Post Office bosses may be hauled back in front of the Commons business watchdog after refusing to fully claw back executive bonuses payments linked to the inquiry into the scandal of wrongly convicted postmasters.
Darren Jones, chair of parliament’s business committee, has written to the Post Office to demand more answers after the company said it would not seek the full return of bonus payments awarded for work related to the inquiry into the Horizon miscarriage of justice.
The Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system resulted in 700 postal workers being wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting between 2000 and 2014. The scandal led to some operators being sent to prison, and has been blamed for four suicides. It is the subject of an inquiry led by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, which was made statutory in 2021.
After the scandal, it emerged that about £1.6m in bonus payments had been made to executives. The Horizon inquiry was one of four “metrics” on which bonus payments were awarded, with each accounting for 25%.
The Post Office admitted it had made mistakes in its handling of the process and 33 employees voluntarily handed back a total of £64,252 in bonuses awarded in relation to a specific sub-metric linked to cooperating with the inquiry.
Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office, earlier this year apologised to MPs for the “error and the mistake” and confirmed he had repaid about £13,000 of his own £455,000 bonus package – or about 3% related to the inquiry compliance sub-metric.
However, the Post Office said in a letter to Jones last week that it does not intend to ask executives to pay back the full proportion of the bonus related to the inquiry.
Ministers investigated the bonus payments and published a report by a law firm, Simmons & Simmons, earlier this month saying that the payment of the bonuses was justifiable according to one reading of the wording of the metric. However, it said it was not possible to say whether this was the basis on which the bonuses were awarded because of incomplete records.
Jones wrote to the Post Office on Friday, challenging its interpretation of the government’s report as a vindication and saying he did not consider the matter closed.
“Will you now consider clawing back the bonus paid in relation to the overall inquiry metric on the grounds of the ‘clear governance’ failings identified by the Department for Business and Trade review and the change in the inquiry’s status imposing obvious legal and ethical obligations on Post Office executives to engage fully with a statutory public inquiry?” he wrote.
Jones also asked the Post Office to hand over details of who was responsible for overseeing the bonus metrics related to the inquiry in confidence.
He said the committee would consider whether and when to recall Post Office bosses for oral or written evidence after receiving its responses.
Asked about the committee’s letter and further comments on bonuses, Henry Staunton, chairman of the Post Office, said: “The report commissioned by the Department for Business and Trade found no basis to support suggestions of impropriety, that there was a justifiable basis to make the award and did not recommend any further repayment of bonus. The board is accepting each of the recommendations and has already put in place a number of measures to improve further the governance of remuneration.”