The House of Commons business and trade committee is not known for a surfeit of popcorn moments but it provided a small bagful. Top of the bill was Henry Staunton, business grandee and former chairman of the Post Office, who gave ordinary mortals an insight into the workings of the executive class. One of the main takeaways was that a cabinet minister’s pay is peanuts when the boardroom is your sandpit.
When asked by MPs about his £150,000 chairman’s pay at the Post Office, Mr Staunton, a veteran of company boards, explained that it was a mere fraction of his pension income and he was not doing the job for the money. He was, however, happy to point committee members in the direction of a man who was: Nick Read, chief executive of the state-owned enterprise since 2019, who in 2022 received a £455,000 bonus to add to his £415,000 salary. Mr Read, said Mr Staunton, was unhappy with his pay and wanted more.
Boardroom dirty washing was in abundance at the hearing, meant to chart progress on compensating subpostmasters jailed, ruined and driven to breakdown by the mammoth miscarriage of justice that was the Horizon computer scandal. If this soap opera clarified anything it was the Post Office’s unfitness to discharge that responsibility.
Last month, Mr Staunton was sacked from the chairmanship by Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, whose department oversees the Post Office. Their falling out was public and acrimonious. Ms Badenoch accused Mr Staunton of lying when he alleged that an official from her department had told him to slow compensation to subpostmasters to ease pressure on the Treasury. Mr Staunton retaliated, claiming that he was the victim of a smear campaign and the pressure to string out payments to victims was real, though he had ignored it.
Caught in the crossfire was his erstwhile colleague Mr Read, who before Mr Staunton’s evidence had been roasted by the committee for his organisation’s chronic failure to distribute compensation in timely manner. MPs were told that only 4 per cent of the £780 million earmarked for subpostmasters wrongfully convicted of crimes because of the faulty Horizon system had been paid out. Others ruined by the scandal had been confronted with impossibly complicated compensation forms. Of the estimated £1.2 billion of compensation needed for as many as 4,500 victims just over 40 per cent had been paid out. This scandal is more than a decade old; many victims are dead. This dilatory approach is shameful.
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As Mr Read flailed before the committee the world learnt that he was spending £15,000 of taxpayers’ money a week on a PR firm, TB Cardew, which trained him and fellow executives to deal with MPs. Five former investigators accused by traumatised subpostmasters of acting like mafia hoods were still on the Post Office payroll. Speaking on oath, Mr Read denied wanting to resign but was promptly contradicted by Mr Staunton, who said he repeatedly dissuaded his CEO from doing so. Mr Read wanted more money but when Mr Staunton went to Grant Shapps, then business secretary, he was told to forget it. Mr Staunton was said by the Post Office to be under investigation for misconduct; he pointed out that the complaint against him was a footnote in an 80-page dossier compiled against Mr Read after the CEO fell out with his own director of human resources.
Clearly this regime is not fit to administer justice. It has had its chance and failed. The government, the sole shareholder, must step in and assume all responsibility for compensation, setting firm deadlines for payments. And then it must go after Fujitsu, Horizon’s creator, and hold that company’s feet to the fire. The prime minister and his business secretary need to grip this situation once and for all. Further delay is unacceptable.
