Post Office witness statement left out ‘unhelpful’ details, inquiry hears

An auditor for the Post Office omitted important details in her witness statement in a civil case against a sub-postmaster, the inquiry into the scandal has heard.

Helen Rose had audited the Bridlington branch run by Lee Castleton when there was a shortfall in the accounts. He was subsequently suspended and made bankrupt after a week-long trial following a claim for repayment by the Post Office.

Castleton, who was unrepresented during the proceedings, was called a thief, and was one of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused based on the shortcomings of the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.

The Post Office Inquiry yesterday heard that Castleton had been pleased when Rose arrived in 2004 to audit the branch accounts – a response she recorded in her initial report. But when Rose produced her witness statement for the civil case two years later, this detail was omitted. She also failed to tell the court that Castleton said he had been in contact with the Horizon helpline regularly to report problems. Again, this had been part of Rose’s initial report after her first visit.

Asked by inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC why information that might have helped Castleton’s case was excluded from her witness statement, Rose said: ‘I honestly don’t know why other things have not been included at the time.’

The inquiry heard that the witness statement included a line about Castleton having left the branch at lunchtime and returning in the afternoon ‘smelling strongly of alcohol’. There was no reference to this in the contemporaneous note from nearly two years previously.

Rose said she could not explain why the alcohol note appeared in the later witness statement but not her initial report, suggesting it ‘must have been a comment I felt necessary to mention’.

Rose admitted that incorrect information about a digital security inspection which had been in the initial audit was still included in the witness statement, although she could not explain why this had happened.

Beer asked: ‘Did you ever feel that you were being encouraged by your employer to include matters that were helpful to it, the employer, and exclude matters that were helpful or potentially helpful to Mr Castleton?’ Rose responded: ‘No.’

The inquiry heard that Rose was appointed as a Post Office disclosure officer dealing with Horizon challenges. She prepared a document detailing 20 cases where sub-postmasters had said the system had been faulty, although she told the inquiry she could not remember doing this.

Rose said that when she wrote the report in August 2012, she was not aware of various bugs within the Horizon system at the time. Commenting on the prosecution of Seema Mistra, who was sentenced in 2010 to 15 months in prison for a theft she did not commit, Rose had written that the case turned ‘from a relatively straightforward general deficiency case to an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system’.

She had added: ‘Although there have been attempts to discredit the Horizon system via the courts, to date the Post Office have been able to defend the integrity of the Horizon system at all levels.’

Beer suggested this showed that Post Office Limited saw attempts to plead innocence as attacks on Horizon rather than as people trying to defend themselves.

Rose replied: ‘At the time, I was not aware of any Horizon issues, and the bugs that you’ve mentioned, I was obviously not aware of them.’