Nick Read has overseen a collapse in trust of the Post Office and not only as a result of the public outcry over the Post Office Horizon scandal, according to members of his own staff.
Chief executive Read will appear before the Post Office scandal public inquiry over three days this week, beginning on 9 October, in phase seven of the two-year inquiry. This comes just days after a letter from Post Office whistleblowers emerged, which made damning accusations about Read’s leadership.
The final sentence of the letter, “Read cannot continue,” was written in May this year, before he announced his resignation last month.
Read took over as CEO in September 2019, replacing Paula Vennells just as the High Court group litigation order (GLO) case brought by subpostmasters proved that the Horizon IT system from Fujitsu was the cause of accounting losses blamed on branch operators.
Tasked with modernising the Post Office, his first act was to agree a settlement with the 555 claimants in the High Court case. He subsequently oversaw the setting up of schemes to provide financial redress for victims, which have left many affected subpostmasters still waiting for their compensation claims to be concluded years later. Read was catapulted into the spotlight at the start of this year as a result of the national outrage following the broadcast of the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
As revealed by Computer Weekly, the whistleblowers called out an ongoing cover-up at the Post Office in a letter to public inquiry chair Wyn Williams and inquiry barristers, Post Office chairman Nigel Railton, and MPs.
“To most of us, Read represents an inadequate, greedy, self-interested man, and like [Paula] Vennells, he cannot genuinely relate to the human side of the Post Office, the hard-working and the honest subpostmasters and employees,” they wrote. “We are very distressed and very unhappy. Please help.”
Collapse in trust
The whistleblowers wrote that the Post Office has “plummeted from its position as Britain’s sixth most trusted brand to 135th”. They said this is “not simply down to the inquiry and the outcry over Horizon (as Read would like us to believe)”.
Writing before Read quit the job, they said: “It is quite clear to us that we will never turn around the Post Office culture under his leadership. Read is not trusted by his own employees, by subpostmasters, by members of the public and by the UK at large.”
Read has earned over £3m as boss of the Post Office, while hundreds of subpostmasters still wait for financial redress for the suffering brought upon them by the Post Office. He will have the opportunity to make the case for his leadership record when he gives evidence at the inquiry this week.
It’s a similar story to Vennells’ exit from the Post Office, when it had just lost the High Court battle against subpostmasters and blown £100m of taxpayers’ money in the process. The case proved that subpostmasters had been wrongly blamed, and in many cases prosecuted, for accounting shortfalls caused by computer errors.
She had overseen a cover-up of the Post Office scandal, which began to crumble with the subpostmasters’ High Court victory. Vennells still managed to leave in 2019 with a massive payout, and was awarded a CBE for services to the Post Office, although this has now been stripped from her.
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 Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •
• Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •
• Also read: Post Office and Fujitsu malevolence and incompetence means huge taxpayers’ bill •
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