At the Post Office inquiry, Mr Cameron said senior management should have settled the claims, apologised and moved on years ago.
He said the Post Office had been over-reliant on its flawed Horizon IT system “when we knew its weaknesses”.
“We have defended ourselves to avoid the consequences. A waste of public money and a postponement of justice.”
Mr Cameron, who joined the Post Office in 2015 and worked closely with then chief executive Paula Vennells, sat on the sub-committee of the Post Office board that oversaw its defence to the group litigation in 2018-19 led by Alan Bates.
At the start of his session, he gave an apology: “I am sorry that when I joined the Post Office in 2015, I accepted without challenging the evidence that there had been no miscarriages of justice in the earlier prosecutions which caused so much devastation to postmasters and their families.
“As a member of the GLO [group litigation order] sub-committee, I am sorry I did not push against the lack of challenge and testing of Post Office’s legal case. Had I done better in these things, we might have started the process of getting justice for postmasters earlier.
“I hope that my statement and evidence today assists the inquiry in its investigations and in getting to the truth which is the least that those affected deserve.”
Mr Cameron was asked about a ‘Strictly Confidential’ document titled “What went wrong?”, written by him in November 2020, which set out the criticisms faced by the Post Office after it lost the litigation brought by 555 subpostmasters.
In it he said that at the heart of what went wrong, the “original sin” of the Post Office was “our culture, self-absorbed and defensive”, which “stopped us from dealing with Postmasters in a straightforward and acceptable way.”
The document revealed his estimate of the total cost to the Post Office of the scandal at the time was £1-£1.5bn.
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