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Alan Bates: once I saw ‘harm and injustice’ I had to dedicate part of my life to this cause
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Alan Bates has said that he has dedicated a large part of his life to campaigning about the scandal because of the “harm and injustice” that he saw.
Appearing at Aldwych house in London, Bates, who was featured as a character in the ITV drama that drew so much focus to the scandal, said:
Once I’d started my individual little campaign and we found others along the way, and eventually we all joined up. It has required dedication, but secondly, it is a cause. I think it’s also stubbornness as well. But it’s … I mean, as you got to meet people, and realise it wasn’t just yourself. And you saw the harm, the injustice that had been descended upon them, it was something that you felt you had to deal with.
He told the inquiry, which has been running for three years, that he had spent four times as long campaigning about Horizon as he had being a subpostmaster, although that had been the decision of the Post Office. He believed they terminated his contract because of his frequent complaints about the Horizon system.
Having used computerised sales software in other roles, Bates said he found the reporting aspects of the Horizon system limited.
Today’s session began with lead consul Jason Beer KC issuing a lengthy criticism of the Post Office for its repeated late discloure of documents to the inquiry, which he said had been “highly disruptive”.
Inquiry chair Wyn Williams said he was determined to continue the hearings on the present timetable, despite the difficulty of the Post Office failing to produce documents in a timely fashion, because the alternative, an adjournment, would be worse. He said he believed the inquiry should not last a day longer than necessary,
Key events
Scotland’s first minister has warned that a vote for the Greens by Scots at the upcoming general election would be a “wasted vote”.
PA Media reports Humza Yousaf told the National newspaper that votes for the Greens would split the pro-independence vote. He said he has “a great amount of time” for the Scottish Greens, who entered the Scottish government in 2021, but cautioned:
In a Westminster election, particularly when we’re facing a challenge from Labour, the danger of voting Greens – who are not going to win a single seat in the general election in Scotland, I think they would be the first to admit that – is that would be a wasted vote.
If you want to advance the cause of independence, if you want a party that aligns with your values – whether that’s social justice or on the climate or wellbeing economy – then the SNP is the party that you need to be voting for.
Former armed forces minister Heappey: both Labour and Tories should commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence
Former armed forces minister James Heappey has said the Conservatives and Labour should commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence in their election manifestos.
He told listeners to the Today programme this morning:
The UK should step up and show some leadership within the European parts, or even the non-US part of Nato, and should commit 2.5% of GDP on defence spending at the Nato 75th anniversary summit in Washington this summer.
And I would hope that both of the parties that hope to form the government after the next general election would have a 3% commitment in their manifestos for delivery in the next parliament.
On 15 March, Heappey announced he was to step down as armed forces minister, and would leave the House of Commons at the next general election
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has broken for lunch for the day. Here’s a video clip from earlier when Alan Bates explained the harm he thought the Post Office had done.
Alan Bates is saying that he holds the civil service more responsible for the lack of progress than ministers. He says:
I do think a lot of the ministers, a lot of them come in for the stick in the inquiry, and all the rest of it. I’m sure some of it’s deserved, but I actually hold the department, and I hold the civil service more to blame in a lot of these instances, why things never progressed at the time. Because I’m sure between them and Post Office briefing ministers that were briefing them in the direction they wanted to brief them.
He suggests that the department must get “nagged” on a lot of issues, and he suspected that civil servants just tried to stall all of them until they saw which ones were getting more traction. He repeats that he blames officials more than minister.
Jason Beer has read out a briefing to Ed Davey which essentially suggested he meet Alan Bates because there might be a Channel 4 news item about the campaign, and to essentially have the meeting for presentational reasons. Bates says he doesn’t recall the meeting he had with Davy.
Bates was asked if Davey appeared engaged at the meeting, and Bates says he doesn’t recall.
The cautionary briefing goes on to suggest Davey was told his best course of action was to adopt a “sub judice approach”. Davy is advised to “Demonstrate you’re prepared to hear their side of the story. But make it clear you’re not in a position to offer substantive comment and avoid committing to setting up an independent or external review of Horizon.”
Of the meeting Bates keeps saying “I don’ recall” and that “I can’t think of anything that came out of it otherwise I’d probably recall it but, I suppose.”
This is the first time that Bates has appeared uncomfortable giving testimony.
The inquiry is now seeing a letter Alan Bates sent to Ed Davey in response in the July of 2010, saying he found Davy’s first letter “offensive”.
Bates added:
It seems that though there are new politicians in post, the government hasn’t changed. The letter you sent is little different to the one I received seven years ago from the Minister responsible for post offices at that time, and so many more lives have been ruined in the interim, because of that same attitude.
It’s not you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter, after all you do own 100% of the shares, and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.
It’s because you’ve adopted an arms length relationship, that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset-stripped by little more than thugs in suits. And you’ve enabled them to carry on with impunity, regardless of the human misery and suffering they’ve caused.
The room has fallen very silent while Beer reads this letter out at length.
Jason Beer KC is now showing a letter sent to Ed Davey, the current Liberal Democrat leader, in May 2010, when he had become minister for post office affairs in the new coalition government.
In the letter Alan Bates said:
In every instance, the Post Office acts as judge, jury and executioner, and the individual is deserted by their reputedly representative organisation the National Federation of subpostmasters.
Invariably, these cases all stem from the flaws of the Horizon system that the Post Office introduced and which they refuse to admit it has ever suffered from a single problem.
The evidence is there to be found by anyone in a position of being able to unlock doors instead of placing barriers in the way of those pursuing the information.
Our organisation has access to a number of specialists who could provide the questions and analyse the resulting data if required though an independent external investigation instigated a ministerial level would be most appropriate and will, without doubt, easily find evidence of the error ridden system.
I’m sure you will appreciate that there is not a single computer system that does not from time to time suffer from errors.
The Post Office blindly state that there are not nor have there ever been any system errors. So subsequently anything wrong is entirely the responsibility of the subpostmaster as that is what they’ve agreed to when signing their contracts.
This is a contract that was produced in 1994 and does not address nor identify new technology, but they’re still using it to intimidate and prosecute subpostmasters over the page.
Davy’s reply states:
The Royal Mail which includes Post Office Ltd was set up as a public limited company with the government as its only shareholder. Government has adopted an arm’s length relationship with the company so that it has commercial freedom to run its business operations without interference from the shareholder.
The integrity of the Post Office system is an operational and contractual matter for the Post Office and not government. And whilst I do appreciate your concerns and those of alliance members, I do not believe that a meeting would serve any useful purpose.
Beer says to Bates that he took particular offence at the idea the government held the Post Office at arms length, and Bates agrees, telling the inquiry:
Because of the structure, the government was the sole shareholder, they were the owners as such of all of this, and how can you run or take control or take responsibility for an organisation without having some interest in trying to control? In fact the government werre pumping huge amounts of money into Post Office year after year. So they need to be held responsible.
Alan Bates said he didn’t expect to be mounting this campaign for 20 years, “but it got more and more complex, and harder and harder to share out, to work as a bigger group.”
He said it felt like “banging your head against a brick wall to try to get everything out, because [the Post Office] were determined to protect the brand at any cost. And they didn’t want anything coming out or being disclosed that might cause damage to Post Office.”
Bates says he hasn’t done any other work since being dismissed as a subpostmaster in 2003.
There’s been a lengthy passage where Alan Bates has been highly critical of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), describing it as just a separate branch of the Post Office itself. He said to his knowledge the NFSP had never helped any member facing prosecution due to Horizon errors.
He described someone being excluded from a meeting after they began to explain they were losing their branch due to the Horizon system’s faults.
“The Federation always seem to try to manage any of the problems around Horizon,” Bates said.
Jason Beer has just made the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry laugh. Alan Bates had started talking about something out of the chronological of his statement, and Beer complained “I’m the one who is supposed to bowl the fast balls.”
Beer is defintely bowling the legal equivalent of underarm at Bates today, just coaxing him through his story. It is likely to be a very different wicket when senior Post Office management figures appear later this week.
My colleague Jane Croftm, who has been covering this story since 2018, yesterday published this piece setting up what we can expect at Aldwych House this week.
Asked why he says in his statement that at the time “the Post Office would do anything and everything to try to keep the failures of Horizon hidden”, Alan Bates says:
I think a number of reasons. First off, I think the field personnel didn’t understand it to any great depth. And they just seemed to follow the corporate mantra, that Horizon is robust and that’s it, and everyone else is wrong.
I had some experience of those types of systems. And it was obvious it was extremely poorly designed, and it didn’t really do the job it was meant to, and there are a huge amount of problems. I kept on hearing problems, little problems from all sorts of people, other subpostmasters.
Because I used to go to regional federation meetings as well, and you did sit and chat, and everyone had a moan and a whinge about it.
And you heard stories of where people were literally taking the computers and the whole systems and leaving them on the pavement outside and telling the Post Office to come and collect it. Those are the sorts of stories that were running around at the time.
“Are you aware of what anecdotal evidence there might be, which demonstrates your unsuitability to be a postmaster?” Alan Bates is asked, after the idea that he had been unsuitable was floated in Post Office a document.
“They appointed me in the first instance,” he noted. “This was just them flexing their muscle and just decided they were right and I was wrong,” he says.
At another point in the documents it is suggested that Bates was “flaunting” the way he was acting against instruction in the way he was rolling over what he considered to be the inaccuracies introduced by the Horizon IT system. Bates said:
I just pointed out what I was doing and the reasons why I was doing it, but they never respond to me, they’d never discuss the issue about data, and data access, and liability, and how long that liability lasted for and all the rest of it.
When I went into Post Office, it was sold to me at the time as you were in partnership with the business. But you very soon learned that this was a very one-sided partnership. I mean, basically you do whatever you’re told was your side of the partnership, and they just didn’t seem to like it if you raised any queries, even no matter how justified they were.
Alan Bates has said in his evidence that everybody he turned to for help with his campaign were being “shut down or fobbed off” by the Post Office, which repeatedly sought to justify its decision to terminate his contract, and told people “No evidence was found which in any way substantiates the various claims being made by Bates.”
Bates is disputing that “further training and support” was given to him. With an element of sarcasm he says “Well, it’s true if that’s what it says” about a Post Office claim to that effect.
A little bit of extra background on what is happening at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today. Alan Bates, perhaps the best known victim and campaigner in the scandal is giving evidence. He is being taken through a 58-page witness statement he submitted to the inquiry by Jason Beer KC.
Post Office chief executive Nick Read is in attendance. Bates told the inquiry he has spent 23 years campaigning to expose the truth.
More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
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