Victim calls for lawyer removal from Horizon scheme

A Post Office scandal victim has called for a top lawyer to be removed from administering Horizon redress schemes.

Former sub-postmaster Lee Castleton said Rodric Williams was "conflicted".

Mr Williams was a litigation lawyer at the Post Office while it was prosecuting sub-postmasters.

Separately, it emerged at an ongoing inquiry that Mr Williams had described a campaigner who tried to draw attention to faults in Horizon software in 2015 as a "bluffer".

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of offences including theft and false accounting on the strength of faulty data from the Post Office's Horizon IT system.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Castleton said the process of getting compensation was "still very adversarial because the people in the process of giving redress are people who have been involved in probably the last 10 or 15 years of... Post Office problems".

"This gentleman here is still a lead lawyer. He needs removing. You cannot be conflicted more so than he is, in my belief. He's conflicted in many different ways, but he just needs removing from the process."

Mr Castleton added that the victims "don't need to be traumatised any more and it needs to be done by an independent person".

Mr Williams rose through the ranks to become the Post Office's current head of legal for dispute resolution and brand. This unit handles appeals from sub-postmasters, compensation and redress.

But according to his witness statement to the inquiry into the Post Office scandal, since April 2022 he has "transferred my [redress] responsibilities to other lawyers within the unit's legal team" so he can respond to requests for legal information.

Mr Castleton did not call for Mr Williams to lose his job although he did say there should be "hopefully some accountability at the end point" of the inquiry.

His story was featured in ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

Separately on Thursday, the inquiry heard how Mr Williams had referred to a former sub-postmaster and campaigner, Tim McCormack, as a "bluffer" in a 2015 email.

Mr McCormack had written to the then Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells.

In his email, which was revealed at an inquiry hearing, he offered to show "clear and unquestionable evidence of an intermittent bug in Horizon".

Mr McCormack wrote in October 2015 that the bug "can and does cause thousands of pounds in losses to sub-postmasters".

"Tonight there is a branch in your network sitting on a loss of [five] figures. The money does not exist. It is the result of several one-sided transactions being entered erroneously by the system, not the operator."

Mr McCormack said it was "a last chance" for Ms Vennells to accept that "what I have been telling you these last few years is true".

He offered to take her to the branch and to show her the evidence he had collected.

Mr Williams replied on an email thread at the time that the Post Office should write to him "in the same terms that we have every other person who has said they have evidence of flaws".

"Generally, my view is that this guy is a bluffer, who keeps expecting us to march to his tune.

"I don't think we should do so, but instead respond with a straight bat."

When asked what he meant by the phrase, Mr Williams said that the Post Office should "respond to his [Mr McCormack's] inbound enquiry seriously and appropriately".

He said he thought Mr McCormack was a bluffer because he was saying: "You have options, or else" which Mr Williams saw as "a threat".

Nevertheless, Mr Williams said his recollection was that former Post Office executive Angela Van Den Bogerd met Mr McCormack "to try and understand the issue in the branch".