‘Not me, guv’: Tory peer ‘frustrated’ at government response to Post Office concerns, inquiry told 

A Conservative peer who has campaigned for the victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal told the inquiry he was “frustrated” at the government’s response when he raised concerns.

Giving evidence to the Post Office IT Inquiry, Lord James Arbuthnot told the probe he was “frustrated and annoyed” with Labour’s then-business secretary Lord Peter Mandelson after describing his approach as “no, not me, guv”.

Lord Arbuthnot first learned of issues from subpostmasters in his constituency, including Jo Hamilton, who was falsely accused of stealing £36,000 from the Hampshire branch she ran.

The Post Office has come under fire since the broadcast of ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, with hundreds of Horizon IT scandal victims awaiting compensation, despite their convictions being quashed.

More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the organisation and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it look like money was missing.

Lead counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, asked the peer why he wrote to the government directly in 2009 to raise subpostmasters’ concerns about the faulty Horizon system.

In a letter to Lord Mandelson, he wrote that there appeared to be “a significant number of postmasters and postmistresses accused of fraud” who claimed Horizon was responsible.

Lord Arbuthnot said: “I was not hugely interested in the intricacies of who was responsible, I just wanted it sorted out and I thought I might as well write to the person who owned it, who was Peter Mandelson.”

But after he received a reply from a minister suggesting the concerns were a matter for the Post Office, Lord Arbuthnot told the inquiry: “I was frustrated and annoyed. 

“It was clear that the government was saying it was nothing to do with them and I didn’t see at that stage where I could take it.

The former Conservative MP added: “I wanted what had seemed to me to be something that was potentially an injustice to be sorted out.

“Since the government owned the Post Office, I assumed that the government would be in a position to sort it out. But they were saying ‘No, not me, guv’.”

Ex-Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells wrote to Lord Arbuthnot, former MP for North East Hampshire, in 2012, while she was managing director, to defend Horizon as “robust”.

She also insisted the system had been “rigorously tested using independent assessors and robust procedures” and said: “The Post Office takes very seriously any perception that there is an issue with the accuracy of the Horizon system: there isn’t.

“There has been no evidence to support any of the allegations and we have no reason to doubt the integrity of the system, which we remain confident is robust and fit for purpose.”

Lord Arbuthnot said he was “not satisfied” with the “brush off” from Vennells. He stressed that the “subpostmasters I had met seemed to me to be transparently honest”.