The Post Office’s chief legal officer has apologised after teams of lawyers failed on multiple occasions to pick up on a racist and offensive document which should have been disclosed.

The statutory inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal heard today that a document with identification codes for postmasters under suspicion was not flagged up as relevant when the inquiry requested documents in February 2022.

The document in question, which used racist and outdated terms for people of different ethnicities, was made public only following a freedom of information request from a member of the public earlier this year.

Ben Foat, group general counsel for Post Office Limited, was summoned to explain the disclosure failure at the inquiry today.

He admitted that email searches have identified 23 occasions on which the codes were sent as an attachment between 2012 and 2019. Despite this, the e-disclosure exercise ahead of the inquiry failed to recognise their relevance due to a breakdown in what Foat described as the ‘de-duplication’ search process which combed through attachments to emails.

He revealed that between four and eight in-house Post Office lawyers, as well as 46 from Herbert Smith Freehills and five from Peters & Peters, are working on disclosure and remediation issues.

Foat said: 'The Post Office is absolutely committed to making sure there is full disclosure. Genuinely everyone in the teams is working in different law firms incredibly hard. I recognise there are a number of areas where we have fallen short and I do apologise to the inquiry.'

Since the late disclosure of the offensive document, lawyers have gone back over the suite of documents discarded in initial searches and found around 700 that are relevant to phase four of the inquiry. The inquiry counsel, Jason Beer KC, pointed out that phase four was due to begin less than an hour later.

The inquiry heard that a formal request had been made in February 2022 to the Post Office through HSF solicitor Andrew Lidbetter asking for disclosure of all documents relevant to the Post Office’s prosecution policy pursued from 1999 onwards.

Foat said the identification codes, sent first in 2011 as an attachment to an email about compliance guidance, had ‘not been responsive’ to subsequent search terms.

Asked what guidance was provided to those reviewing the documents, Foat said individuals were encouraged to raise any queries they might have but this ‘family of documents’ was no examined in greater detail.

Beer suggested that the system may have been ‘too mechanical’, to which Foat said: ‘I agree.

Beer said the missed document could have provided ‘context, colour and assistance’ to the inquiry. Foat responded: ‘I would accept that… there are a number of areas that have not been done to the standard that we would expect but we are quickly remedying them. New, modified search terms have been designed and are being run.’

Foat’s appearance – solely for the disclosure issues – was the pre-cursor to a series of witnesses in phase four who will explain in more detail how the prosecutions were handled. The inquiry will look increasingly at the role of lawyers in contracts drawn up with Fujitsu over the provision of the Horizon IT system, the disclosure of knowledge that the system was faulty and the way subsequent criminal and civil litigation was handled.

 

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