Ed Davey and Jo Swinson ‘handled’ by civil servants in Post Office cover-up, says Sir Alan Bates

Former coalition government ministers were “handled” by civil servants who “covered their own backs” while evidence of a scandal at the Post Office emerged, according to campaigning former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates.

At the latest Post Office Scandal public inquiry hearing last week, current Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey and former leader Jo Swinson were questioned about their time as ministers in the coalition government as the scandal was unfolding.

Davey was the minister in the business department in charge of the Post Office from 2010 to 2012, while Swinson took the helm after him until the coalition government ended in 2015. This was a period when MPs were raising questions on behalf of subpostmasters in their constituencies and there was increasing media coverage of the controversial issue.

Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance chair Bates told Computer Weekly the pair were “tightly controlled” by civil servants throughout what he described as a “cover-up” of subpostmasters being wrongly blamed and even prosecuted, by the government-owned Post Office, based on flawed computer evidence. “They were being handled the whole time and the department had its own agenda,” he said. “It’s obvious to everyone now that it was the officials, it was the department that was running all this.”

He warned that the problems and delays being experienced today by victims seeking financial redress were happening for the same reason.

During last week’s evidence sessions, Davey and Swinson detailed occasions when the actions of officials at the Shareholder Executive (ShEx), now UK government investments (UKGI), prevented them from getting to the root of the Post Office scandal and acting on it. ShEx was the department that looked after government-owned assets, such as the Post Office, which now goes by the name UKGI. Bates said: “From the testimony of those [from ShEx] in the inquiry last week, it is obvious that it is the civil servants who have to carry the bulk of the burden of blame.”

Swinson and Davey were new to government, having joined the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government following the inconclusive 2010 general election. Swinson was minister in charge of the Post office in 2012/13 and 2014/15. She told the latest public inquiry hearing that civil servants were “Orwellian” and “duplicitous” in how they withheld information from her regarding the Post Office.

Evidence was heard that Swinson asked probing questions of the Post Office, particularly regarding its prosecutions of subpostmasters, but some were never answered. She told the inquiry that when she asked civil servants whether she should chase up any questions she asked regarding her briefs, she was told: “Trust us to follow these things up.”

But evidence to the inquiry revealed civil servants at ShEx would give up chasing the Post Office for answers if they weren’t received. Some months after Swinson needed answers to questions from the Post Office “urgently” about subpostmaster prosecutions, a ShEx civil servant told a colleague chasing up the answers that the Post Office would avoid answering difficult questions.

In an email to a colleague, Mike Whitehead, formerly of ShEx, wrote: “Sadly [the Post Office] have a habit of dropping everybody off the [email copy] lists when we seek awkward data. I have not seen anything; my guess is without a chaser they will unilaterally decide we don’t need it.”

Swinson told the inquiry she was not aware of this. “This speaks volumes from what we know now, but it was not brought to my attention at the time,” she said. “I did rely on my private office and officials to chase the many questions that I asked.

“This is pretty shocking on two levels,” said Swinson. “I was asking questions and needed information which I needed to give good answers to [MPs] who, let’s remember are speaking on behalf of constituents that had been affected by these issues. But this is also problematic because if this is the experience ShEx are having, that I think points to potential deeper problems with what the Post Office is willing to provide, it would raise alarm bells.”

Board discussions

Swinson also explained that she was never made aware of discussions at the Post Office board, which was attended by a ShEx representative, over the possible sacking of Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. This is despite the board creating a PowerPoint presentation on the subject.

Whether the CEO is fit to do the job is “really pretty clearly strategic [to the Post Office], therefore something the minister should have been up to date with”, she told the inquiry. “I appreciate there is an issue about at what stage you raise concerns with the minister … but the point at which you are creating a whole PowerPoint deck about it, clearly the time had come when ministers need to be engaged in this discussion.”

Swinson explained that despite increasing controversy over the scandal while she was on maternity leave in 2014, on her return, a briefing note to update her on her department’s work only contained an “incredibly bland” one-line update on Post Office Horizon issues. She said the “nothing to see here” sentence was “tucked away in exceptional items and not even highlighted as a risk”.

Swinson also told the inquiry she was not told of the Post Office’s highly controversial plan to sack Second Sight, the independent forensic accountants investigating Horizon on behalf of MPs.

In her witness statement to the inquiry, Swinson said she felt that instead of being provided with important information on the Post Office, she was being “kept at arm’s length and managed”.

Swinson told the inquiry that her wider experience working with civil servants has been good, but said ShEx officials were different. She referred to the business backgrounds of its members and the fact that many were being recruited from different pools to usual civil servants.

“There was a culture within ShEx that was not of the usual civil service culture, which I found was generally a very helpful one that was focused on the public good,” she said. “I think while there is a need to have relevant commercial experience when you are dealing with companies, actually that mindset of public service is an incredibly important part of what needs to be present on all civil servants, even when dealing with commercial matters.”

Assumed officials told the truth

Earlier in the week, current Liberal Democrat leader Davey told the public inquiry that, while minister, he “assumed he was told the truth” by government officials and the Post Office, but was in fact "being lied to” by the Post Office and what it told department officials was not true.

In preparation for a meeting with Bates in 2010, civil servants prepared a brief for Davey. Bates was bound to ask difficult questions and challenge the integrity of the Horizon system, but the briefing paper simply contained information cut and pasted from Post Office documents, which claimed the Horizon system was reliable.

Jason Beer, KC to the public inquiry, asked Davey whether his officials “simply swallowed what they’ve been told by Post Office” and asked whether this is what he expected from officials briefing him in preparation for a meeting with Bates. Davey said: “It is not what I expected. I’d have thought they’d have had a meeting and argued – not argued, but probed a bit, because this meeting had been planned for. I would have asked for [the briefing] in July [2010], two months after coming into office. It didn’t happen until the October [2010], so there was plenty of time for them to prepare and, given there’d been a number of written Parliamentary Questions and letters, this was a very important meeting to me, and people knew that, and I would have expected a quality brief.”

Bates said the former government ministers were constantly being controlled by the civil service. “The department and those they were meant to rely on had their own agenda and were controlling the whole thing,” he said, adding that it was difficult to understand why civil servants acted this way, but suggesting the fact that it’s a cover-up as a possible reason. “It has been going on a long time, and once you start digging a hole, some people just carry on digging. It got to a point that they had to cover up that they failed to do X, Y and Z at certain times, which would have been exposed.”

Following the recent appearance of ShEx members at the inquiry, former subpostmistress Jo Hamilton, who had a wrongful conviction for false accounting overturned in 2021, said: “The civil servants sum up everything that went wrong in this whole sorry saga. Lifers who are incurious, mediocre and over-promoted.”

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to accounting software. It is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history (see below for timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal, since 2009).