Former Post Office managing director Alan Cook has said he will “regret for the rest of my life” an email in which he wrote that subpostmasters had their “hands in the till”.
“What I wrote in that email was unacceptable”, Mr Cook told an inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal.
The email, sent in 2009 to the Royal Mail Group’s press officer, said the IT was “stable and reliable”.
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted due to the software.
Mr Cook was in charge of the Post Office from 2006 to 2010.
Writing to Mary Fagan, he had said: “For some strange reason, there is a steadily building nervousness about the accuracy of the Horizon system and the press are on it now as well.”
He wrote that the system had been stable and reliable for many years and there was “absolutely no logical reason why these fears should now develop”.
“My instincts tell me that, in a recession, subbies [sub-postmasters] with their hand in the till choose to blame the technology when they are found to be short of cash.”
During the inquiry, Mr Cook also said that he did not realise the organisation itself was prosecuting victims of the Horizon IT scandal.
Instead, he thought it was the police or CPS, he told the inquiry into the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of sub-postmasters due to faulty software.
He told the inquiry he did not know that prosecutions were being brought solely by the Post Office until 2009.
He said when he was told cases “went to court” he presumed that the police had been involved, and only found out later that roughly two thirds of cases against Horizon victims had been brought by the Post Office.
“One of my regrets is that I didn’t pick up on that earlier,” he said.
The involvement of the Post Office in prosecuting its own staff created a risk that it wasn’t taking independent decisions, he said.
Mr Cook added that there would have been a “higher bar” that needed to be reached had the prosecutions been independent.
He said it was a “regret” that he had misunderstood notes and minutes that had made it clear that the Post Office carried out its own prosecutions.
“It never occurred to me that the Post Office was the sole arbiter of whether or not that criminal prosecution would proceed,” he said.
During Mr Cook’s time at the top, the Post Office secured 292 Horizon convictions in England and Wales.
These years saw some of the highest numbers of convictions using Horizon data, according to evidence submitted to the inquiry by Simon Recaldin, director of the Post Office’s remediation unit.
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for offences including theft and false accounting after their books didn’t balance due to errors in the Horizon software.
Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people.
Similarly to Mr Cook, former chief executive of the Royal Mail Group Adam Crozier also said he was not aware that lawyers within the group conducted prosecutions.
He told the inquiry he did not have a “developed understanding” of how Royal Mail carried out prosecutions.
Adam Crozier was appointed chief executive officer of Royal Mail on 1 Feb 2003, and left on 31 March 2010. Royal Mail was the owner of the Post Office during that time.
According to evidence submitted to the Horizon Inquiry by Simon Recaldin, Director of the Post Office’s remediation unit, these years saw some of the highest numbers of convictions using Horizon evidence.
He was asked: “Is the truth of the matter that in your position you did not have a developed understanding of the extent to which Royal Mail prosecuted or the way in which things were or were not carried into effect?”
Mr Crozier responded: “I’m not a lawyer. I would not claim it is my area of expertise”.
He also said he was “not in the slightest” involved in the procurement of Horizon as the Post Office’s IT system.
Former sub-postmaster Janet Skinner was given a nine-month sentence in 2007 over an alleged shortfall of £59,000 from her Post Office branch in Bransholme, Hull.
She served three months in prison before being released with an electronic tag, but eventually had her conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in April 2021.
Ms Skinner told the BBC executives like Alan Cook should have been aware of what was happening in the business.
“He had a high position, and you’re telling me that he wasn’t aware of what was going on in the business?”
She said if Mr Cook didn’t understand that the Post Office had been bringing prosecutions “he shouldn’t have had the position he was in”.
“He was getting paid a lot of money to overview what was going on in the business, and therefore he should have known what was going on,” she added.
