A former Post Office boss has suggested he was partly to blame for the Horizon IT scandal because he “didn’t really reflect” on how the organisation prosecuted alleged crimes.
Giving evidence at the Post Office inquiry on Thursday, David Smith – who was the Post Office’s managing director between April and December 2010 – said there were “inherent risks” involved in the prosecutions taking place in-house as opposed to by an independent authority.
He told the inquiry: “I’m sad to say at the time I didn’t really reflect on it in the way that I perhaps should have done.”
Mr Smith added that, with hindsight, management should have identified those risks, to put in place “better control mechanisms”.
Asked to what extent he accepted responsibility for not identifying that risk, Mr Smith responded: “I certainly think I am a part of it.”
During his evidence, Mr Smith also admitted that the Post Office conducting investigations and then prosecuting the cases might have meant the organisation did not “act independently”.
“I think that the passage of time has shown that conducting the case, gathering the data, acting as the prosecution can lead you to a position where you might not think as independently as you should do about the quality of information,” he said.
He also said he believed there was an “institutional bias” not to investigate further was subpostmasters were saying about the Horizon system.
“Looking back, I think that there was an institutional bias to not interrogate further what was being said by SPMs and the public about Horizon,” he said in a witness statement.
During his appearance, the inquiry also heard how the former MD also said he had been “reassured” by top Post Office bosses such as former CEO Paula Vennells and general counsel Susan Crichton that the Horizon system could not be “tampered with”.
Mr Smith said he would have “approached things differently” had he known that was not true, but also acknowledged that, when he took over in April 2010, it wouldn’t have been unusual for a computer system to have some bugs and there were some issues in the rollout of Horizon online.
He told the inquiry that by the time the Fujitsu system had been rolled out to “around 600 branches” some were experiencing problems like “freezing screens” which affected trading.
He added: “We were all very aware that if we could not fix that problem relatively quickly, we would have to rollback to the legacy system.”
Mr Smith explained that he was having “conversations with senior people from Fujitsu” to get to the bottom of transaction issues and screen freezing, amongst other software issues.
When asked what he had been told about the issues, he said: “We’ve got strong records. We’ve got independent security going round checking and balancing, and the court cases that we’ve have had been largely successful. So it was that kind of level, rather than anything more detailed.”
The inquiry continues.