Former Post Office boss insists he was telling the truth when claiming top Whitehall official told him to 'go slow' on compensation payments for wronged postmasters due to tight public finances - but other execs say they WEREN'T told

The ex-Post Office chairman today insisted he was telling the truth when he said a top Whitehall official told him to stall on compensation for wronged postmasters.

Henry Staunton, who is engulfed in a furious row with Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch over his allegations, stood by his claims when grilled by MPs.

In a quizzing by the House of Commons’ Business and Trade Committee, the 75-year-old repeated that he was told not to ‘rip off the band aid’ by a senior civil servant.

Mr Staunton said Sarah Munby, the former top official at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, warned that ‘money is tight at the Treasury’.

He added he was ‘left in no doubt’ he would have to ‘look at’ the compensation bill from the Horizon scandal during a meeting with Ms Munby last year.

Mr Staunton complained he had since been subject to a ‘smear campaign’ after going public with his allegations.

Mrs Badenoch, the Business and Trade Secretary, has rubbished the claims as ‘completely fictitious’ and accused Ms Staunton of spreading ‘made-up anecdotes’ after she fired him last month.

Nick Read, the current Post Office chief executive, earlier told the committee he does not believe anyone at the company was told to slow down compensation payments.

He suggested Mr Staunton had ‘misinterpreted or perhaps misunderstood’ his conversation with Ms Munby.

Ex-Post Office chairman Henry Staunton today insisted he was telling the truth when he said a top Whitehall official told him to stall on compensation for wronged postmasters

Mr Staunton, who is engulfed in a furious row with Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch over his allegations, stood by his claims when grilled by MPs

Campaigner Alan Bates calls for ‘dead duck’ Post Office to be sold to Amazon for £1 so they can fix it 

The Post Office is a ‘dead duck’ and should be sold to a firm like Amazon for £1, Alan Bates said today.

The campaigning postmaster gave a scathing assessment of the public body in the wake of the Horizon IT scandal, saying the culture will ‘never change’.

Giving evidence to MPs, he warned the Post Office will only be a ‘money pit’ if it stays under government control, while the private sector could turn it into ‘one of the best networks around’.

Mr Bates was the focus of the hit ITV drama that sparked a huge wave of public anger about the persecution of hundreds of postmasters who were accused of theft due to faulty accounting software.

The Commons Business Committee took a day of evidence about the current state of play in efforts to resolve the long-running chaos.

The Government has pledged to quash convictions and pay at least £600,000 to those wrongly tainted by the Post Office’s actions.

Mr Bates said: ‘My personal view about Post Office is it’s a dead duck and it has been for years, and it’s going to be a moneypit for the taxpayer in the years to come.

‘You should sell it to someone like Amazon for £1, get really good contracts for all the serving subpostmasters and within a few years you’ll have one of the best networks around Britain.’

Mr Staunton, who was Post Office chairman between December 2022 and January this year, last week claimed he was told by Ms Munby to ‘hobble’ into the general election on the issue of compensation payments.

He produced a bombshell memo of his first meeting with the senior Whitehall official on January 5 last year, in which he said he was warned ‘now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues’.

The note also claimed the top mandarian told him that ‘politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality’.

Mr Staunton repeated the claims about the meeting with Ms Munby when quizzed by MPs this afternoon, saying: ‘I said that this is a three to five-year turnaround situation at the Post Office, and I had in mind it was probably the latter rather than the former.

‘She said in response to that this is no time for long-term planning, she said money is tight at the Treasury and you need to really understand that.

‘I said in terms of trying to hold back, there are only three levers of big cash flows that we can pull, one is the inquiry costs, which are significant, one is compensation, and one is the replacement to Horizon, which is the biggest lever.

‘In detail I said, the inquiry, the costs will have to be what they have to be, surely? In respect of compensation we need to do the right thing by postmasters in taking this money, and we’re in dire need of a new system.

‘She repeated again, money is very tight, this is no time to rip off the band aid, and I was left in no doubt that this was not a time to rip off the band aid and I would have to look at those levers.’

Mr Staunton also recently claimed, in an interview with the Sunday Times earlier this month, that Mrs Badenoch told him ‘someone’s got to take the rap’ for the Post Office scandal when she sacked him.

He told the committee this afternoon that he had been the victim of a ‘smear campaign’ in the wake of a subsequent public spat with the Cabinet minister.

‘We all know that things were moving far too slowly… and the reason why people have latched onto what I said in the Sunday Times was that finally someone was being honest about how deep seated the problems were and why nothing was being done,’ he told MPs on the Business and Trade Committee.

‘I still think that more could be done, at least to make compensation more generous, and the process of getting justice less bureaucratic.

‘But I will at least have achieved something if the sunlight of disinfectant, which the Secretary of State so approves of, means that Government now lives up to its promises.

‘What the public wants to know is why was everything so slow? … And why does everything remain so slow? I’ve spoken up on matters of genuine public concern, have been fired, and am now subject to a smear campaign.’

Nick Read, the current Post Office chief executive, told the committee he does not believe anyone at the company was told to slow down compensation payments

Carl Creswell, director of business resilience at the Department of Business and Trade, said it was ‘completely incorrect’ that ministers asked the Post Office to go slow on compensation

The Horizon scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.

A public inquiry into what has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history is ongoing.

Anger at the treatment of subpostmasters grew after an ITV drama returned the issue to the spotlight, which prompted the Government to promise a new law so those wrongly convicted are ‘swiftly exonerated and compensated’.

Appearing before the Business and Trade Committee earlier today, Mr Read – the current Post Office chief executive – said he does not believe anyone at the company was told by the Government to slow down compensation payments.

‘I don’t believe that to be the case and I can categorically say that nobody in my team or myself has received any instruction from the Government about slowing down compensation,’ he told MPs.

Mr Read added of Mr Staunton’s claims about his meeting with Ms Munby: ‘I think he’s misinterpreted or perhaps misunderstood the conversation he had with Ms Munby.

‘If I look at the data that I provided to him before he had that briefing, I at no point mentioned compensation, it was absolutely a conversation about the long-term future and funding of the Post Office, and I don’t believe that it had anything to do with compensation.’

A senior civil servant also said it was ‘completely incorrect’ that ministers and officials have asked the Post Office to go slow on paying compensation to wronged postmasters.

Carl Creswell, director of business resilience at the Department of Business and Trade, told the committee: ‘You would have thought someone would have mentioned it to me if that were the intent. Not at all.

‘I worked very closely with Sarah Munby, she and I worked with Treasury to secure the funding needed for the schemes.’

He added: ‘Every conversation I had with her, with ministers, with other senior civil servants in other parts of Government, have all been about how we can pay out this money more quickly, so, no, that is completely incorrect that assertion.’

In a letter to Mrs Badenoch, published on the Government website last week, Ms Munby wrote: ‘It is not true that I made any instruction, either explicitly or implicitly, to Mr Staunton to in any way delay compensation payments.

‘I did not. Neither Mr Staunton’s note, nor the contemporaneous note that my office made, suggest otherwise.

‘In fact, no mention of delaying compensation appears in either note.’

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