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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Post Office scandal was uncovered not by officialdom but by dogged, independent-minded heroes. These included journalists at the BBC, Computer Weekly and Private Eye; an engineer who blew the whistle at Fujitsu; several MPs; and Alan Bates, the sub-postmaster whose determination to get justice is now legendary. These people, now celebrated in an ITV drama that has pushed the issue to the top of the nation’s agenda, were up against a self-serving apparatchik class which despises the little people, is adept at covering its tracks and is an increasing feature of modern Britain.
The number of postmasters affected, and the vindictive way in which the Post Office pursued them, makes it especially shocking. But we have seen the same pattern in other tragedies where public or quasi-public bodies either fail to join the dots or actively conspire in cover-ups. The deaths of babies at Morecambe Bay hospital were uncovered by a father, James Titcombe, who was repeatedly fobbed off in getting answers about why his baby died. The sexual abuse of girls in Rotherham was revealed by The Times, despite extensive obfuscation by Rotherham council. Failings in the care of Baby Peter Connelly, who died under the noses of social workers, were brought to light by Kim Holt, a paediatrician who was suspended for her pains by Great Ormond Street.
One of the reasons the Post Office saga took so long is that it was a state-owned entity which was also independent. It wasn’t accountable to anyone, and even part-funded the postmasters’ representative body, effectively muzzling it. The management culture assumed that many sub-postmasters, who were self-employed, were on the take — a view executives felt was confirmed when the Horizon software appeared to show high levels of fraud. It was protected by Whitehall, whose officials encouraged a succession of ministers not to meet Bates.
The UK landscape is littered with similar hybrid bodies which are fundamentally unaccountable. Universities that pay top management like businesses, but don’t run like businesses. Privatised water monopolies that have spent years illegally dumping sewage into our water, killing fish and making people sick. Their executives are part of the apparatchik class and so is the regulator, Ofwat.
A striking feature of this cadre is how they move from job to job around the system despite, in some cases, egregious failings. The NHS is littered with overpromoted managers who get recycled from one hospital trust to another. Paula Vennells, Post Office chief executive between 2012 and 2019, was in post when failings in the Horizon software became unavoidably evident, yet she continued to preside over prosecutions until 2015. The MP James Arbuthnot, who forced Vennells to agree to the external review of Horizon that helped to break the scandal open, has described an appalling level of management groupthink — and malice. Yet in 2019 Vennells went on to another job on the circuit, chairing a large NHS trust. And Fujitsu, the technology company behind Horizon, which has so far been untouchable, has won £5bn more in government contracts since its software was found not to be robust by the High Court in 2019.
This is how the system operates. Individuals may occasionally be caught out, but the machine just rolls on. Indeed, any government that is minded to abolish arms-length bodies discovers that it can’t — they are often statutory. The level of effort and political capital you would need to expend trying to get rid of any of them is too much for the average minister.
This serves no one, including the brilliant young people who are recruited into the civil service. They arrive with great hopes of serving the nation, and are then trapped in meetings where no one knows much about the people they are supposed to serve. I have met health department officials who have never been inside a hospital or care home. I’ve met quango heads who hire management consultants rather than talk to customers. It’s not surprising we are so bad at procurement: the Fujitsu contract being an example.
What can we learn from the Post Office heroes? First, that momentum depends on spotting patterns. Bates’s determination to find others in similar trouble was a stroke of genius. Second, the importance of meticulous record-keeping. Arbuthnot, who became involved 15 years ago because one of his constituents was a sub-postmaster, has an office overflowing with paper relating to this fight. Third, that investigative journalists like Nick Wallis can crystallise a complex story, hard to understand. Fourth, that tenacity is essential because the system aims to wear you down and tire you out.
For all those on the other “side”, all the good officials, this saga shows the importance of keeping an open mind. Not everyone who claims to be a victim is genuine: I learnt this in years of campaigning on the family courts. But many real victims can also be initially hard to believe. They can be crazed with anxiety, or have a frustratingly vague handle on the chronology of events. Listening to them and extracting their stories takes time — something MPs are rather good at. True whistleblowers are also marked out by the fact that they rarely want fame or honours: what they want is justice. The contrast could not be greater with the senior executives who will spend any amount of taxpayers’ money, and condemn any number of ordinary people to misery, to avoid admitting mistakes.
The postmasters will be exonerated. But Fujitsu should be paying the compensation. And future ministers should consider meeting a few “troublemakers”: they might learn something.