Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour, although rather difficult, to follow the noble Lord, who spoke movingly and from the heart about things he knows a great deal about. I thank him for what he has said. I apologise for having been less in the Chamber than I would have liked because of another Bill in Committee upstairs.
I look at this Bill from the point of view of the sub-postmasters, and I declare an interest as a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. It was good to hear the remarks of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, who also sits on that board.
I have an initial question to the Minister from which everything else I say follows: does the Bill cover the Post Office, a so-called arm’s-length organisation? I believe that, because of the definition contained in paragraph 4 of Schedule 2 to the Bill, the Post Office is covered, but I should be grateful for the Minister’s explicit confirmation of that.
An important aspect of the Post Office scandal is that it began as a computer problem, both hardware and software, but rapidly turned into a human behaviour problem, as managers denied the existence of the computer problem. Perhaps they denied it first to themselves, but later, they certainly denied it to everyone else. Managers believed—or pretended to believe—what they were paid to believe, and therefore what they wanted to believe. We all tend to believe what we want to believe. But how does a duty of candour in practice apply in such circumstances?
It is human nature to defend oneself and the organisations of which we are a part and which pay our salaries, and only the most self-confident freely admit to their own faults. So, in one sense, the Bill tries to counteract human nature. It will work only if it sets up institutions and cultures which reward honesty and openness.
I am not convinced the Bill does reward openness. It attempts to punish deceitfulness, but that is a different thing. How do we reward the whistleblower? That is different from protecting the whistleblower. How does the Bill ensure that these problems are nipped in the bud before they ever get to the stage of public inquiries? Okay, it provides for internal policies and for discouraging retaliation against whistleblowers, and that is good. But if you have lived through the Post Office scandal, as the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, and I have, you know how insidious the accusation of disloyalty is. You know how a hint here or there—that you are being too loyal to your professional ethics and not loyal enough to your business—can influence behaviour. You know that career pathways depend on being seen as part of a team.
The Bill could do more, perhaps through the institution of an office for whistleblowers; perhaps through adopting some of the ideas, as the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, referred to, that Professor Hodges is putting forward about non-blame cultures; perhaps through the Independent Public Advocate. But it could do more to encourage good behaviour from the start.
How will the Bill actually work in practice? There are those directly employed by the Post Office. How will it extend to them? Paula Vennells told me that it was impossible for the Post Office or Fujitsu to access the sub-postmasters’ accounts remotely. We know now that that was wrong. But was it an intentional lie? We may never know, but personally, I believe that at the time she said it to me, she probably believed it. But later, she must have come to recognise that it was untrue. Would the Bill mean that she would be required to come back and put something right that she had realised was wrong? And since I was not myself an inquiry—I was an MP working for my constituent—would the Bill cover her talking to me?
We know that Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s general counsel, asked Fujitsu to “work their magic”—which meant remotely access the sub-postmasters’ accounts—but does her knowledge become imputed to the chief executive of the organisation of which she was a part? How does this Bill deal with wilful blindness in the face of the evidence?
How does the Bill cover the work of the investigators? They told each of the sub-postmasters that they were the only ones with the problem. They knew that this was a lie. It had the result that sub-postmasters, at their lowest ebb and facing false accusations that would lead some of them to take their own lives, were isolated from each other and deprived of the support that collectives like trade unions provide. It was one of the most shocking aspects of the scandal, among many, many shocking aspects. Would that be a breach of the Bill?
How, precisely, would the Bill extend to Fujitsu, that glorious company which has paid not a penny of compensation and which remains on the Government’s list of companies to do business with? How does it apply to the lawyers, upon whose advice we are told the Post Office CEO depended? How does it apply to the principal accounting officer, who delegated his responsibility to others?
I welcome the Bill, but I worry that it concentrates most on public inquiries and investigations—the period after something has gone so seriously wrong that the Government are dragged, kicking and screaming, to having a public inquiry. I believe that it needs to stop the bad behaviour before there is a need to punish it.