Ex-Post Office boss presumed police prosecuted Horizon victims

Former Post Office managing director Alan Cook has said he didn't realise the organisation itself was prosecuting victims of the Horizon IT scandal.

Instead, he thought it was the police or CPS, he told the inquiry into the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of sub-postmasters due to faulty software.

Mr Cook was in charge of the Post Office between 2006 and 2010.

He told the inquiry he did not know that prosecutions were being brought solely by the Post Office until 2009.

He said when he was told cases "went to court" he presumed that the police had been involved, and only found out later that roughly two thirds of cases against Horizon victims had been brought by the Post Office.

"One of my regrets is that I didn't pick up on that earlier," he said.

The involvement of the Post Office in prosecuting its own staff created a risk that it wasn't taking independent decisions, he said.

Mr Cook added that there would have been a "higher bar" that needed to be reached had the prosecutions been independent.

He said it was a "regret" that he had misunderstood notes and minutes that had made it clear that the Post Office carried out its own prosecutions.

"It never occurred to me that the Post Office was the sole arbiter of whether or not that criminal prosecution would proceed," he said.

During Mr Cook's time at the top from 2006 to 2010, the Post Office secured 292 Horizon convictions in England and Wales.

These years saw some of the highest numbers of convictions using Horizon data, according to evidence submitted to the inquiry by Simon Recaldin, director of the Post Office's remediation unit.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for offences including theft and false accounting after their books didn't balance due to errors in the Horizon software.

Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people.

Former sub-postmaster Janet Skinner was given a nine-month sentence in 2007 over an alleged shortfall of £59,000 from her Post Office branch in Bransholme, Hull.

She served three months in prison before being released with an electronic tag, but eventually had her conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in April 2021.

Ms Skinner told the BBC Mr Cook should have been aware of what was happening in the business.

"He had a high position, and you're telling me that he wasn't aware of what was going on in the business?"

She said if Mr Cook didn't understand that the Post Office had been bringing prosecutions "he shouldn't have had the position he was in".

"He was getting paid a lot of money to overview what was going on in the business, and therefore he should have known what was going on," she added.