Paula Vennells Post Office Inquiry live: Ex-CEO accused of talking ‘absolute rubbish’

Former subpostmaster Lee Castleton said he wishes Paula Vennells would have recognised a decade ago that what happened to him and his Post Office colleagues was “unforgivable”.

The former Post Office chief executive admitted the business’ treatment of Mr Castleton, who was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the company, was “unforgivable”, on her third day of her evidence to the Horizon IT inquiry.

Asked how he felt about her comments, Mr Castleton told the PA news agency during a break from the hearing: “It’s a different world for me now. It’s 20 years on and we have had to fight so hard.

“I just wish she would have recognised that in 2013 – it would have made such a difference to a lot of people. It would have been so much better for everybody had the Post Office not done what they had done. There have been so many people punished for nothing.”

Asked if he thought Ms Vennells’ comments on his case had been forced, he said: “Kind of. If I ever believed that it was just about me, me personally, then I probably wouldn’t be here today. But I think it has been forced and we have had to fight every step of the way, and it never needed to be like this.”

Mr Castleton said his overwhelming feeling over the course of Ms Vennells’ evidence has been sadness, adding: “This never needed to happen to anybody.”

The lawyer acting on behalf of wrongfully convicted Scottish subposmaster Susan Sinclair has asked Paula Vennells how she had received statements by Scotland’s lord advocate to the Scottish Parliament last week “that the Post Office is no longer trusted and has been stripped of its role as a specialist agency in Scotland”.

After asking for the question to be repeated, Ms Vennells said: “I think that’s a very appropriate response.”

Paula Vennells is now being quizzed by Christie Allan, who represents Susan Sinclair, the first subpostmistress in Scotland to successfully appeal her wrongful prosecution – which happened only last September.

Ms Allan has begun by asking how, given Ms Vennells’ claims that she always sought to be questioning in her approach – alongside accounts by subpostmasters, the findings of Second Sight, discovery of bugs in Horizon and revelations about Fujitsu witness Gareth Jenkins – to what extent she questioned the safety of convictions including those in Scotlan.

Ms Vennells replied: “All of the subpostmasters who raised cases were admitted into the scheme, if their applications were considered there was a case to do that. There was no intention to exclude anybody. So my understanding – and I’m very sorry because I wouldn’t have known the individual cases, if there were Scottish cases in those – I am very sorry that it took so long for that to be resolved.”

But she denied being reassured that there “was an extra layer of protection in Scottish prosecutions” because of how the Scottish legal system works, saying: “I had no knowledge of that and I don’t believe I asked enough questions.”

Paula Vennells is now being asked questions by Catriona Watt, who is representing the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), a group which campaigner Alan Bates described to the inquiry in April as “absolutely useless”.

She challenges that Horizon being “robust” was a mantra repeated again and again, “until it became corporate truth”.

Ms Vennells replied: “I and many colleagues in the Post Office took comfort from the fact that senior officials in the NFSP were saying that kind of thing. We see many examples of where words are picked up across time and I don’t know where ‘robust’ came from originally. It was certainly used very…