Post Office Horizon IT cases ‘the greatest scandal I have ever seen’, says former senior judge – as it happened

The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has resumed. Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom is giving evidence. The lead counsel Jason Beer KC has just clarified that at the point Arbuthnot was being told in 2012 by the Post Office that no prosecution had ever failed and had not disclosed to him there were any bugs in the Horizon IT system, there had been three jury acquittals in cases where Horizon had featured.

There was also at this point a lengthy list of known problems with the system, including an instance where one subpostmistress had watched the amount of money she was supposed to owe the Post Office double in front of her eyes after following some instructions from the Post Office helpline to try to correct the balance.

You can watch here …

10 Apr 202406.37 EDT

UK spent 27.9% of international aid budget on housing refugees in the UK

Patrick Wintour

Patrick Wintour is the Guardian’s diplomatic editor

The UK taxpayer spent £4.3bn (27.9%) of the total UK aid budget on supporting the housing and food costs of refugees based in Britain, an increase of £600m from 2022, new official government aid statistics for 2023 show.

There has been a growing criticism that Foreign Office funds intended to help alleviate poverty overseas are being diverted to subsidise a chaotic Home Office run asylum system. The latest statistics show that the trend has continued in 2023.

Although the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was the largest spender of UK Official Development Assistance (ODA), spending £9,471m, the Home Office spent £2,955m of ODA funding in 2023, the statistics published on Wednesday show.

Five other government departments each spent more than £200m of UK Official Development Assistance (ODA). The UK four years ago suspended the target to spend 0.7% of national income on aid.

Aid analysts said the refugee spending was only part of a wider long term trend whereby UK aid spend is increasingly being spent inside the UK rather than as promised in locally led projects operating inside recipient countries.

Ian Mitchell, from the Centre for Global Development in Europe commented “Headline figures showing the government spent 0.58% of the country’s income on aid are masking a bigger problem. The government is now spending over 50% of the £9.9bn bilateral aid budget within the UK. Over the last decade, every year has seen the UK spend a greater share of its bilateral aid within its own borders: rising from a low of 6% in 2013, to the 48% figure in 2022.”

The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has just been reminded of an occasion when an MP Mike Wood asked “whether the Post Office was saying that the system was 100% secure and 100% foolproof, making the point that it would be the first software system implemented by government to be so”, and the Post Office reply was “There had not been a case investigated, where the Horizon system had been found to be at fault … The problem is that a small number of postmasters borrow money from the till. The problem is not Horizon. Every prosecution involving Horizon has found in favour of the Post Office, and not a single case existed where on investigation the Horizon system was found to be at fault.”

The inquiry is hearing that the Post Office at this point knew that at least two prosecutions had failed several years earlier, and it knew that bugs existed in the system. In fact, leading counsel Jason Beer KC is now reading out a devastatingly long list of bugs in the system that were well-known to the organisation and not disclosed to Lord Arbuthnot.

“We were all unaware”, he says. “But Mike Wood was raising the question is this the only perfect computer system in existence.”

This is all taking place in the summer of 2012. The chair Wyn Williams is asking Lord Arbuthnot about whether the role of Fujitsu had been raised at this point.

I don’t tend to focus on individual polls, as it is somewhat more reliable to average them out, as we do on our poll tracker. However it is worth noting that YouGov have put out some polling from Scotland this morning, where they say that Labour has overtaken the SNP for the first time in Westminster voting intention since the independence referndum.

I will immediately caveat that by saying it is an extremely small lead and it is just one poll, but UK national level polls are next to useless at teasing out the situation in Scotland, and it does appear to demonstrate that there has been a narrowing of the gap between the SNP and Labour in Scottish constituencies at a UK general election level.

A couple of key points from the YouGov figures:

One in three Scots (33%) currently say they intend to vote for Labour at the forthcoming general election, giving the party a minor two point lead over the SNP (31%). Our previous poll in this series – conducted in October 2023 – had the SNP just a single ahead of Labour, at 33% and 32% respectively. The SNP have lost a fifth (20%) of their 2019 voters to Labour, and are currently holding on to 66% of those who backed them previously. The Conservative vote share in Scotland has shifted more noticeably, falling six points since October to 14%.

The same polling data produces the opposite result for Holyrood constituencies, with the SNP retaining a slim lead.

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Lord Arbuthnot has said that everybody seemed to rally around the word “robust”, and he was constatnly told that the Horizon system was “robust”.

He told the inquiry “There were lots of people who were told to use this word, which implies a sort of series of group-thinking seminars, which led to the use of language.”

A communication from Paula Vennells was read out to the inquiry in which she said:

The Post Office takes very seriously any perception that there is an issue with the accuracy of the Horizon system. There isn’t. The Horizon system has been rigorously tested using independent assessors and robust procedures.

Arbuthnot is being asked about how he was part of now a group of MPs pursuing the case, which included Oliver Letwin.

It is quite striking, at this point in the evidence, how even a group including then-senior MPs who belonged to the parties of government were being completely stonewalled by the Post Office insistence there was no problem, and officials accepting that as the truth.

One document shown to the inquiry states that most people having difficulties with the system could be successfully given extra training on Horizon, and the Post Office also appears to have insisted to the government and to MPs that it never failed in prosecutions over fraud.

Back to the Cass review of the NHS’s gender services for children for a moment, and victims and safeguarding minister Laura Farris has said she does not accept that the report showed the government was failing to look after children.

Appearing on GB News, Farris said:

I don’t accept that. And I make that point very gently and respectfully. There has been a 20-fold, something like a 15 or 20-fold increase in the number of children using these services in the last 10 or 15 years and that’s happened in many countries, many other countries.

It’s a problem everybody’s been grappling with. We’re the government that asked Hilary Cass to conduct that review, she spent three and a half years doing it, there is nothing comparable in any other country that is remotely as in-depth as this.

It’s been incredibly helpful to hear from doctors, from mental health experts and to look at the way that she recommends that this should be dealt with holistically on a regional basis, on a multidisciplinary basis. Actually, I think we’ve acted responsibly. We recognised how it was emerging, with the concerns that people were raising.

On publication of the report, Cass stressed that her findings were not intended to undermine the validity of trans identities or challenge people’s right to transition, but rather to improve the care of the fast-growing number of children and young people with gender-related distress.

In an interview with the Guardian, Cass said that gender-questioning children have been “let down” by the NHS, health professionals and a “woeful” lack of evidence about what treatment works. “One of the things that has let them down is that the toxicity of the debate has been so great that people have become afraid to work in this area.”

The first thirty minutes of Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom’s evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has had its focus on the late 2000s and early 2010s, when he was actively trying to draw the government’s attention to the problem.

He was first involved as an opposition MP writing to Peter Mandelson when the latter was at the department of business about a specific case involving a constituent.

Mandelson, writing on behalf of the then-Labour government, said that the Post Office had assured the government that the Horizon IT system was sound, and that cases were being investigated thoroughly. The government also restated its position that in order to give it commercial freedom, while it was the single shareholder, the government operated the Post Office at an “arms length” relationship.

Arbuthnot has told the inquiry that he compares this to the risks of owning a dangerous dog. He said:

You cannot say that the dangerous dog has an arm’s length relationship with you if the dangerous dog behaves badly. So the whole premise of arm’s length control is a worrying one.

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A little bit later in the chronology, when the coalition government was now in power, Arbuthnot continued correspondence with ministers about other Post Office employees who had been accused of fraud and who were saying it was the Horizon system to blame. He had this to say to the inquiry:

There was something at the back of my mind, which continued to trouble me. Which was the number of these people who were being told you are the only person this is happening to. And that struck me as being profoundly wrong.

Because at first it was obviously disprovable they were not the only people it was happening to. Second it was isolating those [people] so they could not get support from others in the same position. And third, it had an element of intimidation about it.

All of which set the Post Office and its way of operating with it subpostmasters in a bad light.

There has been some response to the government announcing it is intending to make assault on retail workers a specific offence. Part of its rationale, victims and safeguarding minister Laura Farris said, was to make it recordable. [See 9.12am]

Jo Causon, CEO of the Institute of Customer Service, said it was a “welcome step in the right direction” saying it offers “essential safeguards for countless frontline workers who are subjected to intolerable acts of physical aggression.”

She added:

This matter is not confined to retail workers alone. There is an urgent need to extend these protections to service professionals across various industries who are similarly exposed to daily abuse – including those in transportation, delivery services, and customer support roles. I urge the policing minister to take decisive action by ensuring that incidents of assault on public service workers are distinctly categorized within police records.

I mentioned earlier that asked about accusations he had shown weakness in dealing with the William Wragg sexting scandal, on LBC the prime minister sought to deflect that criticism into one of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner. Here is a fuller transcript of that exchange. Sunak said:

People can can judge me if they want to judge me on that, that’s fine. I accept that. But when it comes to weakness, I mean Keir Starmer still hasn’t answered any questions properly about what’s going on with Angela Rayner. When it comes to me or my affairs people are very happy to ask lots of questions, including Angela Rayner herself.

Host Nick Ferrari then challenged Sunak, saying “come on prime minister, that dates back more than ten years, to a woman in a previous relationship, there’s nothing to see here.”

Sunak then continued:

Hang on. This is someone who, as far as you believe the media, assumes he’s going to stroll into 10 Downing Street later this year. And this is the person who’d be deputy leader, deputy prime minister of the country. And I think there are very clear questions for her to answer about this. He hasn’t answered them. She hasn’t answered them. I think it’s reasonable that people get a straight answer on it.

This is not the first time that Sunak, who was appointed prime minister by the Conservative party without an election or even a vote of Tory members, has suggested Keir Starmer would be “strolling” into Downing Street were the Labour party to win a general election under Starmer’s leadership.

The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has resumed in London. You can watch it here. I will keep an eye on it for any key lines that emerge. The first witness is peer Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, who supported the justice campaign led by Alan Bates.