A Post Office PR boss who led a campaign to stop the exposure of the faulty Horizon IT system has landed a plum taxpayer-funded job.
Mark Davies, who doggedly defended the bugged software and rubbished evidence of faults, now heads communications at the Refugee Council. The non-profit, non-government organisation has received £8million from the Home Office since 2019. Surrey sub-postmistress Seema Misra, 48, who was pregnant when she was wrongly jailed for theft, is calling for him to step down “straight away”.
She said: “We should not be funding any of his salary – we don’t work hard and pay our taxes for people like him who ruined lives. Things just get worse and worse – despite having the Post Office on their CV these people can walk into any job with no questions asked, it’s an insult.” Mr Davies, who left his role as group communications and corporate affairs director in 2019, threatened BBC senior management over their 2015 Panorama show about the Horizon scandal.
In emails submitted to the inquiry, he described the issue as a “small number of cases.” He urged staff to tell reporters: “We do not prosecute people for making innocent mistakes.”
A year earlier, he called Tory MP James Arbuthnot’s questioning of the faulty system “very regrettable”. On Radio 4 he said: “In the course of the last decade, half a million people have used that system without problems, face-to-face with customers across the 11,500 branches in the Post Office network.”
The scandal was eventually exposed, and led to the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Mr Davies is described online as a “true communications expert” who has worked in “extremely demanding environments”. From 1999 to 2015, some 700 sub-postmasters and mistresses were prosecuted for offences such as theft, fraud and false accounting.
Some went to prison and others took their own lives. This week the inquiry saw papers detailing how PO staff “shredded” meeting records about the IT malfunctioning. Mark Davies and the Refugee Council declined to comment.