Former Royal Mail chief exec says he ‘was not aware’ group’s lawyers were prosecuting post office operators – as it happened

Prime minister Rishi Sunak has been meeting veterans today as part of an announcement that the government is setting up a new scheme to try to help those leaving the armed forces find employment.

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The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has moved on to asking Alan Cook what he knew about the Horizon IT system itself. Earlier he had mentioned he had been on a training course on using the terminal and said he had spent one day working in a branch.

He said that at his first board meeting “my impression was there was a level of contentment with the functionality of the system, but not its running cost, and occasionally, its availability.”

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, former managing director of the Post Office Alan Cook has been shown a document he signed, which Sam Stevens the barrister says:

This shows doesn’t it, that you were aware that it was the Post Office security team that made decisions on whether or not there was a criminal case to answer.

Cook replies again that this was “not how he read it”. Asked about what action he would take to verify that documents he signed were true he tells the barrister that it would have been drafted for him.

Describing what was in the document, Stevens told the inquiry:

The last paragraph says in terms of the decision to issue court proceedings, the investigations undertaken by the Post Office security team to decide whether there is a criminal case to answer is independent from any action that may be taken by the contracts team, whose role is to focus on contractual related issues only.

The decision to issue legal proceedings is never taken lightly. The alleged offence of fraud against you are, however, have a sufficiently serious nature to support that this is the correct course of action to take a decision therefore, remains unchanged.

Cook maintains “clearly we wouldn’t have wanted anyone prosecuted where we didn’t believe we wanted to prosecute, but I didn’t believe that we were the only party that made that possible.”

PA Media has alerted that Greater Manchester police has said it has reopened a probe into claims Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner may have broken electoral law over information she gave about her living situation a decade ago.

The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has resumed. Alan Cook who was managing director at the Post Office during the early 2000s is the witness, being questioned by Sam Stevens. So far the key line to emerge is that Cook claims it was not until late in his tenure that he realised that the Post Office was itself acting as the prosecutor in cases against subpostmasters. The BBC has previously reported that Cook earned a total of £3m during his time at the company, including £1.2m in his final year. You can watch it here …

Some reaction from Scotland on Keir Starmer’s decision today to come out and say that nuclear weapons are a “bedrock” of Labour’s security plans.

SNP defence spokesperson Martin Docherty-Hughes said:

Westminster has already wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on nuclear weapons and expensive nuclear energy.

It is therefore grotesque that Sir Keir Starmer is prepared to throw billions more down the drain when his party claim there is no money to improve our NHS, help families with the cost of living or to properly invest in our green energy future.

This money would be better spent on a raft of other things – not least investing in the green energy gold rush, which would ensure Scotland, with all its renewable energy potential, could be a green energy powerhouse of the 21st century.

12 Apr 202405.31 EDT

Archie Bland

If you missed our First Edition newsletter today, Archie Bland was talking to Patrick Butler about the growing carers scandal:

“Each injustice has its own special identity,” Patrick Butler said. “But what they have in common is the sense of the little guy being crushed by the vast, impersonal, ruthless state. It has been known for a long time that this is a crappy design, that it punishes people, but they haven’t done anything about it.”

Here’s how it works: let’s say a carer goes over the eligibility limit by £1 a week and doesn’t notice. They are immediately ineligible for the entirety of the allowance, which becomes a debt to the DWP. Over a year, their debt is not the £52 annual total by which their income increased – but the accumulated £81.90 a week benefit, or £4,259.

Of course, because there has been so little change in the carer’s income, it is all too easy to miss: this is not a story about benefit cheats brazenly living the high life. And so there are many potential victims. Last year, the DWP was seeking to recover the debts of more than 145,000 people.

“It can be tempting to cast the DWP as the evil empire, but it’s not,” Patrick said. “The majority of people working there are just human beings. But it is an insanely rigid system that allows no discretion at all.”

Read more here: Friday briefing – ‘The little guy crushed by a ruthless state’ – how the carers scandal is growing

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The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is taking a ten minute break. And so will I. See you when they resume.

Alan Cook has said he believed the potential for fraud was endless within the Post Office business because it was cash rich. He told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry:

More cash went through the Post Office organisation than any other organisation, you know, £80bn a year. The potential for fraud was endless. But the fraud I’m talking about is what the customers are up to. Not particularly what staff were up to. So there was a constant stream of these investigation reports would have a whole range of issues.

He later added:

If you look at the different types of product, the risk of fraud, and primarily to me, when I was hearing the word fraud, I was thinking it was us or the Bank of Ireland was being defrauded by customers.

Cook is claiming that on the documentation he saw, there was never a distinction between prosecutions involving the CPS and those solely by the Post Office.

He has been shown a note from 29 September 2005 which Sam Stevens, the barrister asking the questions, says makes it clear that the Post Office carried out its own prosecutions.

“It’s not how I read it. This is my regret,” said Cook. He went on to say:

There was a sort of high and mighty tone sometimes and it fed a sense of self-importance. It never occurred to me reading that that the Post Office was the sole arbiter of whether or not that criminal prosecution would proceed.

I felt what they were saying was “we agree it’s proceeding but somewhere else had to agree it was going ahead”.

He continues to maintain he did not know the Post Office was acting as prosecutor until 2009.

Alan Cook said he had not previously encountered an organisation that could initiate prosecutions itself, and he describes it as “one of my regrets” that he didn’t “pick up on that earlier”.

He told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry:

I had assumed that the police/DPP had been involved. I shouldn’t have presumed, but I did presume, sadly. And then “it had gone to court” was the expression they used. I had not encountered the notion of an organisation that could make that decision on its own. And I suppose I had too much assumed knowledge. And when you see the words that were written, I can see why that view still perpetuated in my mind, because it didn’t overtly say “We have taken the decision to prosecute.”

Chair Wyn Williams interjects, and says:

As I understand it, it follows from what you’re saying that when you became the managing director, no one within the company Post Office Ltd thought it necessary to tell you “And by the way, we prosecute people, in the sense that we don’t just investigate them, but we initiate and conduct the prosecution.”

Alan Cook says that is correct.

He is shown some minutes about court cases from a meeting he did not attend but would most likely have read at the time. The phrasing still did not, he says, strike him as meaning that Post Office Ltd was itself carrying out the prosecutions.

“I am not blaming others,” he said “It’s my misunderstanding, but I had just not encountered that type of situation.”