Post Office lawyers told investigator to defend faulty IT system ...

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A Post Office investigator said he was taking instruction from the company’s lawyers when he claimed that the Horizon IT system had no problems and denied acting like a “mafia gangster” in his dealings with some of the sub-postmasters caught up in the scandal.

Appearing before the long-running public inquiry into one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice, which resumed on Thursday, Stephen Bradshaw said law firm Cartwright King, which was acting for the Post Office, wrote a statement signed by him in 2012 defending the faulty IT system.

The statement, dated November 2012, said: “The Post Office continues to have absolute confidence in the robustness and integrity of its Horizon system.”

Asked if it was appropriate to declare “confidence” in the IT system, whose faults were responsible for accounting shortfalls that the Post Office had blamed on hundreds of sub-postmasters, he said: “I was given that statement by Cartwright King and told to put that statement through. In hindsight . . . there probably should have been another line stating, ‘These are not my words’.”

Bradshaw had earlier told the inquiry he was not “technically minded” and was not equipped to know whether the Horizon system had bugs or errors.

Bradshaw’s evidence marks the return of the inquiry into the Post Office-Fujitsu scandal after the winter break. During the recess the ITV series Mr Bates vs The Post Office led to outrage about a scandal that has been mired by cover-ups and inertia for decades, forcing the government to intervene this week.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted using data from faulty Horizon software between 2000 and 2014; only 93 convictions have been overturned.

In a written statement to the inquiry, Bradshaw, who joined the Post Office in 1978 and began working as an investigator in 2000, denied claims he and others had “behaved like Mafia gangsters” in their dealings with sub-postmasters falsely accused of wrongdoing. “I refute the allegation that I am a liar,” he wrote.

Sub-postmaster Jacqueline McDonald has previously accused Bradshaw of “bullying” her during interviews conducted to ascertain whether she had engaged in any financial misconduct or theft. She added that investigators had acted like “mafia gangsters”.

Asked if this approach was appropriate, Bradshaw said the interviews were conducted at “pace” and were not supposed to be “nice”. When it was put to him that he “may not have been as professional” as he originally thought, Bradshaw replied: “No, I don’t think that”, adding that his words had often been taken “out of context”.

Inquiry counsel Julian Blake pointed to a transcript of one interview with McDonald in which Bradshaw accused her of telling a “pack of lies”.

One of the most serious allegations levelled at Post Office investigators is that they repeatedly told sub-postmasters they were the only ones experiencing issues with the Horizon system and accounting shortfalls when, in reality, hundreds of people were alerting the company to problems.

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A transcript was shown of an interview with McDonald in which she was told by another investigator present that she was the only one with shortfalls in their balance, which Bradshaw did not query.

He told the inquiry he was just a “small cog in the system” and that any concerns about the Horizon IT system that the Post Office might have had were not passed down to him by his superiors.

Towards the end of the hearing, a lawyer representing dozens of sub-postmasters suggested to him he was “drenched in information” that the IT system was faulty but ignored anything he was shown “that didn’t fit the narrative that Horizon was working”. Bradshaw replied he was “not aware of any bugs, errors or defects”.

The statutory inquiry began in 2021 and is chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams. It previously probed the human impact of the scandal and the rollout of the Horizon system and is now looking at the action taken against sub-postmasters.