they could not identify any actual human being who had signed off or written the untrue statements in the accounts or explain how it was that the accounts misled this issue. Then it promised not to pay bonuses at all before admitting under cross-examination that this too was another lie – as all executives were in fact eligible for bonuses for complying with an inquiry necessitated by their previous wrongdoing.

The Minister insisted in Monday’s debate that the government wanted to ensure “swift and fair” compensation. Whatever this process can be described as, “swift and fair” is not it. The government presents itself as above the fray, generously funding the Post Office. In reality, the government has been responsible in a number of ways:

• Its supervision of the Post Office and its management;
• Its relationship with Horizon (the correspondence between Harriet Harman and Tony Blair about Horizon’s inadequacy at a very early stage is worth reading to see how early matters started to go wrong and how);
• The failures of the criminal justice system; and
• Its control over how the Post Office has responded to the miscarriages of justice and the government’s own inquiry.

The compensation offer came as a surprise on Monday. Why? Well, on Tuesday we had one of the Post Office auditors, Helen Rose, giving evidence. She audited one of the subpostmasters who reported problems with Horizon and sought help. This lady had no qualifications or training as an auditor; no training or experience as an investigator and no training on the Horizon system (that she could remember). She gave written evidence to the High Court supporting the case against the subpostmaster (despite her original report showing flaws in Horizon). From her evidence now it is clear that she left out key information, removed anything true which might have helped the defendant, put in incorrect information and inserted defamatory and untrue statements about the person being investigated. She signed it as true but accepted that it wasn’t. She could not, however, remember how this came about. She could not even remember whether she had been subject to a disciplinary process as a result of the suicide of a subpostmaster she had met and audited. This convenient memory loss is likely to be repeated during this phase as various professionals – from auditors to IT experts and lots and lots of lawyers – give evidence, as the evidence of today’s witness shows.

When hearing evidence like this from people plainly not up to their job, utterly careless of their obligations and seemingly lacking any sense of professionalism, I think of the words of one bereaved Aberfan mother listening to the evidence of NCB officials: –

“What I heard there was very difficult for me to accept. Because most people who were brought to the stand seemed to think it was somebody else’s fault. Not theirs at all. I believe one of the engineers got on the stand and he didn’t seem to realise his dreadful part in this happening. And when I heard what he had to say it made me feel sick because it looked to me as though he couldn’t have cared less about what had happened on account of his neglect. It was a good thing that I wasn’t on the stand or wasn’t talking to him, you know, because I’d have floored him.“

If we are ever to have a hope of preventing this or any injustice reoccurring, if we are ever to provide some justice to those so grievously harmed, those responsible need to be made accountable, to suffer consequences – and soon. If not, “flooring” them may be the only option. It feels like a vain plea. But I make it nonetheless.

August 29 2023

In light of recent cases, it is worth exploring why it is hard for people to speak up about concerns and, often, even harder for people to take them seriously. My second column for GRIP below.

How the human factor affects the culture of whistleblowing

Photo by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash

June 12 2023

Sexual harassment: Boorish behaviour, unwanted by the target. Not to be confused with flirtation or courtship. Often perpetrated by people who have not recently looked in a mirror or who have forgotten their age or marital status.

Code of Conduct: Having some manners.

Banter: Amusing social interaction between friends and/or colleagues. Not to be confused with bad or offensive language, which becomes “banter” when someone complains about it.

Witch-hunt: The process of making grown-ups accountable for their behaviour.

A kangaroo court: any tribunal, committee or other body which decides something which the person under investigation disagrees with.

Addiction: Bad behaviour turned into an “illness”.

A clinic: A place where “addicts” go to, to hide from the media.

Abuse of power: Bullying. Soon to be classified as an “addiction”

Inappropriate: Very popular word covering –

(1) Breaches of social etiquette, such as using fish knives to eat steaks.
(2) Language mistakes e.g. the use of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”.
(3) Behaviour previously described as “wrong” or “illegal” or “criminal”.

Wrong: Description of behaviour which is either illegal or known by a majority to fall below widely accepted standards of decency. Implies responsibility by the person doing it. Now in high danger of falling into disuse.

Apology:

(1) A short form of words by which a person says sorry for behaviour which is “wrong” (see above). Traditionally starts with the 1st person singular and ends with the word “sorry”. In danger of falling into disuse.

(2) A long form of words by which someone appears to apologise while not in fact doing so. The non-apology apology requires focus on the victim’s reaction while also implying that it is both overegged and may not have happened.

There are many variations of this. Industries where bad behaviour is widespread are fond of adding to their apologies (variant no. (2)) a lengthy reference to all the good people in the industry; see Banking, Parliament, the Police, Journalism.

(3) The “Will this implausible excuse do?” apology: used by sulky teenagers everywhere. Now spreading to adults who should know better. See Diane Abbott who thought that saying offensive comments in a first draft was an adequate explanation rather than revelatory of what a person really thinks.

(4) Other popular excuses and explanations:

• “The culture has changed” – “I can’t get away with this anymore.”
• “What might have been acceptable 10, 15 years ago” – “My lawyer drafted this.”
• “Parliament / the police / the CBI / [insert organisation of choice] now needs to look at itself” – “Will this go away if we set up an inquiry and sack someone?”
• “Conduct needs to be improved” – “We must make sure not to get caught again.”
• “I have fallen below the high standards that we require of the [insert organisation of choice] – “By the time anyone works out what this means this unfortunate affair will have been forgotten.”
• “We take this [insert misconduct du jour] extremely seriously” – “We do now, given that it is all over the press and social media.”
• “I have reflected on my position” – “My wife / the PM / the Chief Whip has been shouting at me all weekend.”

The time for apologies is over (©Bob Diamond): The time when apologies (see “Apology (1))” should start.

Clarification: either

• an admission that what you said before was completely untrue (in common parlance, a lie); or
• an insistence that what you are saying now is what you have been saying all along, even though it is the complete opposite.

Shame: No known contemporary definition. Last heard of in the 1960’s.

Offence, the taking of: the best way of avoiding a debate and/or revealing you have no arguments. It is not actually necessary to be offended, just to say that you are.

“We are going to consult on these proposals” – “We know they aren’t popular but we’re going to implement them anyway.”

“We have not been consulted” – “We have not been agreed with”

“Let me be clear” – “I’m going to be anything but.”

“Full and frank disclosure” – “We don’t think they’ve got any more dirt than has already been published but are keeping our fingers crossed that nothing else comes out.”

Any statement saying that an entity’s finances are fine and intended to reassure: usually the precursor to discovery of a fraud or insolvency.

An inquiry: A process by which an embarrassing story disappears from public view.

A report: What a person who had nothing to with the original events has to present to Parliament and/or the media many years later. See the Savile Inquiry Report. See also the forthcoming Grenfell, Post Office, blood contamination and Covid-19 reports.

Lawyers: The people who write inquiry reports. Also, the only people who read them.

Peerage: what the author of a report producing a satisfactory outcome for those commissioning it gets, entirely coincidentally, after the report has been finished. Very occasionally, the peerage is given, again entirely coincidentally, immediately before the report is started (see Ms – now Baroness – Chakrabarti).

Conclusions:  Usually written before the inquiry has heard any evidence.

Recommendations: What you find, if you read that far, at the end of a report.

“We are going to consult on these recommendations ” – “We have no intention of implementing them but this will make it look as if we are doing something until everyone has forgotten about them.”

Working group: A group of people unable to avoid being tasked with the responsibility of coming up with suggestions as to how recommendations might be implemented.

The long grass: Where recommendations usually end up. See also “Inquiry”.

Lack of resources: The best reason yet invented for not implementing any difficult recommendations.

Lessons learned: Lessons which are never learned by those who need to learn them.

“This must never happen again” – “This must never happen again during my term of office, at least not before I resign/retire and draw my gold-plated, index-linked, final salary pension, or move onto an even more well-paid position.”

Whistleblowing: Something which is frequently talked about but not done anything like often enough. The equivalent of an “extreme sport” in some professions e.g. medicine, politics, finance.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash