“See you in court then”

More quotes from the Post Office Horizon inquiry

Fujitsu manager labelled subpostmaster as ‘nasty chap’ before High Court case

A Fujitsu manager labelled a subpostmaster as a “nasty chap” who will be “all out to rubbish” the company’s name ahead of legal proceedings which led to his bankruptcy, the Horizon IT inquiry heard.

Josh Payne www.independent.co.uk

Peter Sewell, who was part of the Post Office Account Security Team at Fujitsu when East Yorkshire subpostmaster Lee Castleton faced his legal battle in 2007, describe the road the court was situated on as a place “they used to hang people out to dry”.

Mr Castleton, from Bridlington, was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch after losing his fight with the Post Office.

Mr Sewell admitted “we all protect our own companies” when pressed on whether he saw it as important to protect Fujitsu’s overall reputation.

In an email exchange in December 2006 with IT security analyst Andrew Dunks, Mr Sewell appeared to give words of encouragement to his colleague ahead of the court battle, which read: “See you in court then.

“Fetters lane is where they used to hang people out to dry. I don’t suppose that type of thing happens any more though.

“That Castleton is a nasty chap and will be all out to rubbish the FJ (Fujitsu) name.

“It’s up to you to maintain absolute strength and integrity no matter what the prosecution throw at you.

“We will all be behind you hoping you come through unscathed. Bless you.”

Mr Dunks replied: “Thank you for those very kind and encouraging words. I had to pause halfway through reading it to wipe away a small tear…”

Questioning Mr Sewell about the exchange, counsel to the inquiry Julian Blake said: “Is that typical of the approach to the work that you were doing?”

Mr Sewell responded: “No, no – I don’t know why that was written.”

The witness added: “I don’t know why it was written – I don’t remember writing it, but obviously I did. I certainly don’t understand it.”

The counsel to the inquiry also asked Mr Sewell: “But my question is, did you see it as important to your work to protect the name of Fujitsu?”

He said: “I guess I did, but not purposely.”

Mr Blake added: “So it would be unfair to describe you as somebody who saw protecting Fujitsu as important – an important part of their job?”

Mr Sewell said: “We all protect our own companies, yes.”

On behalf of a number of subpostmasters, Flora Page continued to probe the witness about the email to Mr Dunks, saying: “Was this your pep talk to your team member that you were managing before he had to go and give evidence?”

Mr Sewell replied: “No it wasn’t a pep talk, no.”

Ms Page continued: “What you say to reassure him is ‘don’t worry, he’s a nasty man’ – how did you form that opinion Mr Sewell?”

Mr Sewell said: “I don’t know, I don’t know why I wrote it. I apologise.”

Ms Page then asked: “What was being said within Fujitsu that allowed you to form the opinion that he was a nasty man?”

The Fujitsu witness said: “Nothing, I don’t think.”

Ms Page continued to press him, saying: “Nothing?”

Mr Sewell said: “I’m not aware of anything, no.”

Ms Page went on: “You made that up off the top of your head?”

The witness replied: “In a way, I think, yes.”

The subpostmasters’ lawyer continued: “And why would you do that Mr Sewell?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Ms Page went on: “Is that the opinion you formed of all subpostmasters who took issue with what the Post Office said in the courts?”

Mr Sewell responded: “Absolutely not.”

Ms Page continued: “You were egging Mr Dunks on weren’t you, urging him to go into battle with Mr Castleton, weren’t you?”

Mr Sewell said: “I don’t know what it was written for now, I don’t know.”

Moving on to a different part of the email, Ms Page said: “You will know by now that Mr Castleton was indeed ‘hung out to dry’.”

Mr Sewell replied: “I know a lot more about it now than I did, yes.”

Ms Page then asked: “Knowing what you know about him being hung out to dry, and the way in which you urged Mr Dunks to go into battle with him, is that the right attitude for someone to take into court when they’re about to give evidence in a case with serious implications for someone?”

“No,” he said.

Ms Page added: “And yet that was the attitude that your management style, and your email, fostered and encouraged isn’t it?”

Mr Sewell said: “It suggests that way, yes. I don’t know why I wrote it.”

He was then questioned on whether he had written a similar email before Mr Dunks gave evidence against subpostmistress Seema Misra, to which he replied: “Absolutely not.”

“Why do you say absolutely not?” Ms Page asked.

Mr Sewell said: “I can’t even believe that that (the email about Mr Castleton) was written.”

Ms Page added: “The attitudes towards subpostmasters that you encouraged in your team must have been one they carried into court whenever they gave evidence against subpostmasters, is that right?”

The witness replied: “I don’t believe so.”

The statutory inquiry, which began in 2021 and is chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, has previously looked at the human impact of the scandal, the Horizon system rollout and the operation of the system, and is now looking into the action taken against subpostmasters.

The inquiry was established to ensure there was a “public summary of the failings which occurred with the Horizon IT system at the Post Office” and subsequently led to the wrongful convictions of subpostmasters.

Inquiry also hears how data was manipulated before being used in criminal trials

It just keeps getting worse – Owl

Penny Horwood www.computing.co.uk

A software developer at Fujitsu who raised the issue of bugs within the Horizon software that the Post Office rolled out from the late 1990’s has told the inquiry into the Post Office scandal that the company did not fix the bugs because it was too expensive and too time consuming. It isn’t the first time the inquiry has been made aware of damaging decisons being made due to worries about cost.

Gerald Barnes, a software developer at Fujitsu since 1998, worked on numerous technical tasks relating to the Post Office migration away from paper-based accounting methods to the automated Horizon IT system.

The inquiry heard that in 2008, a glitch in a system called CABSProcess, which was supposed to automatically summarise a post office’s transactions at close of business, resulted in users having balancing issues.

Crucially, the system did not make post office operators aware of the problem.

“The failure was silent to the postmaster,” Barnes said. “Although it was available [to Fujitsu] in the event log and to diagnosticians, the operator at the Post Office branch would not know anything had gone wrong.”

According to an internal Fujitsu email, Fujitsu did not look to fix the issue due to its “rarity”, but it eventually did when it became “a higher priority with the [Post Office],” when it appears to have emerged that the issue affected 195 branches.

Speaking yesterday at the inquiry Barnes said: 

“We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online.] The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive.”

In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: “I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better.”

In 2009, Barnes began working with the audit team responsible for gathering the data which was subsequently used in the trials of sub-postmasters. It was around this time that Fujitsu scrapped a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce audit record queries (ARQs). This was in order “to save the licence fee”, according to Barnes. 

Fujitsu rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle this function but more bugs meant the ARQs did not provide complete information. Barnes said that in 2010, he worked on one such bug that caused multiple transactions to appear in a spreadsheet without it being clear that it was the same transaction being duplicated.

Email chains between Fujitsu management and its fraud and litigation team which have been presented to the inquiry have revealed that Fujitsu knew about a string of ongoing problems with ARQs that it did not disclose. The duplication of transactions was one such problem with as many as one-third of transactions being duplicated. 

Further emails indicate that Fujitsu management knew that if this became public it would call into question the integrity of the data and therefore prosecution cases.

“If we do not fix this problem, our spreadsheets presented in court are liable to be brought into doubt if duplicate transactions are spotted,” Barnes warned in an internal exchange in 2010. “There are a number of high-profile court cases in the pipeline and it is imperative that we provide sound, accurate records.”

Filtered data

Also giving evidence to the inquiry yesterday was John Simpkins, a team leader within Fujitsu’s software support centre (SSC).

Simpkins was questioned on the now well-known and controversial area of whether Fujitsu and/or the Post Office could access branch data without the knowledge of the sub-postmasters. The forensic accountants Second Sight, and indeed the BBC were told, repeatedly, by the Post Office that remote access was not possible.

Simpkins was shown a document in which an answer was formulated for a question posed by Second Sight, which was: “Can Post Office or Fujitsu edit transaction data without the knowledge of the postmaster?”

A formulated answer was then presented: “Neither the Post Office nor Fujitsu can edit transaction data without the knowledge of the sub-postmaster.”

Simpkins failed to give a clear answer to the question posed by counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, on the accuracy of this formulated answer. Mr Beer KC persisted:

 “So just answer my questions, in summary,  ‘neither Post Office nor Fujitsu can edit transaction data without the knowledge of a sub-postmaster’, is wrong isn’t it?”

“I believe so,” Simpkins said.

Simpkins also said that the team he worked in “downed tools” after learning the Post Office was using ARQ data which had been “manipulated from its original source” and presented to the Post Office in a “filtered” format before being used in criminal proceedings against the sub-postmasters.

“The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) is investigating after finding that the “plan for water” was not detailed or specific enough and was neglecting pollution sources beyond sewage spills. Farming is a bigger polluter of rivers than private water companies.”

This is the same “Plan for Water” that our “libertarian inclined” Simon Jupp voted for, having voted down a Lord’s amendment for mandatory targets, and is the basis of his claim that he “would never vote to pollute our water”. – Owl

Adam Vaughan www.thetimes.co.uk

The government’s flagship plan for cleaning up Britain’s waterways is not doing enough to stop farmers polluting rivers, England’s watchdog has found.

The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) is investigating after finding that the “plan for water” was not detailed or specific enough and was neglecting pollution sources beyond sewage spills. Farming is a bigger polluter of rivers than private water companies.

The watchdog said that policies for dealing with chicken manure and other pollutants washing off farm fields were limited, and that plans to tackle pollution from roads were “notably absent”.

Overall, the OEP said the government was “largely off-track” and faced “very substantial challenges” in hitting its environment targets, which range from halting wildlife declines to restoring waterways to their natural state.

Robbie McDonald, chief scientist at the OEP, said: “Prospects are largely off-track. Water pollution is still problematic. Pollution incidents are not reducing and the ecological status of England’s freshwaters, which is one of the most important barometers of success, has remained largely static. Not all of the major pressures are being attended to. Agricultural pollution is a big issue.”

Cathy Maguire, author of an OEP report to be published on Thursday, said the watchdog had begun a “very substantial piece of work” on the effectiveness of laws and regulators to curb farming and transport pollution in rivers.

The watchdog said that not enough was being done for the government to hit its target of increasing the number of waterways that were close to their natural state from 16 per cent now to 77 per cent by 2027. The Times’ award-winning Clean it Up campaign has been calling for greater resources for regulators and more incentives for farmers to improve the state of the country’s rivers and seas.

Overall, the OEP’s annual progress report found the government was largely off track with regard to meeting 10 out of 40 environmental targets. A lack of evidence meant 15 were impossible to assess. The rest were on track to some degree.

The report painted a mixed picture of the state of England’s natural environment. Of 51 trends, about half were improving but the rest were deteriorating, static or impossible to evaluate because of a lack of data.

Dame Glenys Stacey, OEP chairwoman, said her team’s ability to assess progress towards restoring wildlife and habitats had been hampered by a “really concerning” lack of monitoring and transparency. Thérèse Coffey, the former environment secretary, pledged last year that everyone should live within a 15-minute walk of woodland or other green space but, because of a lack of evidence, this was found impossible to measure.

The watchdog made 47 recommendations urging the government to speed up and scale up action to meet the nation’s environmental targets. Stacey said: “We do now have, to a large extent, control of our own destiny [post-EU], but we’re not moving quickly enough.”

Labour called the report a “damning indictment” of the government’s record on protecting the natural world. “They have left the UK as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with record levels of toxic sewage swilling through our rivers, lakes and seas,” said Steve Reed, shadow environment secretary.

On top of pollution, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed there were more than a million fly-tipping incidents in England last year, a small decrease but largely unchanged on the previous year. Farming groups said the number underplayed the true figure because much illegal rubbish dumping was happening on private land.

The ex-special forces teams fighting fly-tipping

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Rebecca Pow, the environment minister, said: “We were always clear that our targets are ambitious, and would require significant work to achieve, but we are fully committed to creating a greener country for future generations and going further and faster to deliver for nature.”

“Spreadsheet” Sunak, who promised integrity and accountability on the steps of No 10, caught for a second time being “economical with the truth” when it comes to interpreting statistics.

‘Not surprising’ people felt ‘misled’ by government’s asylum claims – UK stats watchdog

Tim Baker news.sky.com

The UK’s statistics watchdog has criticised the government for claiming to have cleared the legacy asylum backlog – saying it is “not surprising” people felt “misled”.

Rishi Sunak and his administration faced criticism at the start of the year for saying they had cleared all the applications to remain in the UK by asylum seekers made before 28 June 2022.

In total, 4,537 claims from the backlog still needed a decision at the time of the announcement – but Mr Sunak’s spokesman said since these had been reviewed, the government considered them “cleared”.

Following a review, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has now written to opposition MPs that complained about the prime minister’s claims.

Sir Robert Chote, the OSR’s chair, said that “it is not surprising that the government’s claim has been greeted with scepticism and that some people may feel misled”.

Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael said: “Not only is the government celebrating something that is no achievement, they are twisting the facts, as proven by the UK stats authority just today.

“As this letter again shows, the Conservatives have not cleared the asylum backlog. The British public deserves better than this.”

Mr Carmichael was one of the MPs who complained, alongside Labour’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock.

A post on X from Rishi Sunak at the time had a community note added to it – meaning other users provided context for what was said.

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) January 2, 2024

In his letter, OSR chair Sir Robert said that the “average member of the public is likely to interpret a claim to have ‘cleared a backlog’ – especially when presented without context on social media – as meaning that it has been eliminated entirely”.

He added: “That said, there may be a perfectly good case for excluding cases of this type [the ones which remain but were counted as ‘cleared’] from any commitment to eliminate the backlog over the timeframe the government chose, but this argument was not made at the time the target was announced or when it was clarified in the letter to the home affairs committee.

“This episode may affect public trust when the government sets targets and announces whether they have been met in the other policy domains. It highlights the need for ministers and advisers to think carefully about how a reasonable person would interpret a quantitative claim of the sort and to consult the statistical professionals in their department.”

While Sir Robert thanked the government for publishing the data alongside its claim, it noted this was not provided ahead of time to journalists, “which prevented them from being able to scrutinise the data when first reporting it”.

“This does not support our expectations around intelligent transparency, and we have raised this with the Home Office,” he said.

Downing Street said it would “consider” the letter from Sir Robert.

Asked whether Downing Street had a problem with representing statistics accurately, Mr Sunak’s spokesperson said: “

“I don’t think that is right. We publish a wide range of statistical information and continue to do so.

“We also linked through to the full story on Gov.uk with the details of our update on the legacy backlog, and the PM was referring to a commitment he himself made and spoke about.

“But of course we will note the letter and consider it to ensure we can be as clear and transparent as possible.”

Mr Sunak pledged in December 2022 that he would “abolish” the legacy backlog of asylum claims made before 28 June of that year, with the Home Office being given the target of the end of 2023.

The department said the pledge had been “delivered” earlier this month, having processed more than 112,000 asylum claims overall in 2023.

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There were more than 92,000 asylum claims made before 28 June 2022 requiring a decision, but Labour has said the government’s claim that all of those cases have been cleared is “false”.

The Home Office conceded that all cases in the legacy backlog have been reviewed, but added that “4,500 complex cases have been highlighted that require additional checks or investigation for a final decision to be made”.

The NHS body responsible for funding local hospice services has told local MPs it’s working towards ‘equitable’ funding for all four adult hospices in Devon.

[Amazing how a looming general election concentrates political minds, especially when the Tory stranglehold on Devon looks to be under serious threat. – Owl]

Philippa Davies www.midweekherald.co.uk 

Last year Hospiscare, which serves East Devon and Exeter, warned that it might have to cut services if it doesn’t receive more money from the NHS. The charity is facing a £2.5million deficit in the next financial year. Hospiscare pointed out that it receives only 18 per cent of its £10million annual running costs from the NHS, while the average NHS contribution to other UK hospices is 37 per cent.

Meanwhile, Sidmouth Hospice at Home receives no funding from NHS Devon.

The East Devon MP Simon Jupp, Tiverton & Honiton MP Richard Foord, and Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw all wrote to the NHS Devon Integrated Care Board to raise their concerns.

Simon Jupp has held meetings with the CEOs of Sidmouth Hospice at Home and Hospiscare to discuss the impact on their services from the lack of fair funding from NHS Devon, and secured and led a debate in Parliament about the issue on Wednesday (January 17).

[See Hansard transcript here with contributions from Richard Foord and Kevin Foster, Torbay, with Helen Whately, The Minister for Social Care, responding]

In a letter dated the same day, sent to all three MPs, the chair and chief executive of NHS Devon’s Integrated Care Board, said their body is also facing a huge cash deficit, but is aware of the financial challenges Hospiscare faces.

The letter said: “Our executive team recently met to discuss the funding challenges faced by our hospices and are working on plans to move towards equitable NHS funding for all four adult hospices in the county starting in 2024-25.

“These conversations are ongoing, given the financial challenges outlined above, and we have committed to undertaking a financial review that addresses several of the options that were part of the end of life commissioning review.”

The letter said the different levels of funding to hospices are the result of historic grant arrangements pre-dating the creation of the ICB – but the funding body is now working with NHS England South West ‘to support the implementation of sustainable, effective end of life support for people and families across Devon’.

Simon Jupp said: “I first raised NHS Devon’s unfair funding for hospices over two years ago. It is truly regrettable that it took the debate I secured in Parliament for NHS Devon to finally commit to reviewing hospice funding in the county just hours before it began.

“I was pleased to secure the support of the Minister for Social Care for my call for fairer funding for hospice services in Sidmouth, Exmouth, Seaton, Axminster and Exeter. I will continue to press for progress from NHS Devon to better support all of our local hospice care providers and their brilliant teams who help take the strain off the RD&E and community hospitals across East Devon.”

Regulator accused of ‘massaging figures’ by telling staff to pause inspections at poorly performing waste sites until January.

www.theguardian.com 

The Environment Agency told staff in September to stop inspecting the most poorly performing waste sites until January in order to meet corporate compliance targets, it can be revealed.

The regulator has been accused of “massaging the figures”, with an insider telling the Ends Report and the Guardian that a lack of resources means the body is “failing to do its statutory duty in a timely manner”.

Under the Environment Agency’s corporate targets, the regulator aims to ensure that 97% of all regulated sites, such as landfills, are complying with their permits.

In an email sent on 20 September last year, and seen by the Ends Report and the Guardian, a senior installations manager for waste sites in Nottingham emailed staff to warn that the region was at risk of missing this corporate target.

“The KPI [key performance indicator, a way companies measure performance] says that we have to have 97% of our sites in compliance band A B C, which effectively means we are ‘allowed’ no more than 3% in D E F. 3% of our sites equals 23.2 sites. Therefore we are aiming for 23 – NO MORE,” they wrote.

The agency identifies any non-compliances in the course of a calendar year and uses this information to work out a compliance rating based on a points system. Based on the cumulative score over a calendar year, each site is placed into one of six compliance bands from A to F.

Sites in bands A and B have demonstrated an expected level of permit compliance, sites in bands C and D must improve in order to achieve compliance and sites in bands E and F must significantly improve in order to achieve compliance. The score determines the level of annual subsistence fees regulated firms must pay to the Environment Agency.

In the email, the manager asked officers to “PAUSE UNTIL JAN work which is not absolutely necessary to do now”.

Responding to the email, a technical lead officer raised concerns with this plan and warned that there are already environmental problems with waste sites in the east Midlands region that could be exacerbated if they paused inspection work.

On 28 September, the junior member of staff was told by a separate team leader: “If you still feel uncomfortable with our direction when we’ve seen the reviews and reflected on our best course of action, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to work on other projects instead that have a higher priority to us to remove any conflicts that may exist for you.”

Speaking on the condition of strict anonymity, one Environment Agency insider said that this statement “upset a lot of colleagues in that office and those who work in that part of the business because the managers were basically saying: ‘We don’t care about your professional judgment, we are just chasing this number.’”

This team leader emphasised again that it was important to “maintain our D E F KPI as far as we can as it’s an externally reported KPI that is coming under heavy scrutiny at the moment”.

The direction was given to “pause any work that may foreseeably result in a site moving into D E F”.

The team leader asked the officer to “produce a forward plan” to explain what they would do to ensure the risk with the specific waste site of concern was mitigated, but said “we’d prefer this to start from January”.

“In the meantime, we can decide the best way to service the band U without setting hares off that we can’t control or haven’t the resources to deal with,” they wrote.

Band U are sites that have not been classified because they have not been inspected.

An Environment Agency insider said the fact the instruction related to the most poorly performing sites was “evil”.

“It’s saying: stop looking at the sites that we know are the worst,” they said. “This is indicative of the fact that we are failing to do our statutory duty in a timely manner. It’s a method of massaging the figures to make it appear that the situation is better than it is.

“As soon as you know that a site is causing problems then you need to deal with it. But the easy way to make that problem go away is to not see the site as a problem. The external problem hasn’t gone away, but what they’re doing here is trying not to create an internal problem by pretending they haven’t noticed the issue,” they said.

The insider said the problem was down to resourcing, and that ultimately the Environment Agency’s budget had been cut to such an extent that it was unable to regulate properly.

“By not exceeding that traffic light target in our KPIs it’s a very simplistic indicator that we as a business are not doing all the proper stuff that underpins that,” they said. “It shouldn’t just be an absolute bloody traffic light target. But the reality is that everything is broken to the extent that we are playing silly buggers with the numbers just to reach the targets we have set ourselves.”

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “These claims are incorrect – our work to regulate these sites did not stop. We are responsible for over 600 waste and installation sites in the east Midlands, and it is not unusual to prioritise work on those which pose the greatest risk to the environment, for example, those with hazardous waste.

“Last year, all these sites received their necessary inspections by our officers – and we already have compliance plans in place for the forthcoming year, to ensure they meet our high standards.”

However, the insider said that to claim all sites received their necessary inspections was “disingenuous” because the staff decided what “necessary” was.

“The subtext of that statement is that we define what necessary looks like, and what these individuals said [was] that for those poorly performing sites, we are not going to look. It’s like putting a telescope up to your blind eye and saying: ‘What signal, I see no signal,’” they said.

Commenting on the emails, Helen Venn, the chief regulatory officer at the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), the government’s post-Brexit green regulator, said: “It is crucial for all government departments and public bodies to keep accurate records. Monitoring compliance with environmental law is a critical component of effective environmental regulation. We are undertaking work to consider the implementation and effectiveness of legislative frameworks and associated arrangements in relation to compliance monitoring.”

Posted on X, a clip of the former Environment Minister admonishing Yvette Cooper that “she can’t even get the name of the country right” when she referred to the “Kigali Government” in the Rwanda debate.

No wonder our environment is so full of crap. – Owl

View the clip on X here