During the latest hearing at the Post Office scandal public inquiry, former Post Office chair Tim Parker expressed regret for following advice from the organisation’s legal chief to keep a critical report secret. The report could have supported the claims of subpostmasters wrongly accused of theft and false accounting. Parker’s testimony was marked by multiple instances of claiming he could not remember certain details, using the phrase “I do not recall” 64 times in his 158-page witness statement.
Parker was appointed as part-time chairman of the Post Office board in 2015 when accusations were mounting that flaws in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system had led to accounting errors for which subpostmasters were wrongly blamed. A review by barrister Jonathan Swift found that subpostmasters may have been coerced into pleading guilty to false accounting due to insufficient evidence of fraud. The review also identified bugs in the Horizon system that may have led to miscarriages of justice.
Despite these findings, Parker was advised by Post Office general counsel Jane MacLeod not to share the review with the board due to legal privilege. As a result, the review was not made available as evidence during a 2018/19 High Court case that confirmed bugs in Horizon were responsible for accounting losses. Parker later admitted regretting this decision and expressed a wish to have shared the report more widely.
The Swift review remained secret until 2022 when a freedom of information request led to its release. MacLeod, who advised Parker on keeping the review confidential, now lives in Australia and has declined to testify before the inquiry. The Post Office scandal, first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, is considered one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.