Kelly Tolhurst, the first former minister to give evidence to the current phase of the Post Office scandal inquiry, has described her “embarrassment” and “utter shame” when a judge found in favour of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of theft and false accounting.
Ms Tolhurst was the minister responsible for the Post Office from July 2018 to February 2020.
She told the inquiry on Wednesday that the Post Office had initially reassured her about the robustness of the Horizon computer system and its chances of winning a case brought by 555 sub-postmasters five years ago.
But when Mr Justice Fraser handed down the first of his landmark judgements in which he found in favour of the sub-postmasters in March 2019, Ms Tolhurst said it was a “lightbulb moment”.
Between 1999 and 2013, hundreds of sub-postmasters were convicted based on evidence from the flawed computer system Horizon, in what has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
But in the 2019 High Court judgement, Mr Justice Fraser said the IT system was not “remotely robust”, and even when improved it had a significant number of bugs. It was a case which paved the way for convictions of postmasters wrongly accused to be overturned.
In her witness statement, Ms Tolhurst said her immediate reaction to the case was “one of embarrassment”.
“I was appalled that the judge had found POL [the Post Office] to have behaved so reprehensibly and I felt utter shame on behalf POL in respect of what the SPMs [sub-postmasters] had been through,” she added.
Asked at the inquiry whether she should have recognised some of the risks of Horizon earlier, Ms Tolhurst said: “Yes, I mean there’s lots of things I would I wish I had done or said, or done differently. I can’t make any sort of excuses for that.”
She talked about the difficulty of balancing a wide-ranging ministerial brief, and getting information out of the Post Office.
She told the inquiry that she worried that Tom Cooper, the government’s representative on the Post Office board, had “gone native” and lost his independence from the Post Office and was not providing effective challenge or scrutiny.
Though she thought it was “madness” for the Post Office to respond the first trial judgement by calling for the removal of the judge from the case, she did not think she had the power to stop it, the inquiry heard.
She said she had a “gut instinct”, but that was not enough for a “first-time junior minister” to go against legal advice which recommended the Post Office board should try to remove the judge.
She said that the structure of the Post Office, which is a limited company owned by the government, did not give her the powers she needed to tell it what to do.
“I definitely wasn’t using it as a convenient excuse not to get involved. I fundamentally believe that I was unable to,” she said.
Her only power, she felt, was the “nuclear option” of firing the Post Office chairman. Though Angela Patrick, barrister for some of the sub-postmasters, said the minister still had “leverage” even without sacking the chairman.
Ms Tolhurst said she was “deeply saddened” to hear that sub-postmasters were “not satisfied” with the settlement in the case, which saw most of their compensation swallowed up by legal costs, though she added she played no role in negotiating it.
In her witness statement, Ms Tolhurst said that when she learned in November 2018 that Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells was stepping down, her private secretary sent her a WhatsApp message asking: “I’m wondering if this means she has realised that the litigation is going to end badly and is getting out first.”
Ms Tolhurst replied: “Oh interesting news! Yes I would agree.”
Ms Tolhurst moved to the Department of Transport in February 2020. She lost her Rochester and Strood seat in the 2024 general election.
Two more former Post Office ministers, Pat McFadden – now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey, are due to give evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday.