Paula Vennells: No desire to point fingers over Horizon scandal

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the government said it would pay compensation to sub-postmasters who suffered losses due to shortfalls in the Post Office IT system prior to Horizon, which was called Capture.

The government said that it has asked the Post Office to “urgently review its files” so criminal cases review bodies can “ensure no one was wrongfully convicted of a Horizon-style injustice”.

The Capture accounting system was used between 1992 and 1999, when it was replace by Horizon.

At the inquiry into Horizon, Ms Vennells’ lawyer Samantha Leek KC claimed that throughout the whole hearing “there has been nothing to show that she acted in bad faith”.

Ms Leek said Ms Vennells “cannot, and does not, try to hide from the fact that while chief executive she did not manage to uncover the truth about the extent of the bugs, errors and defects” in the software.

But “she simply did not get the information which she ought to have been given by her senior team, whom she trusted and to whom she delegated responsible roles”.

“Ms Vennells does not know why key information was not passed on to her,” she added.

Ms Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019. She was previously network director at the organisation for five years.

Her statement is one of the last to be heard in the long-running inquiry into the Horizon scandal which was set up in September 2020.

It has heard from 298 witnesses, received 780 witness statements and dealt with more than 2.2 million pages of disclosure.