27 June 2024 – Gareth Jenkins
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Gareth Jenkins
GARETH IDRIS JENKINS (continued).
Questioned by Mr Beer (continued)
Sir Wyn Williams: Morning, my colleague, Ms Eliasson-Norris, can’t be here in person today.
Mr Beer: Thank you, sir.
Good morning Mr Jenkins.
Gareth Jenkins: Good morning.
Mr Beer: Can we start with the Seema Misra case study, please. Just for reference, no need to display it, you set out in your third witness statement, paragraphs 326 to 521, your involvement in Seema Misra’s case. Just by way of reference, before you ever became involved in it, back on 1 April 2008, Mr Singh, Jarnail Singh, had advised there was sufficient evidence for a prosecution of Mrs Misra. The reference for that, again, no need to be displayed, is POL00049658.
Can I turn, please, to what might be your first involvement or the genesis of your first involvement in the case.
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: FUJ00152866, please. If we can turn to page 6, please. An email – if we just scroll down, and a bit more. We can’t in fact see it. We’ll have to scroll up to see it was sent from Mr Dunks. There. Can you see an email of 26 November 2009 from Mr Dunks to Jane Owen?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it’s copied to Mr Dunks, isn’t it from Jon Longman?
Mr Beer: You’re quite right. Mr Longman to Ms Owen, copied to Mr Dunks. You’re quite right. If we scroll down it says:
“I attach a report from the defence expert where he has highlighted a number of problems with the Horizon system. Our barrister, Warwick Tatford, has asked that the problems with Horizon that he has raised in his report are replied to in a witness statement form. I presume that an employee of Fujitsu would have to produce the witness statement …
“In addition to this the defence have also requested some information”, which I’m not going to read.
Okay?
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: If we go to page 5, please, at the top of the page. We can see that Jane Owen sends that to Penny Thomas in Fujitsu on 1 December:
“This is the email and attachments that we chatted about. Please let me know if there is anything else you need from me and if this kind of request needs to be raised in a more official way.”
Okay?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You’re not included at this stage?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: If we go to page 3, please. If we just scroll up a bit more – thank you – you’ll see an email from Penny Thomas to David Hinde. Do you remember David Hinde?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, yes, he was one of the Programme Managers within the Post Office Account and I worked quite closely with him on a number of occasions.
Mr Beer: So he was a Post Office –
Gareth Jenkins: No, he was a Fujitsu person.
Mr Beer: Working on the POA?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Thank you:
“David
“We had a conversation last week and you advised me I should no longer ask Gareth to support our prosecution … activity. I now have a request from [the Post Office], which they would like addressed prior to Christmas, and I need an expert to respond. Could you help me to identify a suitable candidate?”
Then she attaches the expert’s report.
Do you know anything about why you were not to be approached, “We should no longer ask Gareth to support our prosecution” –
Gareth Jenkins: Possibly because I was quite business working on Horizon Online at the time.
Mr Beer: All right so it was about capacity, was it, as far as you knew?
Gareth Jenkins: As far as I know, yes.
Mr Beer: Then if we scroll up, please, at page 2. Mr Hinde replies:
“Penny
“We have not identified anyone else who can take this on at present so this will need to be handled by Gareth.”
Then scroll up. An email that we’ve looked at before, I think we looked at it yesterday or the day before, which is really about generally what you do to support prosecution activity.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So this chain doesn’t actually – even though there’s a request for the provision of an expert report in the form of a witness statement, or an expert’s reply to the expert’s report in the form of a witness statement – ask you directly to perform that function, does it, when it’s sent on to you?
Gareth Jenkins: No not at this stage, no.
Mr Beer: Can you help us, do you know why you’re replying to this chain with this series of questions and answers?
Gareth Jenkins: The questions are from this Dave Jennings and the answers are mine. So, again, I’m interspersing things so I think the darker font is his questions and the lighter font, more to the left, are my responses, is how I’m interpreting that.
Mr Beer: My question was more: do you know why you’re saying all this in answer to the series of emails below, which is about, “Can we have a reply from somebody within Fujitsu in the form of a witness statement”, to the defence expert report in the Seema Misra case?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t have a clear answer. I’m assuming, from what this is saying, that Dave Jennings wanted to have some sort of background as to the sort of things I’d done in the past but I’m – I’m guessing from the sort of questions he’s asking.
Mr Beer: Can you recall when you were first asked to provide assistance to the Post Office in relation to Mrs Misra’s case?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it was from – as a consequence of this email. There may be – I think there may be a later one, either on this chain or a separate chain, that actually passes me the report to have a look at but it was certainly some time in December 2009.
Mr Beer: You tell us in your witness statement that you do not think you received any kind of briefing or explanation about the background to Mrs Misra’s case; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: At that stage, I don’t believe I did.
Mr Beer: And that you weren’t in fact provided with Professor McLachlan’s first interim technical report?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that.
Mr Beer: Without a briefing or explanation about the background to Mrs Misra’s case or the prosecution case against her and without a copy of Professor McLachlan’s first interim report, how did that impact on your ability to respond to the Post Office’s requests?
Gareth Jenkins: I saw the Post Office’s requests as being purely to comment on the second report that I was provided with, either at this time or shortly afterwards.
Mr Beer: So, again, performing a narrow function?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because that’s what I thought I was being asked to do.
Mr Beer: Did you ever think, “Hold on, I don’t know anything about this case”?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I was just being asked “Please can you comment on this report”, so I commented on the report in the way I normally did by interspersing my comments within the electronic version of the report.
Mr Beer: You also, in your witness statement, describe the Post Office’s management of Seema Misra’s case – this is something you mentioned previously in your oral evidence – as “fairly chaotic”.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I would agree with that.
Mr Beer: What did you mean by your reference to the management by the Post Office of Mrs Misra’s case as being “fairly chaotic”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think this came a bit more later. There were a number of cases where I would respond to an email and then get asked exactly the same question again by the same person and, therefore, ended up sort of saying, “Well, I told you this yesterday, here’s the answer I gave you when you asked me the question before”. And there are number of examples of that in the exchanges I had with Jarnail Singh.
Mr Beer: Other than receiving repeated requests for the same thing, was there anything else that made their management of the case chaotic or fairly chaotic?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t being asked very clear questions. I was having to make all sorts of assumptions of what they wanted me to do, I did try and set out what I thought I was being asked to do, but it was very much a case of I definitely didn’t have clear instructions as to “Please do exactly this”, let alone formal instructions, as I now realise I should have had.
Mr Beer: Did you realise at the time that you weren’t receiving clear instructions?
Gareth Jenkins: I just thought that was the way things worked. So –
Mr Beer: That’s a slightly different point. Did you realise at the time that you were not receiving clear instructions?
Gareth Jenkins: No, because I didn’t know that I should have been.
Mr Beer: Irrespective of the formality of a letter of instruction, which you say you now realise that you ought to have received, did you at the time realise that the requests being made of you were unclear?
Gareth Jenkins: They were certainly unclear and I did the best I could to interpret what I thought I was being asked. And sometimes I did actually seek clarification to say, “I think what you mean is this, isn’t it?”
Mr Beer: You also describe in your witness statement that:
“At times I struggled to deal with the Post Office’s demands.”
Is that because you were heavily involved in the rollout of Horizon Online?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. I mean, there was clearly a scheduling problem I had, which I think I managed to fulfil, but, yes.
Mr Beer: Did you feel that there was pressure applied to you by the Post Office to provide evidence in Mrs Misra’s case that conformed to the Post Office’s expectations?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, they clearly wanted me to say that everything was perfect and I don’t think I actually said that.
Mr Beer: In what way did that pressure manifest itself?
Gareth Jenkins: I kept on getting emails – it was in spurts, it wasn’t solid throughout the time, but I kept on being asked please can I do this, please can I do that, and I kept getting occasional phone calls as well.
Mr Beer: Did you feel uncomfortable about the pressure you were being placed – that was being placed upon you?
Gareth Jenkins: Uncomfortable – I just got on with things, which is what – my normal reaction to try and handle things, rather than worry about things.
Mr Beer: So you felt uncomfortable but got on with it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Did you raise the fact that you felt uncomfortable with any of your managers?
Gareth Jenkins: I – yes, for example, there was the discussion with David Jones at the beginning of February that we had and that was part of my uncomfortableness, if you like, and there were occasions when I’d raised with my line manager, “Look, I’m being asked to do all this but you want me to do all my day job stuff, how does this all tie together?”
Mr Beer: I was not thinking so much about the capacity issue but rather the “we want evidence”, the substance of the evidence.
In your words, I think you said to say that the system was all okay or all alright, and you felt uncomfortable about doing that.
Gareth Jenkins: I think that was the reason why we got in touch with David Jones, for example, at the beginning of February.
Mr Beer: Other than that, did you escalate it in any way within your organisation?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember properly. I think there may be some examples within the emails but I can’t remember off the top of my head exactly which ones they were.
Mr Beer: Okay. Can we look, please, at FUJ00122794.
By this time, this is February 2010, for context, you had received, by this time, a request to produce a witness statement and, if we go down, please, to page 2 – thank you – we’ll see an email from Jarnail Singh, in fact it’s from his secretary or PA on his behalf, of 5 February at 3.50 to Mr Jones, and copied to you and Penny Thomas.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The email body is addressed to you:
“Dear David and Penny …”
He says:
“On first glance points 2-4 have not been answered and I reproduce below.”
Item 3:
“When Gareth completes his statement …”
As I said already, by this time, you’d been asked to provide a witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “When Gareth completes his statement could he also mention whether there are any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of. If none could this be clarified in the statement.”
This is an email from the Post Office to three of you in Fujitsu, correct?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You’re getting the request directly here from the lawyer, the prosecution lawyer, Jarnail Singh?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Just looking at of the request in number 3, would you agree that that’s a broad request?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, it is.
Mr Beer: It does not ask whether there were known problems which affected Seema Misra’s branch at West Byfleet, does it?
Gareth Jenkins: No, not at that stage.
Mr Beer: It doesn’t ask you whether you personally know of problems within Horizon; it asks whether you can say whether Fujitsu knows of problems with Horizon, doesn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and I responded to that saying that – identifying a problem that I was aware of that would need to be checked out.
Mr Beer: I’m going to come to your answers in a moment. I’m just looking at what the request means at the moment. I think you’ve agreed that it was broad. It’s not limited to Seema Misra’s branch and it’s not limited to your own knowledge; it’s Fujitsu’s knowledge?
Gareth Jenkins: I see now that is what it said. I’m not sure that I would have analysed it in that way at the time.
Mr Beer: Why might you not have analysed it or why – put aside analysis of it: why might you not have read it that way at the time?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought that all I could be really commenting on was what was happening in the particular branch when we actually had some data to look at for the specific branch.
Mr Beer: That plainly doesn’t say that though, does it? It doesn’t ask that?
Gareth Jenkins: I realise that now.
Mr Beer: We now know that request originated from the prosecution barrister, Warwick Tatford. If we go up, please, to the bottom of page 1, if we just look at your reply, 16.06. Can you see that you replied to David Jones and Penny Thomas?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So you have cut the Post Office person, Jarnail Singh, out of the chain?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Why did you cut Jarnail Singh out of the chain?
Gareth Jenkins: I wanted advice from David Jones in particular as to exactly what I should be saying, particularly since I was reluctant to make a clear statement and I was aware of this problem so I wanted guidance as to what I should be saying about it.
Mr Beer: So you were really looking for a steer from Fujitsu Legal on how to deal with this request?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You say:
“Brief responses as [below], but not sure that I should put them in a witness statement …”
Gareth Jenkins: Again, I was seeking guidance.
Mr Beer: Just help us with why you weren’t sure you should put them in a witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: I was just trying to get some clarity as to whether I – exactly what I should be saying. I was looking for guidance particularly from David Jones as to what I should be saying.
Mr Beer: But why were you not sure you should put them in a witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: I just didn’t know. I’d not really had such much to do with this sort of thing, so I was just seeking some sort of guidance.
Mr Beer: But what were the reasons that would prevent you from putting them in a witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t know. I was just ignorant.
Mr Beer: What, that, “Is this something that we do, we provide witness statements?” I mean, you were providing one already?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, yeah. I was just – I was just asking the question.
Mr Beer: Wasn’t it more about the content; you were worried about putting the content in a witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: I was just looking for guidance as to what I should be saying.
Mr Beer: Weren’t you really not focusing on “Should I provide a witness statement or not”, you were saying by that, “I’m not really sure that I should put this content in a witness statement”?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know.
Mr Beer: Look at number 3. You’ll remember this is the answer to the question:
“Could he also mention whether there are any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of? If none, could this be clarified in the statement?”
You say:
“This is where I’m reluctant to make a clear statement. I am aware of one problem where transactions have been lost in particular circumstances due to locking issues. When this happens we have events in the eventing logs to indicate that there was an issue and whenever we provide transaction logs to [the Post Office] we check for any such events. In the case of West Byfleet we have not provided any transaction logs and so have not made these checks.”
Would you agree that the implication of that was that you may be able to respond to question 3 when you had the ARQ data?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. I think that’s basically what I was trying to say there.
Mr Beer: Now, you refer to one problem in that answer: you were referring to the Callendar Square bug, right?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I was referring to the Craigpark issue. I wasn’t aware of the Callendar Square issue at that time.
Mr Beer: Could be the Craigpark be checked for by reference to ARQ data?
Gareth Jenkins: It could be – no, but it could be checked in reference to the NT event logs.
Mr Beer: Is that what you’re referring to where you say “transaction logs”?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, the transaction logs I’m referring is to ARQ data, but I was saying that, when we provide transaction logs, we also check against the corresponding NT events as part of that process.
Mr Beer: That’s what you refer to when you say “eventing”?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: So that means NT event logs? So the third line –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, yes.
Mr Beer: At this time, did you know of other problems which would require more than the ARQ data to investigate whether they were in play at this branch?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t aware of any other such problems.
Mr Beer: What about accounting discrepancies due to hardware failures?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought that those would have been picked up as – would have been picked up at the time because they would have been fairly obvious at the time when there were such hardware failures.
Mr Beer: You’d need to look, wouldn’t you? Whether they’d been picked up at the time or not was the very issue that you’d be looking for, wouldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure whether I was thinking of that at the time. This was –
Mr Beer: You agree now?
Gareth Jenkins: This was this issue that I thought about, so therefore I raised this and asked for guidance as to what should be done about it.
Mr Beer: What about bad blocks; do you remember what they were?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think bad blocks actually caused problems. What that effectively meant was that the system came to a halt and then needed to be restarted to sort things out.
Mr Beer: Would that be shown on an NT event log?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You’d need the Horizon Helpdesk records to look for calls suggesting that hardware had been at fault, wouldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I was aware that someone else had done an analysis of Helpdesk calls or –
Mr Beer: Were you aware –
Gareth Jenkins: – maybe not at this point but I became aware of that, as time went on.
Mr Beer: At this point, in order to answer that question, even if it was restricted in your mind to West Byfleet, you would need to look at the Horizon Helpdesk records to look for calls made by Mrs Misra or other people at branch level, for example suggesting hardware issues, wouldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t aware that I would have needed to have done that because, as I say, I thought that was something that someone else would be covering.
Mr Beer: Why did you think that it would be something that somebody else would be covering?
Gareth Jenkins: Because my expertise was in the software rather than the hardware.
Mr Beer: Wouldn’t you need the full message store to look for unusual restarts?
Gareth Jenkins: You could see those, you should be able to see those from the ARQ data, I think.
Mr Beer: You think or you know?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m trying to remember now. It’s a long time ago since I looked thorough the detailed ARQ data.
Mr Beer: If you were going to give a complete answer to the question whether there were any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of, you would need to investigate PinICLs and PEAKs, wouldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but, as I say, at this stage, I was just saying I couldn’t make a clear statement and I wasn’t thinking about what else I would need to do. I was just saying, “This is my immediate response to the question I’ve been asked”.
Mr Beer: But do you agree that, if you were going to give a complete answer to the question of whether there were any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of, you would need to look at PinICLs and PEAKs?
Gareth Jenkins: There would have been some need to do that and I believe I did so at some point.
Mr Beer: You would need to look at KELs to see which problems were in play for at least the period when Mrs Misra was alleged to have stolen money from the West Byfleet branch, wouldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure I would have thought of looking at KELs because my normal approaches was to look at the PEAKs and PinICLs which are sat behind them, rather than the actual KELs.
Mr Beer: But you agree that, if you were to answer the question completely of whether there were known problems with Horizon that Fujitsu are aware of, you would at least have to look at any PinICLs or PEAKs to see whether any known problems were in play for at least the period when Mrs Misra was alleged to have stolen money from West Byfleet?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t actually answering the question at this point; I was just saying that I didn’t think I could answer the question –
Mr Beer: I’m asking you: if you were to answer it accurately and completely, that’s what you would need to do?
Gareth Jenkins: Possibly. As I say, I don’t think I ever did actually answer that question, as such.
Mr Beer: We know that you didn’t. I’m looking at what you would need to do in order to have done it properly, accurately, completely. The implication of the answer that you gave, namely “I could answer the question if I was given event logs and ARQ data”, that wasn’t right, was it? You needed much more information to answer it accurately and completely?
Gareth Jenkins: I had not thought of that at the time.
Mr Beer: Do you agree now?
Gareth Jenkins: Possibly. I don’t know.
Mr Beer: Why don’t you know?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, I probably would have had to do some further research.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
Now, I think you and your colleagues within Fujitsu made a number of suggestions to the Post Office in the following days to obtain relevant transaction data in relation to Mrs Misra’s tenure at the West Byfleet branch, didn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we look at those repeated requests to the Post Office. FUJ00122713, and page 1. Thank you. 5 February, 2.46; Mr Jones, the lawyer, to Mr Singh, the lawyer; you and Penny Thomas copied in. It’s just in relation to the part – if we scroll down, please, the penultimate paragraph, Mr Jones says to the Post Office:
“One concern is that [the Post Office] have not apparently requested transaction data for West Byfleet for the period and transactions in question. This would normally be provided in previous cases and would include Fujitsu extracting log files from the system to enable us to provide details of transactions. Surprisingly this has not been requested in this case. Perhaps you would consider the need for this.”
That’s a request or sentiment I think you would agree with?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, definitely.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
If we look, please, at FUJ00152930. Same day at 5.10; same distribution, Jones to Singh; you and Penny Thomas copied in. If we scroll down, please – thank you – he effectively passes your reply, that we’ve just looked at, into numbered paragraph 3 –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – and, in the last part of the paragraph, he says to Mr Singh:
“In the case of West Byfleet we have not been asked to provide any transaction logs and so have not made these checks.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Correct? So, essentially, making a similar demand or request or point to the Post Office?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Agreed?
Gareth Jenkins: Agreed.
Mr Beer: So twice in one day, essentially?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Then can we look at POL00093961, page 19, please. This is a draft witness statement you provided on 8 February 2010 in Seema Misra’s case. If we just go forwards for present purposes to page 21. We can see in the top paragraph, I think you’re performing the familiar task of cutting into a document of yours what somebody else says, here it’s Professor McLachlan; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I think this is his third report, I believe?
Mr Beer: Yes.
Gareth Jenkins: And so the italics is my response to the normal font of his actual statements in the report –
Mr Beer: So in his report he’d said:
“The implication is that EPOSS transactions can be lost due to equipment failures. Without access to the sub post office data records and the intermediate data records in the end-to-end process it will not be possible to identify the extent to which this may explain the accounting discrepancies.”
You say in your draft witness statement:
“No request has been made to Fujitsu for any data relating to this branch. The logs would show any equipment failures and replacement which might possibly relate to lost transactions.”
So, again, you’re making the point, this time a bit more formally in a witness statement, that there has been no request for any data relating to the branch.
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: Was that unusual?
Gareth Jenkins: My understanding was that it was normal when there was a prosecution to request the data to have the basis of what was alleged to have taken place in the branch, but I wasn’t very close to things but I thought that was the whole point of the prosecution support team within the Fujitsu, was to provide that data in support of prosecutions. And I assumed it was done in all cases but I didn’t really know.
Mr Beer: And normal to obtain the data relating to the period covered by the charge?
Gareth Jenkins: Whatever period Post Office requested. As I say, I wasn’t that close to know exactly what period we were talking about.
Mr Beer: Did you know whether they normally requested the period covered by the charge?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I didn’t know that.
Mr Beer: You didn’t know one way or the other?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct, yes.
Mr Beer: Would it make sense to you that they would request data for the period covered by the charge?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I can understand that.
Mr Beer: Can we go forwards, please, in fact on the same day. FUJ00083722. If we scroll down, please, to the top of page 2, we see a chain there beginning – I’m not going to go through it all – from Anne Chambers to others about Callendar Square in 2006; do you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I see that.
Mr Beer: If we just go back up to the bottom of page 1, we see on 8 February, so the same date we were looking at that draft witness statement, Anne Chambers essentially forwarding you that chain; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, that’s right.
Mr Beer: Do you remember the circumstances in which she forwarded you that chain?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I’d asked her to do so because one of the requests I had – and if we go back to the witness statement we were just looking at, there’s a comment there saying I’ve asked about Callendar Square and I don’t know anything about it but I can do some research, and this was me doing the research.
Mr Beer: Okay, so you had been asked to comment in a witness statement about the Callendar Square bug, you had no personal knowledge and you were trying to find out some information –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – from Anne Chambers?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: One of the things she did was forward you this chain?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: She highlights a KEL and asks you, “Can you see KELs?”, and says:
“I’d forgotten – this did give a discrepancy, but also a receipts and payments mismatch, if they persisted and rolled over (though it was usually obvious that something was wrong).
“And a flood of NT events (not ‘Riposte events’!) which SMC should have noticed at the time.
“Since we are now checking for these particular events, and did a catch up for old retrievals, can you say that the current branch did not have this problem??
“Anyway it stopped happening once S90 was installed (around 4 March 2006, according to the info below).
“This particular problem would only affect branches with more than one stock unit. It happened several times at Callendar Square, though we never found why they were so badly affected.
“Is this sufficient?”
She said, “I’d forgotten – this did give a discrepancy”, had you asked her whether the bug would produce discrepancies?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember the conversation I had at the time. I was just asking for information.
Mr Beer: That rather implies there had been an exchange or a conversation when she had forgotten that this bug had produced discrepancies?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I could well have asked about that. As I say, I just can’t remember that conversation.
Mr Beer: Would you be interested to know whether the bug did or did not produce discrepancies?
Gareth Jenkins: Clearly, because, if there had been a discrepancy, then that would be something important to have reported on.
Mr Beer: Also, whether the bug was or the effects of the bug were noticeable to the user, the branch user?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: That would be something that would be important to discover?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: She asked the question, or she says:
“Since we are now checking for these particular events, and did a catch up for old retrievals …”
She then asked the question:
“… can you say that the current branch did not have this problem??”
Gareth Jenkins: Well, at that stage I couldn’t but that was a check that we did later do when we checked the NT events for the West Byfleet branch.
Mr Beer: Do you agree that there’s an implication there that you’re looking for ways to find or to say that the bug had no application in Seema Misra’s case?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Was there a bigger point arising from this email, namely the fact that the Callendar Square bug existed, that it produced discrepancies, meant that before testifying as to the reliability of Horizon accounts, you needed to carry out a thorough review of PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought that what I needed to do was a thorough review of the NT events, which is what I did.
Mr Beer: I think you reflected earlier in your evidence that you’ve now realise that something more broad was needed or a broader –
Gareth Jenkins: Looking back now but, at the time, I thought it was sufficient to just look at the NT events.
Mr Beer: And Helpdesk records as well, would you include that in the list of things that you ought to have looked at?
Gareth Jenkins: Now, yes; at the time, I felt that that had – or at least maybe not at this exact time but I was aware at some stage that Andy Dunks had actually done a survey of Helpdesk calls and –
Mr Beer: We’re going to come to those a bit later.
Do you agree that, in order to answer the question that had been asked of you, you would need to look at the full message store?
Gareth Jenkins: I would certainly need to look at the ARQ data, whether I needed to look at the full message store or not, I’m not 100 per cent sure.
Mr Beer: Why aren’t you 100 per cent sure?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure what I would have found in the full message store that was not obvious in the ARQ data. It’s certainly useful to have the full message store there to look at if I would need to do so, and I made sure I did get it.
Mr Beer: Winding forwards, you say eventually in your witness statement that you had little personal knowledge of the Callendar Square bug until 2010, when you were asked to find out about it and comment on it in the Misra case?
Gareth Jenkins: And that’s what this email exchange is all about.
Mr Beer: If you didn’t have any personal knowledge at all, do you know why you were asked to comment on it?
Gareth Jenkins: No, is the simple answer.
Mr Beer: Did you question why somebody with no knowledge about an issue was asked to provide a witness statement and then go to court about the issue?
Gareth Jenkins: No. I don’t know why that was done.
Mr Beer: Well, did you question why somebody with actual or real experience of the bug in question was not being asked to answer the questions?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I don’t know why that was done.
Mr Beer: Do you agree that, if you had no firsthand knowledge of the bug, you weren’t truly in a position to give evidence about it, its effects, and whether or not it had afflicted Mrs Misra’s branch?
Gareth Jenkins: I think in the research that I did, I learnt sufficient about the bug to be able to say that it hadn’t affected that particular branch.
Mr Beer: What about the broader issues as to the bug itself? Were you in a sufficiently knowledgeable position to give evidence about that?
Gareth Jenkins: I knew enough about it, I don’t think anyone knew what the real underlying cause was because that was something in the Escher software, as we discussed the other day.
Mr Beer: Can we move forwards, please. POL00054220, and look at page 2, please. If we just look at the foot of page 1, we can see that this is an email from you, I think. There we are: you to Mr Singh, copied to Penny Thomas, and we’re on 25 February now.
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: Scroll down. You apologise for a delay in replying and say things were hectic and you had a day of leave. Then you’re essentially reporting back your communication or conversation with Professor McLachlan, yes?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: In the fourth paragraph, you say:
“I also explained to him how some of Horizon works and why this means that some of his hypotheses were invalid. I also pointed out that in order to identify exactly what was happening, then it would be necessary to go through the detailed logs of the relevant times and that as far as I was aware, no request had been made for any such logs (though I think they may now have been requested).”
So it was still the case that you were, by 25 February, conducting a conversation with the defence expert without an analysis having occurred of what you call the detailed logs of the relevant times?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: Was that problematic?
Gareth Jenkins: It really depended what the questions were. So, I mean, I think we had quite a useful discussion in terms of, at a high level, how Horizon was operating but, clearly, in terms of proving some of the detail and some of his hypotheses, we would need to examine the logs.
Mr Beer: Can we go to the next day, please, 26 February 2010, by looking at FUJ00152992. Can we see you send a further email the next day to Mr Singh, copied again to Penny Thomas, and you say:
“Jarnail
“I’ve no idea what it is that the defence is looking for in this case or exactly what is alleged to have happened. It is normal to identify a specific time period of about a month to look for some specific fraudulent transactions. As I’ve no idea exactly what is being alleged I can’t really advise as to what evidence might be required either to support the prosecution or the defence. [The Post Office’s] Prosecution Support Team have a formal mechanism to request logs for specific periods and there is a process to do that. Although I have suggested for some time that these logs are requested, I understand that no such request has been made to Fujitsu. Trying to analyse transactions over a period of 2 or 3 years …”
There you’re referring essentially to the period of the allegations against Mrs Misra; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure that I was fully aware of the period of the allegation at that stage, but I think I was probably generally aware that we were talking about a long period, not a short period.
Mr Beer: “… is likely to take several weeks or months of effort – especially if it is not clear what is being looked for – and I certainly cannot commit that amount of time to it.”
So, again, you’re pressing the point that you’ve been asking for some time now – or Fujitsu have been asking for some time now – that the logs be requested?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we look, please, at POL00169122, and look at page 3, please – thank you. This is an email from Jon Longman to Mark Dinsdale but copied to Jarnail Singh, but it records the fact that:
“Jarnail Singh has just telephoned me … to get transaction log data for the above [post office] from 1 December 2006 to 31 December 2007.”
Had you advised or suggested that that limited time period be the extent of the request for transaction log data?
Gareth Jenkins: No.
Mr Beer: But, in any event, it seems that, at this time or by this time, on the 26th, there had been a request for transaction log data for that limited period?
Gareth Jenkins: So I understand, and I know that’s the data that I eventually got.
Mr Beer: When you eventually got the data for that limited period, did you think, “Why am I getting the data for this period”?
Gareth Jenkins: I took the fact that I was being given data for that period, that that was the limit of what I needed to investigate.
Mr Beer: That’s circular. Did you know why you were given data between those two time periods?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I may have been told that that was the period during which false accounting had occurred and there’d been some question about theft. I think I’ve set that out in my witness statement but I can’t remember the exact details.
Mr Beer: Can we go forwards, please, to what you say about the analysis of that transaction data, FUJ00156128. We’re on 3 March now, email from you to Warwick Tatford, copied to Penny Thomas:
“Warwick,
“… I’ve added my comments to [the] fifth report.”
The paragraph below, you say:
“I’ve now also got hold of the transaction logs for December 2006 to December 2007. These amount to a total of nearly half a million transactions …”
Can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So by this time you had the ARQ data, is that right, for the limited period that had been requested?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and I think I also had the raw logs, but the analysis I did was restricted to what I had in the ARQ data.
Mr Beer: Why was the analysis restricted to what you had in the ARQ data?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I was looking for specific things that had been mentioned in Professor McLachlan’s second report, as I lay out in this email. And this email is saying, “This is the investigation that I have done on the data that I’ve got”, and I also, I believe, suggested other things that could be looked at and I don’t think anyone ever took me up on it and said, “Can you please go and have a look at that as well?”
Mr Beer: So, again, it was a restricted function that you were performing, ie responding to that which Professor McLachlan had alleged?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. I believe I’d been told that this was all needed very quickly because I believe there was a court date about a week or so later, so there wasn’t really time to do anything more thorough than that.
Mr Beer: Indeed. Can we look at your witness statement, please. It’s your third witness statement in the Misra case. POL00001643. Can you see that’s your witness statement –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – of 9 March, which is your third witness statement in the Misra case. By this time, you’d got the ARQ data for the limited period that had been allowed and you’d also had the exchange with Anne Chambers about Callendar Square?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: I think you addressed both of those in this witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and I think I also addressed Professor McLachlan’s first report as well.
Mr Beer: Do you agree in the witness statement it’s not disclosed on the face of the witness statement what work you had done yourself and what work had been done by others?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because, at that point, I wasn’t aware that there was a need to make that sort of distinction, though I realise now that I should have done.
Mr Beer: If we go forward to page 12, please. You’re here dealing with request to comment on Callendar Square.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You say:
“I have been requested to comment on the issue raised by the defence in relation to a post office called Callendar Square, Falkirk that was mentioned at the Castleton trial. I have examined our records and can confirm the following:
“The problem occurred when transferring cash or stock between stock units. Note that West Byfleet … does operate multiple stock units so the issue could have occurred. It manifests itself by the receiving stock unit not being able to ‘see’ the transfer being made by the ‘sending’ stock unit and is compounded by attempting to make a further transfer. Please note that such transactions usually reappear the next day. It is clearly visible to the user as the ‘Receipts and payments mismatch’ at the time that one of the stock units is balanced. This usually results in the branch raising a call. There are no such calls in Andy Dunks’ witness statement of 29 January which summarises the calls raised by West Byfleet. Also this can be checked on any balance reports or trading statements that are available from the branch which should show that receipts and payments do [not] match and that the trading position is zero. The problem is also visible when looking at the system events associated with the branch. The system events from 30/06/2005 to 31/12/2009 for West Byfleet have been checked and no such events have been found. The problem was fixed in the S90 release which went live in March 2006 and so would not have been relevant at the time of the detailed transaction logs obtained for West Byfleet between December 2006 and December 2007.”
Do you agree much of what you said here was assertions made by you, based on what Anne Chambers had told you?
Gareth Jenkins: I had also looked at the underlying PEAK, which had got the analysis that she had done at the time.
Mr Beer: Is that the reference, if we go back up the page, to “I have examined our records”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think so, yes.
Mr Beer: So, for example, you say the problem was fixed. Could you say that the problem was fixed?
Gareth Jenkins: I – the PEAKs said that – the PEAK was closed with the comment saying that this is – this fix appears to have done it and the problem has not reoccurred since the fix has gone in.
Mr Beer: That’s slightly different from asserting in a witness statement that the problem was fixed, wasn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t think so at the time.
Mr Beer: Looking back now, do you appreciate the difference?
Gareth Jenkins: Okay, yes, I probably appreciate the difference now but, at the time, I felt that it was the same thing.
Mr Beer: If you carry on reading, over the page, you say:
“Therefore I can conclude that the problems identified in Callendar Square … are not relevant to West Byfleet …”
Then you go on to say:
“On 2 October 2009 I produced a report about Horizon data integrity. Within this report are details about transactions (sometimes known as EPOSS transactions) and various scenarios that could occur following system failures. In rare circumstances it is possible for transactions to not be recorded on the local system but in all such cases the user would be aware of this. I produce this report as [your] exhibit GJ/01.”
That’s your Horizon data integrity report, the first one, that we looked at yesterday –
Gareth Jenkins: It is.
Mr Beer: – is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The cross reference – no need to go there – is FUJ00080526.
Why were you producing that report in the context of the Misra case?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I thought it gave a useful summary in section 3 of the sort of hardware errors that could occur that could possibly cause loss of data.
Mr Beer: You continue:
“As with any large system, there will be occasional failures, such as the one found in Callendar Square, Falkirk. Any such faults, whether during testing or from live user feedback would be investigated and resolved appropriately. I am not aware of any such faults that have been raised by West Byfleet. If specific transactions can be identified where the user feels the system has caused losses then further investigation can be made.”
Was that last paragraph as close as you ever came to answering the broad question that originated from Mr Tatford, namely whether there were any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of?
Gareth Jenkins: That was probably addressing that request, yes.
Mr Beer: You make your answer conditional, don’t you: any such faults, whether found during testing, et cetera, would be investigated and resolved appropriately, don’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: That was my belief.
Mr Beer: But it’s conditional, isn’t it? It suggests to the reader that there weren’t any which Fujitsu actually knew about, other than Callendar Square?
Gareth Jenkins: And I believed I was confident of that because, by this time, I had actually looked at the NT event logs at the time and I would have expected, if there had been faults, for there to be evidence in the NT event logs to reflect those.
Mr Beer: The first part of the paragraph is dealing with Horizon more generally though, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Not the branch in question: West Byfleet?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Would you agree that a complete answer would say: There are many known problems with Horizon. Fujitsu keeps records of them in documents called PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs?
Gareth Jenkins: I can understand that now. I don’t think I would have thought of it that way at the time.
Mr Beer: By answering the question in this way, you did not disclose the existence of PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs, did you?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t know that I needed to.
Mr Beer: By answering the question in this way, conditionally, “Any such faults would be investigated”, rather suggests that the only one is Callendar Square, doesn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: But certainly later on in the process, I did make it clear that there were PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs, and no one asked me to say anything about those in any sort of statement.
Mr Beer: In any case, you say that any faults would be investigated and resolved appropriately?
Gareth Jenkins: That was my belief.
Mr Beer: You believed in the life of Horizon all faults had been resolved appropriately?
Gareth Jenkins: That was my understanding.
Mr Beer: What investigation did you carry out in order to be able to confidently assert that?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure that I did any specific investigation at the time.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
Can we turn to a different topic, please, whether you mentioned in your witness statements your knowledge of other bugs –
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: – by looking to start with, please, at FUJ00117478.
This a document I don’t think we’ve seen before or much before. It’s prepared by you, correct, on 29 January?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but this relates to Horizon Online, not Legacy Horizon.
Mr Beer: I’m going to look at a series of Horizon Online – just so you know where I’m going – issues?
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: The heading tells us what it’s about, the “Issue of Duplicate Statements found at Derby”:
“The purpose of this note is to describe the issues found at Derby this week with duplicate settlements and present options for fixing the defect[s].”
So it sets out the problem and this had led to duplicate transactions; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I need to put this a bit of context.
Mr Beer: Oh, please do.
Gareth Jenkins: We’re talking now about the pilot of Horizon Online. At that stage it was operating in about a dozen/couple of dozen branches, so we were expecting to get some initial problems, and we did, as expected, get a number of problems during the pilot phase. But, as far as I’m aware, the problems were all resolved before we actually rolled out Horizon Online later on that summer.
Mr Beer: Okay, that’s important context which may –
Gareth Jenkins: Very important. That’s why I wanted to bring it out.
Mr Beer: That may apply to a number of the issues that I’m going to ask you about.
Gareth Jenkins: I suspect it will apply to all of them but we’ll see.
Mr Beer: You, at the foot of the page – if we just go over the page – suggest some solutions/fixes which are either a tactical solution or a strategic solution, yes?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: If we look at the foot of the page, second paragraph under “Strategic”, you say:
“The change is a straightforward code change … However, full regression testing of the counter is recommended.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: What does that mean, “full regression testing of the counter”?
Gareth Jenkins: That before we would put that change into live, then we would need to go through a regression testing cycle, which would take a few days, so it was a case of how quickly were we going to get the fix in place, and so, therefore, there may be some benefit in doing the tactical solution first and then the strategic solution later, so as to actually make sure that other branches were – had the minimum impact of the problem.
Mr Beer: Got it. Can we go forward, please, to 8 February. FUJ00092922.
These are some notes of a Horizon Next Generation implementation meeting on 8 February, and we can see that you are present.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: This is to discuss the Derby issue, or the Derby bug issue. Yes?
Gareth Jenkins: I think there were – it’s not just the Derby bug. I think other things were being discussed as well.
Mr Beer: Are they the issues at Coton, Warwick?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I can’t remember what those issues were now but we had a number of issues during the pilot period.
Mr Beer: I think the note records that what was called the Derby bug had manifested itself at Coton and Warwick?
Gareth Jenkins: Ah, okay.
Mr Beer: Does the fact that this group of people were drawn together reflect the fact that the Derby bug was a serious issue?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because it affected the accounts and, obviously, we didn’t want any problems that affected the accounts in Horizon Online moving forward.
Mr Beer: Can we go forwards, please, to FUJ00093031. This is the next day, 9 February. I don’t think you’re on this circulation list.
Gareth Jenkins: No, but I think it was forwarded to me later.
Mr Beer: Did the Derby bug issue lead to a full Fujitsu internal audit, essentially?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. It took place the previous week when I was off sick, which is probably why I wasn’t actually involved in the circulation of it, because the auditors wouldn’t have talked to me.
Mr Beer: If we just look at the foot of page 1, please. The last paragraph. It says:
“The net effect [I think that’s of the bug] would be that the Post Office and the branch records would not match. Where this happens, the Post Office investigates the branch and postmaster, with a view to retraining or even uncovering fraud. It would seriously undermine Post Office credibility and possibly historic cases if it could be shown that a discrepancy could be caused by a system error rather than postmaster/clerk action. More importantly, the central database as the system of record would be called into question.”
Is what is recorded there reflective of the views that you held at the time about the bug?
Gareth Jenkins: I was certainly – my view was that these bugs all needed to be fixed before we could put any reliability into the way that Horizon Online operated. I didn’t see that it had been particularly important in terms of prosecution. What we needed was a system that correctly handled accounts and, until we had a system that correctly handled the accounts, then we needed to do that moving forward, and I believe that that’s what happened by the time the rollout of Horizon Online happened.
Mr Beer: Why would you not have seen it through the complexion or the lens of it affecting prosecutions?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I didn’t think we should be going anywhere near prosecutions, in terms of the state of that system, until we actually had the system that was stable and operating correctly. Prosecutions was – the important thing was to have the system operating correctly.
Mr Beer: Do you agree the existence of the bug, if revealed, would seriously undermine the Post Office’s credibility?
Gareth Jenkins: If the bug was left unfixed yes, but my approach was much more to do with fixing the bug, rather than any suggestion of not fixing it and that was where I was coming from: that the important thing to do was to get these bugs fixed and so that we actually had a properly operating system.
Mr Beer: Do you agree that the existence of the bug would possibly undermine historic cases?
Gareth Jenkins: Don’t see that it was anything to do with historic cases because, as I say, the important thing was to get the thing fixed, rather than leave the thing unfixed, and that was what I was focusing on.
Mr Beer: Do you know how it was said, then, in this document, that the existence of this bug in Horizon Online could possibly undermine historic cases?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t see that it could affect the historic cases because Horizon Online was a totally different system from the Legacy Horizon system, as far as the accounting was concerned. So I didn’t see that it would have that sort of impact.
Mr Beer: The paper explains it in terms of that that is because it could be shown that a discrepancy could be caused by a system error, rather than the postmaster or clerk action?
Gareth Jenkins: I see that’s what it says. I wouldn’t have necessarily agreed with that, but my focus, as I say, was on actually getting the bugs fixed not on what the impact they would have had if they hadn’t been fixed. Because it was clearly very important that these bugs were fixed.
Mr Beer: You didn’t reveal the existence of this bug in your March 2010 witness statement or any of the subsequent witness statements, did you?
Gareth Jenkins: No, because it was totally irrelevant.
Mr Beer: Was that the view: because this was about Horizon Online –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – you needn’t reveal anything about Horizon Online in –
Gareth Jenkins: It was a totally separate – oh, it – it was a totally separate system.
Mr Beer: Was that your mindset at the time?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: “I needn’t tell the court or the defence anything about the existence of bugs that caused financial discrepancies, which aren’t revealed to a subpostmaster in the system we’re currently operating, because those facts cannot be relevant to the court?”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and that is still my technical belief. I understand now that the legal position is different from that but, as a technician, which is basically what I am, not a lawyer, then I still believe that that’s the case.
Mr Beer: But you were stepping out of the computer lab and walking into a court, weren’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t realise that there was that difference that I needed to worry about and no one advised me as to that.
Mr Beer: Did you think, “I need to take a bit of advice here. There are problems with the current system where, as I’m making these witness statements in the Seema Misra case, we’re discovering problems which don’t reveal themselves to subpostmasters, which cause financial discrepancies, and they’re caused by bugs. Have I got to reveal that; should I reveal that in a candid way to the court”?
Gareth Jenkins: It never occurred to me that anything to do with Horizon Online was relevant to Legacy Horizon.
Mr Beer: You said that –
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah –
Mr Beer: – that it never occurred to you, and so it didn’t occur to you to reveal it but it didn’t occur to you to ask whether you should reveal it?
Gareth Jenkins: No, it just seemed so totally illogical to me.
Mr Beer: You didn’t know how the legal system worked –
Gareth Jenkins: I –
Mr Beer: – you tell us –
Gareth Jenkins: I assume the legal system had some sort of logic to it. I still don’t understand why the legal system would think that I should be revealing problems to do with Horizon Online in Legacy Horizon. Okay, I understand now, having been told that I should have considered it but it just doesn’t actually make an awful lot of sense to me as a technician.
Mr Beer: Again, I’ll ask the question: do you not realise that’s the very reason why you should seek advice?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t … well, I had sought advice from –
Mr Beer: Not about this issue?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, not this specific issue but I had sought advice in terms of what I should be saying from David Jones.
Mr Beer: Yes, but not about the broader issue of “I’ve got this knowledge of many bugs, including bugs that are revealing themselves as we roll out or as we develop Horizon Online, have I got to reveal those too?”
Gareth Jenkins: It just never occurred to me that it was at all relevant.
Mr Beer: Just remember that last paragraph, there, in particular the sentence, “It would seriously undermine Post Office’s credibility and possibly historic cases”, and can we look at FUJ00094392. Look at the foot of the page, please. This is an email exchange, if we just go up – and a bit more, thank you.
This is a discussion, you’re not party to this discussion, but I just want to know whether you knew about it. This is a discussion about amendments being made to that document we just looked at. You understand Mr Jenkins?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I understand that. I can’t remember if I was copied in on this email or not. I think – I may possibly have been passed it before but I certainly wouldn’t have taken much notice of it.
Mr Beer: If we look at the bottom of the page, thank you, just a bit further, I think we see it’s signed off by “JP”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. JP gave me some advice and was in contact with me at the time that I was at the Seema Misra trial. I also think he phoned me up a couple of times to see how I was getting on, and so on, and he certainly never mentioned to me anything about why I needed to think about the problems such as this, which he was well aware of.
Mr Beer: Just focusing on this for a moment, he says to Mr D’Alvarez:
“… please find below the two comments I had raised …”
A paragraph:
“First paragraph, page 2 – the following section is potentially problematic: ‘It would seriously undermine Post Office credibility and possibly historic cases if it could be shown that a discrepancy could be caused by a system error rather than a postmaster/clerk action. Most importantly the central database as the system of record would be called into question’. As discussed, there is no need to paint this in the worst possible light. I would suggest the following as being accurate without being unduly alarmist …”
Then the new drafting is:
“If it could be shown that a discrepancy could be caused by a system error rather than a postmaster/clerk action, it could potentially call into question the effectiveness of the central database as a system of record.”
If we scroll up, please:
“After review with Legal … two amendments have been made to the documents and … the sections … have been removed as they do not materially add to the primary purpose of the review which is to determine whether the solution, as designed, would protect data integrity.
“Version 3 has been sent to Dave Smith, Post Office.”
So this seems to record that the sentence about data integrity affecting possibly past historic cases appears to have been removed before it was sent to the Post Office; do you agree?
Gareth Jenkins: I agree that’s what this says, yes.
Mr Beer: If we just go to the top of the page. I think we see that exchange was sent on to you?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Do you know why you were being told that the report had been edited to remove the section that said that this discovery of the bug in Horizon Online might affect past historic cases –
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think – sorry –
Mr Beer: – was going to be removed in the version that was being sent to the Post Office, why that chain was being sent to you?
Gareth Jenkins: I would have taken that as just being sent the latest version of the document, rather than taking any notice of the – of that particular discussion.
Mr Beer: Not because they knew that you were giving evidence about past historic cases?
Gareth Jenkins: Not that I thought of at the time.
Mr Beer: No.
Sir Wyn Williams: Mr Beer, have I got this right: this seems to have been a period of, what is it, seven or eight months, between the exchange about the contents of the document and it actually being forwarded to Mr –
Mr Beer: No, this is one of those dates where it has been Americanised. That’s actually –
Sir Wyn Williams: I see. It’s actually the other way round –
Mr Beer: – 11 March.
Sir Wyn Williams: – 11 March, okay, fine.
Mr Beer: Can we go forwards, please, to FUJ00142152.
This is a further report of yours, a few days later, 12 February 2010, ie a few days later than the Derby bug issue report, okay?
Gareth Jenkins: The original one. I mean, the one you just showed me was March but the original probably yes, yes.
Mr Beer: You wrote this report and, in summary, is this about another bug which resulted in final balances for branch trading statements being inaccurate?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: This was first reported at the Post Office in Warwick; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so, yes.
Mr Beer: If we look at FUJ00094268, and the third page of that, we’ll see that you sign off an email there and, if we scroll up, please, is this is an email discussion between you and others about the issue that we’ve just looked at in that report, ie a bug resulting in trading statements being inaccurate?
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so, yes.
Mr Beer: If we scroll down, can you see a passage that’s indented, which says:
“Given the legal status of these reports (they ‘the final’ are often used in court proceedings when we are trying to recovery monies from dismissed subpostmasters) and the potential ‘integrity’ challenges that could be levelled against the [Horizon] system as a result of any differences; POL need assurance from Fujitsu that they could/will explain the cause of the problem and prove the system has integrity should we be challenged.”
That’s not you speaking; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: No, that’s Phil Norton, I think it was, who was sent the email. So, again, I’ve got his questions indented and my responses not indented.
Mr Beer: You say:
“I understand this, though I would have thought most legal proceedings would be based on the first part of the report (which covers cash levels) rather than the second part.”
Irrespective of that answer, you were being told by Mr Norton and being left in no doubt as to the importance of the accuracy of the Branch Trading Statements for legal proceedings.
Gareth Jenkins: I was aware of that, and my approach was: we’ve got to fix this problem. We certainly could not leave that problem unfixed for Horizon Online to move forward and be rolled out, and so, therefore, it was important that the problem did get fixed, which it did.
Mr Beer: Did you know at this time that, at least since the Lee Castleton case, the Post Office relied on the implicit accuracy of Branch Trading Statements when bringing civil claims against subpostmasters?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure that I was really – had any distinction between civil or non-civil claims but I knew that the Branch Trading Statements, once that came about as part of IMPACT, was the – effectively the legal document that was used to say that the accounts had been signed off.
Mr Beer: When this bug arose, did you consider the possibility that there may have been other bugs which affected the accuracy of Branch Trading Statements?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought – I could see that this bug was causing a problem in the accuracy of that part of the Branch Trading Statement report and felt that it was important to actually get the bug fixed.
Mr Beer: Did you consider the possibility of other bugs which affected the accuracy of Branch Trading Statements?
Gareth Jenkins: We would look for other bugs there and I’m not aware that we actually ever found any other –
Mr Beer: Did you look for other bugs there?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, we were looking for all sorts of bugs that could be happening during the pilot. That was the whole point of the pilot.
Mr Beer: Can we move forwards, please, to FUJ00094235, and in sheet 1, and row 20, please, can you see – first of all, do you know what this document is; do you remember what the document is?
Gareth Jenkins: I think this is some sort of tracker of issues during the pilot of Horizon Online.
Mr Beer: Number 20, “BTS reports incorrect”, the narrative, if you just read that to yourself. Can you see that, in –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – column I.
I’m so sorry, it’s the one above. Thank you. So you should really read column B and column I. (Pause)
Gareth Jenkins: Right. I can’t remember that problem.
Mr Beer: Is this another problem, a separate one from the two that we’ve just looked at?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, this was a problem – as part of the migration of a branch from Legacy Horizon to Horizon Online, a report was produced on the last day it was operating on Legacy Horizon, which was giving effectively a snapshot of the balance, and then another report was generated the following morning showing, again, the snapshot of the balance, and these two reports were compared. And this looks likely to be some sort of issue in that comparison but I can’t remember the details of that particular problem.
Mr Beer: It looks like it’s a discrepancy bug where stock movements weren’t included in the receipts part of the stock units balance report?
Gareth Jenkins: I – sorry, I just can’t remember the detail. I can see that’s what the words say but I cannot remember this particular problem.
Mr Beer: The words say that the data that was “included in Horizon was incorrect”, whereas the data shown in Horizon Online is incorrect –
Gareth Jenkins: That –
Mr Beer: – sorry is correct.
Gareth Jenkins: That suggests to me that there was a problem in the report that was produced on the Horizon side, on the date before we migrated, but the data that was on the Horizon Online version was actually accurate and, therefore, there would be a mismatch between the two reports, and the reason for the mismatch was because the data had been calculated inaccurately on the Horizon side, but it was correct on the Horizon Online side, is what I think I’m reading from this.
Mr Beer: I see.
Gareth Jenkins: But, as I say, I think I would need to do further research to say anything more than that.
Mr Beer: So it seems like it’s a problem with Legacy Horizon, rather than Horizon Online?
Gareth Jenkins: It’s a problem with the reporting of the situation on Legacy Horizon, so I don’t think it’s actually a problem in Legacy Horizon, as such, it’s purely in the way that that report is being generated. There was a special report that was produced as part of the migration process, I believe.
Mr Beer: You’ll see that the recommendation on the right-hand side, under “17 February 2010”, is not to fix the error –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – and, instead, to raise a KEL for coverage. What does that mean, “KEL for coverage”?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know, is the simple answer.
Mr Beer: Was that an expression used, “raise a KEL for coverage”?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve not heard of that expression before.
Mr Beer: Then a KEL is issued and then it’s closed.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. As part of the migration process, there was an automated check made of the electronic versions of these reports because they’re printed in the branch, but there was a – it was stored away. So there was a comparison, a before and after report. So I’m assuming that, as part of the migration process, some sort of alert would have been raised if the reports didn’t match and so the purpose of the KEL was that if those reports didn’t match and it was down to this particular reason, then it would then be known about, and therefore understood. But –
Mr Beer: You’re assuming a lot there?
Gareth Jenkins: I am assuming a lot, but to say more than that I would need to go back to the individual PEAKs.
Mr Beer: Do you recall making any checks to see whether this bug had affected the West Byfleet branch?
Gareth Jenkins: That wouldn’t have had any impact. I wouldn’t have made any checks because this would have had no impact on the West Byfleet branch because that was still running on Legacy Horizon. This was purely a migration issue, this one.
Mr Beer: Did it affect the data that was moved over to Horizon Online?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t believe so, no.
Mr Beer: What was, on your understanding, the impact of the bug, then?
Gareth Jenkins: It was purely to do with the contents of the report produced before and after the migration.
Mr Beer: A Branch Trading Statement report?
Gareth Jenkins: No, this was a migration report, so it wasn’t a Branch Trading Statement – you didn’t – it was decided that it was not sensible to actually get branches to actually produce a Branch Trading Statement on the day they migrated, because that would restrict very much the rate at which migration could take place. So there was just a snapshot that was produced at the time that the branches migrated from Legacy Horizon to Horizon Online.
Mr Beer: Thank you. That can come down.
So when, in early March 2010, you signed your third witness statement in Seema Misra’s case, you knew about a bug in Horizon Online that had affected system created, system generated discrepancies. You knew about the so-called Warwick bug, which resulted in inaccurate Branch Trading Statements in Horizon Online, and that there was a stock unit discrepancy bug in which affected migration reports. You didn’t reveal any of those three things in your witness statement, did you?
Gareth Jenkins: But as I said before because I thought they were totally irrelevant.
Mr Beer: But you, in that paragraph we looked at, were you trying to answer Mr Tatford’s general question about known bugs in Horizon?
Gareth Jenkins: I was trying to address problems – I assumed he was referring to Legacy Horizon, as it operated at the time that Mrs Misra was operating the branch in West Byfleet. I didn’t see that a problem in Horizon Online in 2010 was relevant to something that had taken place in 2006/2007, which is what I had been looking at.
Mr Beer: Why did you assume that his question, which I think you agreed first thing this morning, was broadly drawn and did not have the caveats that you’ve introduced into it?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t see any relevance of the – Horizon Online to the situation we had there.
Mr Beer: So you inserted the limitations to the question in the way that you chose to answer it?
Gareth Jenkins: I think that’s putting it slightly strongly but I just – it never occurred to me that there was any relevance of that whatsoever.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
Sir, that’s a good time for the morning break. Can we take ten minutes, please, until 11.25.
Sir Wyn Williams: All right.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
(11.15 am)
(A short break)
(11.26 am)
Mr Beer: Mr Jenkins, can we finish off the topic we were just looking at by examining an email that you wrote in September 2010 concerning, essentially, these three Horizon Online bugs that emerged in testing in the early part of 2010, and look at FUJ00156217.
If we go to the last page, please, and then if we just scroll up. You’re talking here about a PEAK and is it SYSMAN or SYSMAN3 Events?
Gareth Jenkins: SYSMAN is how I’d call it, it’s short for “system management”.
Mr Beer: What was this, the System management 3 events?
Gareth Jenkins: Basically NT events. So Legacy Horizon used a subsystem called SYSMAN2, whilst Horizon Online had a slightly different version of the technology which was called SYSMAN3.
Mr Beer: Thank you. If we scroll up, please, and if we keep going – and keep going. Thank you, just stop there.
You’re emailing Penny Thomas and others, saying:
“Steve Porter has had a look at these events … and his responses are below.”
I’m not going to go to those responses. You say:
“Unfortunately they are a bit inconclusive, but there is nothing that is obviously suspicious.
“Given that this relates to [Horizon Online] in March, [then you say this] then we do know that there were a number of potentially serious issues around at that time, so we would need to be wary about making any witness statements associated with such data. However it should be fine to pass the data to [Post Office] with an ARQ.
“We’re going to need to tread fairly carefully for ARQs in this area.”
Can you explain what you meant, please?
Gareth Jenkins: Part of the process of extracting ARQ data was to check any NT events that were associated with it, and what I believe had happened here is that there had been a request for ARQ data for this particular branch, and some NT events had come back in the search that looked a bit odd. And so, therefore, what I was suggesting is, yes, we could pass the information to Post Office, but we needed to actually put on a caveat saying that, in this particular case, there was potentially going to be some sort of problem with that.
Mr Beer: You don’t say, “We’re going to need to put on a caveat when we pass the ARQ data to the Post Office”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I was implying that with what I was saying, and I believe that is what actually happened.
Mr Beer: Is it, in fact, what happened: you put caveats on when the ARQ data –
Gareth Jenkins: I think there was a subsequent email exchange where I believe Tom Lillywhite told Post Office, “Sorry, we can’t guarantee the ARQ data for this particular case because we’ve come up with these events”.
Mr Beer: What about the passage that says, “We need to be wary about making witness statements associated with such data”, the potentially serious issues around that time, do those include the three bugs that I’ve drawn to your attention this morning?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I would certainly not have been happy about any of that data from that pilot period being used in any sort – anywhere near a prosecution because the system was not stable at that time.
Mr Beer: So “wary about making witness statements”, means what: “we should not make a witness statement relying on such data”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, basically.
Mr Beer: “We should tell the Post Office that you should not confidently prosecute anyone in reliance on such data”?
Gareth Jenkins: That was my feeling at the time, yes.
Mr Beer: Thank you. Did you consider whether that kind of sentiment or view ought to have been revealed when you were making your witness statements in the Misra case, “look, it can happen in the operation of the Horizon system that data is produced upon which reliance by a court should not be placed”?
Gareth Jenkins: No, because this was a totally different circumstance. Here we were talking about a pilot of Horizon Online whilst, by the time – the time period we’re talking about for Mrs Misra’s case, then we actually had what I felt was a stable system.
Mr Beer: Thank you. Can we turn to a separate issue: the duplication of transaction records contained in ARQ data?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we start by looking at FUJ00097058. This is a document, I think you know, authored by Penny Thomas?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Its date is 22 June 2010 and it records duplicate record issues in ARQ returns. Can you explain, in layman’s terms, what the problem was?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, when ARQ data was being collected from Legacy Horizon, there were certain circumstances in which we might record the same transaction more than once into the audit server. So there could be multiple copies of the same message recorded in the audit server. And the way in which ARQ data was extracted from that, in terms of producing the spreadsheets, on Legacy Horizon discarded these duplicates.
Mr Beer: It was supposed to discard it?
Gareth Jenkins: On Legacy Horizon, it did.
Mr Beer: Yes.
Gareth Jenkins: What we had here was, when we moved to Horizon Online, from the same raw data, we had a different mechanism for extracting the ARQ spreadsheets and it was found that the mechanism that was used for generating the ARQ spreadsheets that was now in use with Horizon Online did not detect and discard these duplicates that were in the raw audit trail.
Mr Beer: Thank you. If we just scroll down, please, numbered point 1 identifies the issue as urgent in “CS prayers”; what were they?
Gareth Jenkins: It was a regular meeting. So “CS” stands for Customer Services.
Mr Beer: Okay, so a morning type meeting?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. They used to be referred to as “prayers”, I’m not quite sure why, but it was really a case of a get-together first thing in the morning to work out what the agenda of the urgent issues for the day was.
Mr Beer: I think we see in numbered paragraph 4, a separate issue was identified where a seemingly duplicated transaction had a different NUM. That’s some form of identifier; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, each record should have a unique identifier which was actually in three parts. So there was the FAD code for the branch, the counter position, and then a serial number, which started at 1 when the branch was first installed and, by this time, was up into the millions probably, relating to the number of records that had been produced for each counter.
Mr Beer: So that’s an additional problem on top of the problem?
Gareth Jenkins: No, this isn’t for a problem at all.
Mr Beer: Right.
Gareth Jenkins: What this is all to do with is if you actually look at the data without taking account of the NUM, you may have things that look like they’re identical data but they aren’t actually genuine duplicates – sorry, they are not duplicates, they are actually two real records that look almost identical.
Mr Beer: If we go to point 6, please – if we just go back up:
“We need to identify which cases provided with ARQ returns since the [Horizon Online] application has been live have progressed to prosecution and identify whether duplicate records were included. We will need [Post Office] involvement to ensure all instances are covered. A very quick review identifies that both West Byfleet and Porters Avenue are included here, to what extent is not yet known.”
Do you know why West Byfleet was analysed?
Gareth Jenkins: I think Penny had been going through all the ARQ returns and clearly we had produced ARQ data for West Byfleet, using the Horizon Online extraction mechanism back in March, as we discussed earlier this morning.
Mr Beer: So was it – it was relevant, this problem, to the prosecution of Mrs Misra?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, it was, which is why I produced a separate witness statement explaining the problem.
Mr Beer: Why was the Post Office involvement necessary to ensure that all instances were covered?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it was a case of doing a double check that we knew exactly which ARQ returns were involved in prosecutions because sometimes Post Office would ask for ARQ data that wasn’t relevant to prosecutions. So I think it was – Penny had done an analysis of all the ARC returns that she’d done using this mechanism but she wanted to get Post Office involved to make sure that she hadn’t missed any and understood which ones were the high priority ones to sort out, so as to get some sort of workload scheduling.
Mr Beer: So it wasn’t the case Fujitsu could not identify all incidents?
Gareth Jenkins: No. Penny had, as I understand it – as I say, I don’t have personal knowledge of that, but my understanding was that she had good records of every ARQ that she had ever extracted and when she produced it, and so on, and she could go through those records. I think there is an email a day or two later where she actually produces some statistics.
Mr Beer: Can we look at FUJ00097047, and start at page 5, please. We see that she sends her report we’ve just looked at – yes –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – through to you and others on 23 June. Then if we scroll up, please, Penny says, “Here’s some analysis”. This, I think, is a day later.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, so these are the statistics that I mentioned a few minutes ago.
Mr Beer: Yes: number of ARQs affected; number of ARQs where one or two instances highlighted which indicates bona fide activity – do you know what that means?
Gareth Jenkins: Sorry, I don’t.
Mr Beer: Number of ARQs work in progress, presumably?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: 12 ARQs where court action is known, number of cases is two. Did that include West Byfleet?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m assuming that’s Porters Avenue and West Byfleet that were mentioned in the previous note but I’m not 100 per cent of that.
Mr Beer: 8 ARQs returned where witness statement requested but not yet provided, number of cases was three; and ARQs where no court activity is known is 76.
Then scroll down:
“Audit development are currently working on a fix which is expected to be available by [the 29th].”
Then you’re said to have suggested “the following explanation” for the Post Office.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Did you suggest that explanation?
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so and, hopefully, that is pretty well what I just said a few minutes ago.
Mr Beer: If we scroll on. She says she wanted to speak with her counterpart in the Post Office, presumably –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – comments please. Then if we scroll back up, please, to the next page, Guy Wilkerson asks:
“Would the additional transactions make any difference to the charges for a subpostmaster?”
Then keep scrolling. She replies:
“These are original records which have been duplicated when copying to audit server. We are not suggesting that original records have been duplicated.”
That, of course, is correct, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct, yes.
Mr Beer: “If analysis was undertaken on the audit data some transactions would be duplicated; both plus and minus (we hope!). Analysis on stock units could be out as TI would show duplicated transfers and equally would TO.”
What do both of those mean?
Gareth Jenkins: Transfer in and transfer out, so it’s to do with transferring cash between stock units.
Mr Beer: “Cash on hand analysis would also be out.
“Gareth – is there anything else I need to add?”
Scroll up. You say that covers it:
“… there is no guarantee that the duplicates are even complete sessions in which case the sum of all transactions may even be out.
“In summary, any detailed analysis of the finances of a branch which is done with duplicate transactions without realising that there are duplicates (and so removing them) will give incorrect results.”
That would be a serious issue, wouldn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, yes.
Mr Beer: Then scroll up – and then keep going, and keep going.
Geoff Butts says:
“… do not make any communication with [Post Office]. We’ve been looking … and are waiting [for a workaround].”
Scroll up, and scroll up, Penny says that she’s not going to communicate with Post Office:
“I do have questions …
“My assumption that any records which have been duplicated and presented to court will need to be replaced. The 2 forthcoming, high profile cases, West Byfleet and Porters Avenue, immediately spring to mind.
“We have only been presenting duplicate records since the beginning of the year and, although not an impossibility, it is unlikely that we would have provided records for any cases heard in such a short time frame. I can find no record of any witness statement provided, apart from those listed … we need confirmation … from POL; and guidance from Legal.
“All of the returns listed may not end up in court, but we need to be aware that a significant amount may need replacing.”
If we go back down to your explanation, I don’t think that includes the point that was made originally, that you had spotted, the problem with a duplicate with a different NUM. Instead, it refers to the NUM as being a reliable way to identify a duplicate, doesn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I think you may have misunderstood what the other issue was.
Mr Beer: Okay.
Gareth Jenkins: The other issue was that you should get –
Mr Beer: That’s completely possible, by the way.
Gareth Jenkins: Sorry?
Mr Beer: That’s completely possible.
Gareth Jenkins: Sorry. What the other issue was, where you would actually get two transactions that were identical, apart from their NUM, and therefore if you tried filtering things out without looking at the NUM, you might be filtering out things that weren’t actually genuine duplicates.
Mr Beer: I see. So is that why that is not mentioned in this section?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. So, therefore, what it’s saying there: the reliable way of identifying the duplicate is to use the NUM for the filtering, rather than by looking at the text of what was presented in the ARQ.
Mr Beer: Thank you. So, overall, would you agree this was a serious problem?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, yes.
Mr Beer: Can we turn to things that you were saying at this time, as a separate issue – that can come down – as perhaps a way of understanding what was operative upon you at the time. FUJ00152888.
Look at page 2, please. Can you see that you have been reading through a report; can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I can see that.
Mr Beer: Is that about Shoeburyness and Leigh-on-Sea?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t – I thought this was to do with Porters Avenue but I’m not – I – I don’t recall this particularly. All I can go by is the email that you showed me.
Mr Beer: If we just scroll down, and again, please – thank you:
“I have received a copy of an accountant’s report and attach.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “… and a statement from Phil Budd …
“Please could you read the report and decide how to continue; the request from the accountant, Charles McLachlan … suggests a telephone call …”
Does that help or not?
Gareth Jenkins: Not really. As I say, I do remember looking at something to do with Porters Avenue and I do remember that Phil Budd had something to do with it. So that’s why I’m assuming this is to do with that but I can’t remember the context and I’ve certainly no recollection of what the report said and why I was concerned about it.
Mr Beer: If we go up to page 2, then, where we were – thank you – you say:
“Penny,
“I’ve now read through this report. I agree that there probably needs to be some further investigation here. However I’m also aware that this is probably highly political. Therefore I’m not sure how best to address this. We don’t really want to be seen to be undermining a [Post Office] prosecution!
“I think the report does raise a number of questions without a detailed analysis of the various transactions over the period described (it’s 6 to 9 months) it is difficult to progress. The cost of such an analysis is likely to be high. We did some similar analysis over a two-month period for a defence accountant about a year ago and were paid for it (Pete Sewell set it up – Anne did most of the hard work and I presented it to the accountant). I think we need some management guidance on this.”
You say that this is “highly political”.
Gareth Jenkins: Basically, what I meant it’s not a technical issue; this is something that management need to think about.
Mr Beer: Then you would say this is a management issue?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, so that’s basically saying that – repeating my point.
Mr Beer: In what respect was it political?
Gareth Jenkins: It was to do in the way in which – I’m not using “political” in terms of party politics, I just saw that – when you –
Mr Beer: It means –
Gareth Jenkins: – “commercial” might have been a better term to use. It’s to do with how Fujitsu interacts with Post Office.
Mr Beer: Okay, so it obviously doesn’t mean high politics?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, no, it’s to do with the higher level communication between the companies, which was not the sort of thing I liked to get involved in, if I could help it.
Mr Beer: Why was it political in that sense?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I think we needed guidance as to how to approach this. As I say, I can’t remember any of the details of what the details were in this particular case but I think this was another thing that caused Penny to get David Thomas involved because I think – not David Thomas, David Jones – because that occurred about a week after this and, certainly, he was asked about Porters Avenue as well as West Byfleet, and that’s why I think this is to do with Porters Avenue.
Mr Beer: Political in the sense that we’ve been asked to give evidence about the reliability of the system that we’re supplying to the Post Office?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure what the issue was to do in this case.
Mr Beer: You continue, and I want to ask whether this gives us an understanding of what you meant:
“We don’t really want to be seen to be undermining a [Post Office] prosecution!”
Firstly, did that represent your state of mind, that Fujitsu should not be seen to be undermining Post Office prosecutions?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, I’m not sure that that’s – I think I needed to get some guidance on that but there was certainly an example email I’ve been shown, as part of this Inquiry, where I have actually said, in response to a report that I’d been asked, that I agreed with the defence expert and Post Office decided to ignore what I’d said.
Mr Beer: Can we just focus on the question, please, Mr Jenkins?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: Was it your state of mind at the time that you believed that Fujitsu should not be seen to be undermining a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, I was wanting guidance as to what exactly we should be doing.
Mr Beer: Why did you need guidance on whether or not Fujitsu should just present the facts, irrespective of whether they supported or undermined a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: I just wanted to get some sort of guidance from senior management as to any communication I had in this area with Post Office and the guidance I got was to just tell the truth, which is what I would like to have done anyway.
Mr Beer: Did you need guidance from management –
Gareth Jenkins: I wanted to make sure that I didn’t undermine anything.
Mr Beer: Did you need guidance from management on whether you should just tell the truth or not?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I didn’t need guidance. I would just tell the truth but I just wanted to make sure that I had – I was being covered by my management for any actions that I took.
Mr Beer: You needed top cover for telling the truth?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know what to say to that.
Mr Beer: Why did you need management guidance on whether or not Fujitsu should be seen to be undermining a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: I just wanted to get some sort of feeling as to how to approach the response to the report.
Mr Beer: When you subsequently came to give evidence in the Misra trial, very limited questions were asked about your – the status in which you were giving evidence and the duties of an expert witness, agreed?
Gareth Jenkins: Agreed.
Mr Beer: One of the only things that was asked was, in fact, by the judge – I’m not going to turn it up, I’m going to read it.
Gareth Jenkins: No, I know what you –
Mr Beer: You know the question.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “Is there any question of your evidence having been influenced by the fact that you’re a Fujitsu man?”
You said no.
Gareth Jenkins: And I stand by that.
Mr Beer: If that’s the case, why were you asking for management guidance on whether or not the evidence that should be given in response to a defence expert report –
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think we were talking about evidence at this stage. It for just a case of comments on a report.
Mr Beer: Okay, so comments on a report –
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: – a defence expert report.
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: If your evidence wasn’t influenced by the fact that you were a Fujitsu man, why were you seeking management guidance on what should be done if your answers might undermine a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: It was a case of whether my answers should be sent – my comments on the report should be sent through or not, I suppose. As I say, I just cannot remember what the issue was that I was concerned about in this case.
Mr Beer: When you gave witness statements and then subsequently were asked questions and answered them in court, was a factor operative on your mind the fact that you, on behalf of Fujitsu, should not be seen to undermine a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: No.
Mr Beer: Because that’s what the politics of the situation demanded?
Gareth Jenkins: No, certainly when it came to court, then that didn’t – that didn’t come into it. I just wanted to understand what I needed to do about my thoughts on this particular report, which was not at that stage anywhere near a court, as I understood it.
Mr Beer: So are you saying that there’s a material difference between providing comments on a report in an email chain, on the one hand, where you wouldn’t wish to be seen to undermining a prosecution, and then ultimately providing a witness statement, when such impure motives would have evaporated?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, I was just looking for guidance as to what I should be doing in this particular circumstance.
Mr Beer: Did you get guidance as to whether or not you should simply set out the facts, irrespective of whether or not they supported or undermined a Post Office prosecution?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, I think that would have affected the guidance I got from David Jones the following week.
Mr Beer: Can we go forwards, please, to FUJ00156122 and look at page 12, please. We’re dealing with a different branch here, “Alresford large debt outstanding”, and there’s a reference to an email trail below. I’m not going to turn to that. You say:
“This I another example of postmasters trying to get away with ‘Horizon has taken my money’. Dave Smith seems to have put me forward as the expert to help on this.
“How should I respond to his request?”
Does that reveal what your mindset was in February 2010 when you were conducting investigations into Seema Misra’s case and providing witness statements?
Gareth Jenkins: No, that is me very poorly trying to summarise what was – what I thought was being laid out in the email trail below and I apologise for the wording that I used there. But it was me trying to do a crude summarisation of the email trail for management. I don’t think I had anything further to do with that particular case.
Mr Beer: A lot of people have said that they’ve used poor words in their emails when they say that what is recorded does not reflect truly what they believed. Did you believe that there were many examples of postmasters trying to get away with “Horizon has taken my money”?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember what I believed.
Mr Beer: Presumably –
Gareth Jenkins: What I was trying to do was summarise the email trail below.
Mr Beer: Yes, but you say it’s another example of it. Presumably, it does reflect your mind at the time that postmasters were trying to get away with “Horizon has taken my money”?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, I didn’t believe that there were any problems with Horizon that was causing Horizon to lose money.
Mr Beer: So you did believe that postmasters were blaming Horizon by saying, “it’s taken my money” falsely?
Gareth Jenkins: I just wasn’t thinking things through properly.
Mr Beer: Hold on. I think you said that you believed that Horizon was operating correctly, so this would accurately reflect your belief. Postmasters were trying to get away with it by blaming on it Horizon.
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think – I think the issues are actually much broader than that. I think the issues are as much to do with the way that they were – the Post Office was treating the postmasters and the support and the training they were getting, rather than actually problems with Horizon, as such.
Mr Beer: Can we move on to POL00175839, and look – if we scroll down, please – an email from you to Jarnail Singh on 1 March in the Seema Misra case:
“Thanks for the information, which I’ve now read [it] through.
“… I can summarise …
“Ms Misra … initially identified that the sub post office was short of cash by about £80-£90,000.
“She tried to cover this up while she repaid the losses which she thought was due to staff theft.
“By the time of the audit in January 2008 she was £73,000 short suggesting she had made good about £10,000 of the losses.
“When she went to court, she saw an article in Computer Weekly indicating that Horizon was unreliable and decided to jump on the bandwagon.”
Gareth Jenkins: Again, that’s totally inappropriate wording on my part and for which I apologise.
Mr Beer: It seems that, rather than Mr Singh being the originator of the “bandwagon” phrase, it appears to be you, doesn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I was reflecting that from conversations I’d had with other people. It’s not a term I would have used myself. The only reason I would have used it here was because I’d heard it being used by others.
Mr Beer: Who had –
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember now who it would have been, possibly Mr Singh but I can’t say definitively.
Mr Beer: So back to Mr Singh, perhaps?
Gareth Jenkins: Possibly. But, like I say, it’s not a term I would – I would have used off the top of my head. I was clearly reflecting it, that I’d heard it from someone else.
Mr Beer: Were you able to approach the task of conducting investigations for the purposes of giving evidence in court, compiling witness statements and then giving evidence dispassionately, or –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – were you afflicted by this belief that these were subpostmasters jumping on a bandwagon which blamed Horizon?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did the analysis conscientiously all the way throughout.
Mr Beer: Did you see your role, as a Fujitsu man, to be to help prove that Mrs Misra had jumped on the bandwagon and that, to use the phrase from the other email, was trying to get away with “Horizon has taken my money”?
Gareth Jenkins: As I say, I didn’t think the problem was within Horizon; I thought there were other reasons as to what had happened and so my focus was looking at seeing whether there were any problems with Horizon at that point, rather than the broader focus of what the prosecutions were about.
Mr Beer: Can we look lastly on this topic, just to see whether we find another tell as to what your state of mind was by looking at FUJ00153115. This is an email of 15 June about the Misra case, saying that you had had a call from Professor McLachlan. I’m going to skip over the first three or four paragraphs. In the penultimate paragraph, you say to Penny Thomas:
“The good news is that he [Professor McLachlan] is looking for problems in people’s use of Horizon and not bugs in Horizon as such.”
Why was it good news that the defence expert was looking at people’s use of Horizon and not looking at bugs.
Gareth Jenkins: Because that’s where I thought the genuine problems were.
Mr Beer: Were you pleased that his attention was not on bugs?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I didn’t think that there were relevant bugs at the time.
Mr Beer: Were you worried that, if he did divert his attention to the existence of bugs, he may have found some?
Gareth Jenkins: No. I was concerned that I would be wasting time looking at other bugs that didn’t actually apply, in the same way as we’d already discussed with Callendar Square.
Mr Beer: You thought that it was a waste of time looking for other bugs?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I didn’t think there were relevant bugs to be looked at because, as far as I was aware, the bugs that had occurred within Horizon had been fixed.
Mr Beer: That was all based, I think we established yesterday, on assumption and chat?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but that was still my true belief at the time and still is.
Mr Beer: I think that’s because you reject some of the judge’s findings in the Horizon Issues trial?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we turn to the receipts and payments mismatch bug and your treatment of it, by looking at POL00029084. If we scroll down, please, there. I’m afraid it’s cut off on the left-hand side of the page. I think we can establish from other evidence that this is 28 September 2010. You say to Mark Wright – what role did Mark Wright perform?
Gareth Jenkins: He was in the SSC.
Mr Beer: “The attached note summarises the problem …”
The problem is in the title, “Receipts payments mismatch issue”.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “… and describes what we need to do to identify the full scope of the problem and discuss with POL if/how we fix the problem.”
So you’re attaching your lost discrepancies note –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – which we’re going to look at in a moment?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You ask for feedback. You say:
“We probably need to formally raise this as a problem with [the Post Office]. I’m not sure how this is done … We should then plan to do the initial analysis [with Post Office] with a view as to scope and then agree how to progress it.”
Skipping a paragraph:
“Jon is easily able to reproduce the problem in a development environment … it is probably worth starting on the data extraction to ascertain the full scope of the issue ASAP since it has probably been around since day one …”
Gareth Jenkins: By that, I meant day 1 of Horizon Online.
Mr Beer: Yes, ie since January 2010?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “… and data more than 6 months old is being dropped from BRSS …”
Remind us, BRSS?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember exactly what the acronym stands for but it was basically a copy of the live transaction database that was used for support purposes.
Mr Beer: So this was a relatively time critical task because the relevant data was being dropped off?
Gareth Jenkins: It was being dropped off there, it wasn’t being lost altogether. It could still be retrieved using ARQ data or that, but it was available online through the BRSS.
Mr Beer: You say:
“… so the sooner we run the queries, the better.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: If data more than six months old was being dropped off, would that mean that there would be no way of knowing how many branches were affected?
Gareth Jenkins: No. And, in fact, the way that we eventually decided was the simplest way of identifying it was through events that were being picked up from SYSMAN and from the databases, and events were being held longer.
Mr Beer: So there was still a facility?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: But, in any event, you thought this had probably been around since January 2010?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we turn please to POL00028838, a document which I think you’ll be familiar with –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – and with which the Inquiry has been familiar for a number of months now. There appears to have been some meetings between Post Office and Fujitsu about the receipts and payments mismatch bug and this is about one of them, this note was compiled. You, in your witness statements, try to date this meeting, don’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I can see there were a number of meetings during the week and I’m not sure exactly which or whether this was just a summary of the problem based on all of the meetings. I don’t think I saw this note until 2018.
Mr Beer: You were present at this meeting; can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: I was present at some of the calls that we had during that week, whether this is a note of a meeting or not, is not 100 per cent clear.
Mr Beer: You, if we look at page 3, please, top paragraph:
“The Receipts and Payments mismatch will result in an error code being generated which will allow Fujitsu to isolate branches affected by this problem, although this is not seen by the branches. We have asked Fujitsu why it has taken so long to react to and escalate an issue which began in May.”
Did you tell them that the problem began in May?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember what exactly what I said in the meeting. I doubt I would have scoped it in that way.
Mr Beer: Because you thought that the problem had been around probably from day 1, ie January 2010.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, there was a fairly obscure set of circumstances which caused this problem, which is why it only occurred about 60-odd times across what was by then a whole estate of 12,000 branches. So it is quite possible that the first occurrence of the problem was in May, in that none of the branches had actually gone through that particular set of interactions earlier. But, if they had gone through that set of interactions before May, then they could have hit the problem. As I say, I can’t remember now exactly when the first occurrence was but that’s maybe where May comes from, I don’t know.
Mr Beer: It’s said that they – that’s Fujitsu – will provide feedback on that issue in due course, ie “We are in October now, why is it that we are being told about this now?”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and I can’t remember the circumstances as to why it was only at this point that the problem had actually been discovered. My first involvement with it, as far as I can remember, was at the end of September, so about a week before these calls with Post Office.
Mr Beer: The code fix is mentioned in the next paragraph.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Was it the case that, at this meeting, or as a result of these communications, Post Office was told that Fujitsu had data from which it was possible to ascertain all of the branches that had been affected?
Gareth Jenkins: That is my understanding. We certainly did have that – we certainly worked out that information at some point. Exactly how that fits in with this meeting or not, I can’t remember the exact chronology.
Mr Beer: Now, we’ve seen that you authored a document about correcting accounts for loss discrepancies. If we can look at that, please, it’s part of this package of material, it’s at page 6. We’ll see this is your document, correct –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I believe so.
Mr Beer: – dated 29 September.
Gareth Jenkins: Ah, that’s right. Most of the other versions that I’ve seen have been dated 28 September, so whether it’s – how that differs, I’m not sure.
Mr Beer: Okay.
Gareth Jenkins: Probably not materially.
Mr Beer: Under the heading “Introduction”, you discuss some PEAKs, 765 and 263, and also 864, which is a duplicate of 263. You ask the question:
“Are these really duplicates? I’m a bit confused as to which one to refer to. Can one be closed as a duplicate of the other?”
Was that an issue that happened frequently, namely multiple or duplicate PEAKs and some were closed in order to keep only one open if possible?
Gareth Jenkins: I am not an expert on the process. You would need to talk to the SSC people about that but my understanding was that, if the same problem was raised for more than one branch, then the approach was just to have one PEAK that actually controlled the issue, and there was a mechanism within that PEAK of listing all the branches that were affected by that issue and then closing other PEAKs that are duplicates, so there was just one PEAK which could actually sort out the result of the problem.
Mr Beer: In the paragraph underneath, just two lines from the bottom of it, you say:
“… PEAK [765] is a Master PEAK to record all affected branches …”
Gareth Jenkins: That is really what I was trying to say, yes.
Mr Beer: There should be a master –
Gareth Jenkins: There should be a master PEAK, yes, because there is no point in investigating the same problem more than once, once it has been established that it is the same problem.
Mr Beer: Was that something that was always done, ie when a problem or issue or bug was reported, there was a system in place to consolidate reports across Fujitsu to collect together all reports relating to that problem into a master PEAK?
Gareth Jenkins: That is what I understood was the way that things should be working. I’m not sure that it always did work in exactly that way but that was how the process was supposed to work, as I understand it. This wasn’t my process.
Mr Beer: Over the page to page 7. If we just scroll down, please. At the foot of the page, you say in the box immediately at the bottom of the page:
“Mark Wright has produced a list of 16 occurrences of event 903 in the last 30 days. This needs to be extended.”
What was event 903; can you remember?
Gareth Jenkins: It was the primary symptom of this particular problem. I can’t remember the details more than that, I’m afraid, now.
Mr Beer: Mr Wright, had found 16 occurrences of that problem, or symptom, in the last 30 days, and that needed to be extended. Do you mean –
Gareth Jenkins: So therefore I was saying you need to look back more than 30 days ago, you need to look back at all occurrences of this event going back to January 2010.
Mr Beer: Was that done?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: How many were eventually detected?
Gareth Jenkins: I think at the end we found there were 64 occurrences in 62 branches but they hadn’t necessarily all happened at this point because some of them – the problem continued to occur until the code fix went in about two or three weeks after this time.
Mr Beer: In the report overall there was an acknowledgement that subpostmasters may be unaware of the problem because there wasn’t essentially a prompt to them to make them aware of it. Is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: There wasn’t an explicit prompt. If they had looked in detail at the branch trading statement, they would have seen that there was a problem there but there wasn’t a message that actually popped up and said, “Yes, you’ve got a problem”.
Mr Beer: So they would need to examine, very carefully, a branch trading statement – to –
Gareth Jenkins: There was one figure in there which should always be zero and, in this particular case, it wasn’t.
Mr Beer: If we go over to page 8, please. At the bottom of the page, please, under “Communication with the Post Office”, you say:
“Once we have the information [above] which will enable us to identify the full scope … we need to communicate this to the Post Office Limited through the problem management mechanisms. We will then need to get Post Office to agree if and how we should be correcting the data.”
Why did you think there was a possibility that you might not correct the data?
Gareth Jenkins: We didn’t correct the data in the branches. What we actually did was we corrected the data in the Post Office’s back-end systems.
Mr Beer: “Post Office should also be able to check up on POLSAP to confirm these discrepancies are still visible even though they have been lost in the branch.
“It should be noted that as discrepancies are normally losses, then a lost discrepancy would [need to] work in the branch’s favour so there is no incentive for the branch to report the problem. Also, if we do amend the data to re-introduce the discrepancy, this will need to be carefully communicated to the branches to avoid questions about the system integrity.”
Gareth Jenkins: We never did amend the data in the –
Mr Beer: Yes, just before you get that answer in too quickly, why would you, if you did amend the data, need carefully to communicate that to the branches, in order to avoid questions about system integrity?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, I can see that this was an important problem. I didn’t want to be amending the data in the branches, and we didn’t amend the data in the branches –
Mr Beer: No, no, that’s a different issue.
Gareth Jenkins: If it was –
Mr Beer: It –
Gareth Jenkins: If it was badly communicated, it could show that there were serious problems within the ongoing operation of Horizon Online, and we clearly didn’t want to do that, so it wasn’t a case of covering up; we just didn’t want to have bad publicity for what was actually a very isolated problem.
Mr Beer: That’s not what this says. You wanted to avoid questions about system integrity, didn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: That was behind what I was trying to say at the time.
Mr Beer: Well, on this document, that’s all that was behind what you wanted to say. You wanted to avoid questions being raised about the system’s integrity, didn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t think – I didn’t think there was anything fundamentally wrong and I wanted to ensure that things were actually communicated accurately.
Mr Beer: This isn’t about the accurate or inaccurate communication of information to branches, it’s about avoiding questions concerning the system’s integrity. That’s your motive, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: No, my motive was to make sure the communications were done accurately.
Mr Beer: Why didn’t you say, “If we do amend the data, we must communicate that to the branches accurately”?
Gareth Jenkins: Perhaps that’s what I should have said at the time. But, as I say, I wasn’t exploring every word that I wrote in an internal document expecting it to be picked apart in the way that it’s being picked apart now.
Mr Beer: Apologies for picking it apart, I’m just trying to work out what was operative on your mind at the time.
Gareth Jenkins: Operative on my mind was that we didn’t want to blow this out of proportion. This was a relatively small problem that was affecting a very small number of branches and we didn’t want to actually undermine the overall system, which was working perfectly correctly in many, many branches, and this was a problem that was going to get fixed, and it was easily scoped and identifiable.
Mr Beer: But you didn’t know any of that at this time. You told us that there had only been a backward look for 30 days. You thought this went back to January, rather than May. You didn’t know the extent of the problem at all –
Gareth Jenkins: But I knew that –
Mr Beer: – a limited problem affecting a small number of branches that was easily fixed – when you were writing this sentence, did you?
Gareth Jenkins: I was aware that – I had a fairly good idea what the sort of scope was going to be. At this point, we’d identified 16 branches, I could see that we would identify a few further branches and, as I say, the eventual figure was about 60-something.
Mr Beer: I’m going to continue the picking apart, if I may. The reason that you used these words was because that’s what you were thinking at the time, isn’t it? It’s not a poor choice of words, it’s not a choice of words that was in error, it’s not a choice of words that reflects something that you didn’t think. You wanted to avoid questions about the Horizon system’s integrity, didn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think that’s true but …
Mr Beer: Sir, it’s just gone 12.20.
Sir Wyn Williams: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we break until 12.35, please?
Sir Wyn Williams: Yes.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
(12.22 pm)
(A short break)
(12.35 pm)
Mr Beer: Good afternoon, Mr Jenkins, can we continue your evidence by finishing off the receipts and payments mismatch issue, and go back to POL00028838, please. Can we look, please, at page 2.
Can you see, in respect of this meeting, in relation to which you’re recorded as an attendee, under the heading “Impact” at the bottom – if that can be blown up, please. Thank you.
“Impact
“The branch appeared to have balanced, whereas in fact they could have had a loss or gain.
“Our accounting systems will be out of sync with what is recorded at the branch.
“If widely known, could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon system by branches.”
Just stopping there, at the third bullet point:
“If widely known it [the receipts and payments mismatch bug] could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon system by branches.”
You were at this meeting; did you say that?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know, is the simple answer. I don’t think so but I don’t know.
Mr Beer: Do you recall who did say that?
Gareth Jenkins: I have no recollection of – whether this was one meeting or a consolidated report of all the meetings, have no idea. I remember being on conference calls about the issue but what was said in detail on the conference calls I’ve no recollection, I’m afraid.
Sir Wyn Williams: Was there any face-to-face meeting, as far as you can remember or were they all conference calls?
Gareth Jenkins: There were face-to-face meetings internally within Fujitsu but, in terms of communication with Post Office, I think it was all conference calls.
Sir Wyn Williams: So this list of people we see at the start of this document, which is both Post Office and Fujitsu, was there ever an occasion when you were all in the same room together discussing it?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t believe so.
Sir Wyn Williams: Right, fine.
Mr Beer: Was there ever an occasion when you were all on the same call?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember exact – as I say, I thought it was just one call. I’ve since seen suggestions that there were two or three calls and I just can’t remember the details, I’m afraid.
Mr Beer: Was the outcome of the calls an agreement that, if the problem was widely known, it could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon system by branches, as recorded here?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know. My role in these calls was explaining what the issue was technically, not in terms of – and understanding what it was that was going to be decided in terms of how we fixed it moving forward. That was my main focus.
Mr Beer: If a view was expressed in the call or calls, whether by Fujitsu, including you, or by the Post Office, that if the receipts and payments mismatch bug was widely known, it could cause loose of confidence by branches in the Horizon system, did that fact, did that view, as expressed, affect your willingness to mention it in court in the following weeks when you gave evidence?
Gareth Jenkins: No, it never occurred to me that it was relevant because, as I said earlier, this was an issue with Horizon Online, and where I was giving evidence was to do with Legacy Horizon.
Mr Beer: The next bullet point, therefore, becomes relevant:
“Potential impact upon ongoing legal cases where branches are disputing the integrity of Horizon data.”
By this time, I think only two branches had been identified in respect of which there were ongoing court cases, correct?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve no idea.
Mr Beer: We looked at the report earlier, didn’t we? One of them was –
Gareth Jenkins: That was in a different context. That was when we were looking back at ARQ data back in June.
Mr Beer: By this time, had any court cases been identified?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know. I don’t recall any mention of legal cases as part of this discussion. That wasn’t where I was focused on. What I was concerned with at this point was the technical aspects of this issue. I have no recollection of discussion of legal implications of this.
Mr Beer: What, to your knowledge, ongoing legal cases were there?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t aware of any legal cases involved with Horizon Online by that time.
Mr Beer: No, it doesn’t say Horizon Online, does it? It simply says, “ongoing legal cases”. You knew about one, didn’t you, a big one: Seema Misra’s case?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but I didn’t see it as being relevant to that and I would not have taken it as being relevant in – that that statement was referring to that at all.
Mr Beer: What ongoing legal cases were there concerning Horizon Online?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of any.
Mr Beer: Were there, were there any at all?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know. I don’t understand the context of that. I mean, I understand now what the context of that is but, at the time, I wouldn’t have known what that was about and I’m not sure if I’d even have noticed if anyone said anything along those lines.
Mr Beer: Did you say that: that the bug has a potential impact on ongoing legal cases?
Gareth Jenkins: No.
Mr Beer: Who said that?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve no idea. As I say, I don’t even remember hearing that being said. It’s clearly recorded there in the minutes.
Mr Beer: You agree that it’s a record in this document of the receipts and payments mismatch bug, having a potential impact upon ongoing cases. Given the start date of Horizon Online, you would have known at this time that the likelihood of there being any ongoing legal cases involving Horizon Online was minimal or even zero?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve no recollection of there being a discussion about legal cases as part of the – these exchanges. I’ve subsequently seen, as part of the work with the Inquiry, that there was discussion along those lines but, at the time, I am not sure that I’d have even noticed that sort of thing being mentioned. I was concerned about the technical aspects of this problem.
Mr Beer: So if it was discussed at a call or calls that the bug had an impact or potential impact on ongoing legal cases, that wouldn’t have affected your willingness or otherwise to mention it in the Seema Misra case?
Gareth Jenkins: No, because, so far as I was concerned, it was totally irrelevant. Now, if someone had then come and said I should mention it, I would probably have argued against it. But if they said “No, you’ve got to do it for legal reasons”, then, obviously, I would have done.
Mr Beer: We know, in fairness to you, that you had disclosed it in your note of 28/29 September 2010, and we know that that was forwarded to Post Office Legal, Jarnail Singh?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I have learnt that as part of the work I’ve done for the Inquiry, yes.
Mr Beer: The last bullet point:
“It could provide branches with ammunition to blame Horizon for future discrepancies.”
Do you recall who said that?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I don’t, I’m afraid.
Mr Beer: Whether that was somebody from Post Office or Fujitsu?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve no idea I’m afraid, sorry.
Mr Beer: Do you agree these three bullet points taken together seem to reflect a concern about the disclosure of the receipts and payments mismatch bug, in that it would have undesirable consequences?
Gareth Jenkins: I can understand that now but, as I say, I don’t think I was conscious of that sort of discussion as part of the meeting at the time.
Mr Beer: Can we go forward, please, to page 3. We can see the solutions, and I think you’ll be familiar with these?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: If we scroll down – thank you – which one did you support?
Gareth Jenkins: Where it was sorted out in the back end. So I think that’s Solution Two, isn’t it –
Mr Beer: Two.
Gareth Jenkins: – where it gets journalled in POLSAP. And that was the one, I believe, that was eventually done.
Mr Beer: The first and the third solution are said to have moral implications, the first because it would involve changing branch data without informing the branch and the third, moral implications to the integrity of the business; can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I don’t remember the term “moral implications” being used there but, certainly, it was – I was always favouring the second option, doing things in the back end. I felt that was the right way of doing things and, as I say, that was what was eventually done.
Mr Beer: The first solution was said to have significant data integrity concerns and could lead to questions of tampering with the branch system and could generate questions about or around how the discrepancy was caused. Is that because this would involve Fujitsu manually writing values into branch accounts?
Gareth Jenkins: That is how that would have been done and I was against doing that.
Mr Beer: Why were you against doing it?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I think it was the wrong thing to do. It was much better to actually sort things out through a business process that was there in the back end of journalising the entries in POLSAP.
Mr Beer: That discussion revealed, of course, that the facility was available to Fujitsu, a form of remote access?
Gareth Jenkins: I wouldn’t call that a form of remote access, as such. I think I – because what we would have had to do is we would have had to develop a specific bit of code to actually make those sort of changes to those affected branches and so it wouldn’t have been using any of the regular remote access type facilities that we had. So it would have been a special bit of code that would have been developed and tested specifically for that purpose. But, again, that wasn’t the way that we went.
Mr Beer: Was consensus reached on that in the meeting?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember the actual discussion but it was certainly Solution Two that was done, going forward, in terms of actually sorting things out at the back end. I can’t remember the discussions behind it and how long those discussions were.
Mr Beer: Thank you. Can we move on, please, to the evidence that you gave at trial, by looking at POL00029406. Can you see this 14 October 2010 at the Crown Court at Guildford. If we scroll down, it’s a transcript of the proceedings –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – and it’s a transcript of your evidence.
If we go forward to page 123, please, and just go down at H. At the foot of the page, thank you. Re-examination, so that’s questions at the end of your evidence session, being asked by the prosecution barrister, Mr Tatford. He says:
“Are there problems that the subpostmaster at the Post Office is going to be unaware of?”
Can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You say:
“Most problems manifest themselves so they can be visible. So, for example, if there was some problem with balancing and so on, then that – that I would expect to be investigated to see whether there was an underlying problem as a result of it.”
The question that you were asked, “Are there problems that a subpostmaster at the Post Office is going to be unaware of?”, you say, “Most problems manifest themselves so they can be visible”.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: A month earlier, you’d been dealing with a problem that didn’t manifest itself in an obvious way to the subpostmaster.
Gareth Jenkins: It did manifest itself, it was visible. If you actually read thorough the BTS, there was a non-zero entry in the BTS where there should be a zero entry.
Mr Beer: I think you had said already that that’s if you examine them carefully –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – or a similar phrase?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Was your reason for not mentioning that here because that was to do with Horizon Online and you thought you were answering questions only about Legacy Horizon?
Gareth Jenkins: I was certainly thinking I was only talking about Legacy Horizon.
Mr Beer: Does that answer apply across the transcript –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – that, even if questions are asked of you in a broad way, like that one was, which wasn’t specifically about Legacy Horizon, you thought you were talking and only talking about Legacy Horizon?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can I turn to the extent to which you were asked to consider wider issues when you were providing your witness statements and giving evidence, and just start by looking at your witness statement, your third witness statement, at page 125. This is just what you say at the end of paragraph 369, the last four lines. You’re dealing here with the event timeout locking issues and you say, in the last four lines:
“Nor have I seen any emails that suggest my raising these event timeout/locking issues prompted anyone within [Post Office] or Fujitsu to ask me to provide a witness statement about any other past problems that had affected Horizon.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: By that, are you saying that you don’t more generally recall being asked to provide a witness statement about any past problems that had affected Horizon?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I think that’s what I was saying. What I thought I was being asked to look at and what I think I was looking at was specific problems at the specific branch, and I found no evidence of any specific problems at the branch. I had raised with people within Post Office the fact that I was aware of problems that didn’t affect that branch, and no one said, “Oh, in that case, you need to talk about it and put it in your witness statement”.
Mr Beer: You say, therefore, that you don’t think you were being asked to provide witness statements or a witness statement about any past problems that had affected Horizon. Can we look back, please, at FUJ00122794. FUJ00122794, and page 2, please – and scroll down.
We looked at this email first thing this morning. Jarnail Singh, and we see that you’re copied, and Mr Singh has said that points 2 to 4 haven’t been answered, and 3:
“When Gareth completes his statement could he also mention whether there are any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of.”
So you had been asked that very question.
Gareth Jenkins: And I’d responded to it at the time saying that until I looked at the logs, I wasn’t able to make a clear statement, and then nothing further was actually done about that. So I thought that that had been addressed.
Mr Beer: Well, let’s break that down. In your witness statement, you said, “Nobody asked me to provide a statement about any other past problems that had affected Horizon”. This is a request to do exactly that, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not considered it that way when I was putting together the witness statement.
Mr Beer: No, but looking at it now, it’s a request to do exactly that, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not seen it that way, but possibly.
Mr Beer: So you’d been asked that question, the broad question of known problems with Horizon, through the lawyer’s route, I’m going to call it, seen to you. Yes?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we look, please, at FUJ00152902, page 2, please. Can you see an email, Jon Longman to Penny Thomas – yes –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – on 1 February. If we just scroll up, just the bottom of the page there, Penny Thomas to you:
“Please see … below; this is now extremely urgent.”
So you get forwarded this chain.
Go back to where we were, top of page 2, so Longman to Thomas. I’m going to call this the investigator’s route, rather than the lawyer’s route:
“At a pre-court hearing today the judge has ordered that all defence requests [be answered].”
Then:
“Gareth’s statement needs to cover the following four points.”
Then do you see (3):
“When Gareth completes his statement he should also mention whether there are any known problems with Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of. If none could this be clarified in the statement.”
So, in fact, far from what you say in your witness statement that “Nobody had asked me to provide a statement about any other past problems that had affected Horizon”, you were asked that very question twice, weren’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, I didn’t respond to that either way.
Mr Beer: Well, let’s just agree: you were asked the question twice, weren’t you, once through the lawyer’s route and once through the investigator’s route?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not considered it in that way.
Mr Beer: I know you say that you hadn’t but the fact of the matter is, rather than you not being asked a question about broader issues or problems with Horizon at all, you’d in fact been asked it twice: once by a lawyer and once through an investigator’s email, hadn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: It looks like it.
Mr Beer: Can we scroll up to what you replied:
“I’ve finally managed to go through the witness statements [et cetera].
“I don’t know anything [presently] about Falkirk.”
Then:
“I’m not aware of issues in Horizon other than the event timeouts. Not sure how to cover that in the witness statement.”
Gareth Jenkins: Which is basically the same thing as I said to David Jones later in the week.
Mr Beer: Well, firstly, do you agree that answer there in that third paragraph is your response to the question, or the request, to cover whether there were any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it probably was, yes.
Mr Beer: So that’s a direct response to the broad question. You were aware of issues in Horizon, other than the event timeouts, weren’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: Not ones that were still outstanding.
Mr Beer: Is that what you say?
Gareth Jenkins: I had assumed that as part of the context but I accept that I didn’t spell it out.
Mr Beer: The context is framed by the question that you were asked, “Are there any known problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu are aware of?” That’s talking about the operation of Legacy Horizon at the very least, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t understanding the question that way but I can understand that that may have been what was meant.
Mr Beer: You say that this answer is supposed to read, “I’m not aware of any outstanding issues in Horizon, other than the event timeouts which have not been resolved”. Why would you not say that, if that’s the meaning that you now attribute to those words?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know, is the simple answer.
Mr Beer: That statement there is not true, is it, “I am not aware of issues in Horizon other than the event timeouts”?
Gareth Jenkins: I was thinking of outstanding issues but I can accept that I have not qualified it correctly.
Mr Beer: So you were asked twice, once by Jon Longman and once by Jarnail Singh, explicitly to mention any known problems with the Horizon system. Why on both occasions have you applied a restrictive approach, rather than simply mentioning all of the problems that you were aware of?
Gareth Jenkins: That was not how I’d understood the question but I accept now that I’d misunderstood the question.
Mr Beer: Or was it an unwillingness to reveal known problems with Horizon system?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it was a case of me misunderstanding the question.
Mr Beer: Can I turn to the topic of your knowledge of remote access before Seema Misra’s trial by looking at FUJ00083737.
This is, I think, your fifth witness statement, dated 8 October 2010. If we go forwards, please, to page 8, and if we scroll down, please. Thank you. Just back up again, so we get the whole of that paragraph. Thank you. You say:
“… in section 1.2.3 [that’s of Professor McLachlan’s report] there is the hypothesis that ‘External systems across the wider Post Office operating environment provide incorrect externally entered information to the Horizon accounts through system or operator error outside Horizon’.”
You say:
“I was not quite clear what Professor McLachlan was referring to here. In the updated version of the report [he] has clarified this by adding ‘For example, incorrect transaction corrections are submitted from the central systems for acceptance by the subpostmaster’.”
You continue:
“However in my view this is not really relevant since any transaction that is recorded on Horizon must be authorised by a user of the Horizon system who is taking responsibility for the impact that such a transaction has on the branch’s accounts.”
Then this:
“There are no cases where external systems can manipulate the branch’s account without the users in branch being aware of what is happening and authorising the transactions.”
That’s not correct, is it?
Gareth Jenkins: I was referring to the transaction corrections and external systems.
Mr Beer: You don’t say that, do you?
Gareth Jenkins: I do say that external systems cannot manipulate the branch accounts, and the context of the question that I was referring to was to do with transaction corrections, and that’s how I was understanding the scope of it.
Mr Beer: The month previously, you had been present on a call or calls where, when discussing the receipts and payments mismatch bug, a solution was alteration of figures at accounts, at branch level, the local branch accounts. That was rejected because it would be done without the subpostmaster knowing about it and it therefore lacked integrity.
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think that was the only reason it was rejected. I think it was rejected because it was a complicated way of doing things and it was much simpler to do things at the back end system.
Mr Beer: But didn’t that make it clear that external systems could manipulate the branch’s accounts without the user being aware?
Gareth Jenkins: I wouldn’t have called that external systems and manipulating accounts. That would have been a specific code change made to actually change the accounts, and it was not something that I would have been in favour of, and that didn’t happen.
Mr Beer: So wouldn’t a full answer here have been, “There are facilities for remote access that I’ve known about since [I think you said yesterday] 2000 which are, in my view, theoretically available to alter branches’ accounts. My understanding is they are used infrequently but that facility is there”?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not understood that as being part of the question. I thought we were talking about business as usual – I think, in my fourth witness statement, I talk about business remote access, and that was the context that I was taking this discussion to be in.
Mr Beer: Did you, in any of your witness statements, disclose the other forms of remote access that were possible?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t think they were relevant.
Mr Beer: Why did you think they were not relevant?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I did not think that those had taken place in West Byfleet.
Mr Beer: Therefore, there was no necessity to tell the defence or the court about the facility for Fujitsu remotely to alter branch accounts without a subpostmaster’s knowledge?
Gareth Jenkins: That was where I was coming from.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
Sir, I wonder if we could take the break there. We’re about to change topic.
Sir Wyn Williams: Yes.
Mr Beer: Until 1.55, please. Thank you very much.
(1.07 pm)
(The Short Adjournment)
(1.55 pm)
Mr Beer: Thank you, sir.
Mr Jenkins, good afternoon.
Gareth Jenkins: Good afternoon.
Mr Beer: Can we turn to the issue of hardware failures at the West Byfleet branch. Can we start by looking at FUJ00083737. This is your witness statement of 8 October 2010. Can we turn to page 4, please. At the top of the page you say:
“I understand there is a suggestion that the equipment in the branch might be faulty. I am not aware of any fundamental issues though this being covered by Mr Dunks. Specifically, in his witness statement he states that ‘All the calls are of a routine nature and do not fall outside the normal working parameters of the system or would affect the working order of the counters’.”
By saying that, are you saying that you agreed with him that all of the calls were of a routine nature, that they didn’t fall outside the normal working parameters of the system or they wouldn’t affect the working order of the counters?
Gareth Jenkins: No, just quoting what he had said.
Mr Beer: What was the purpose of quoting him?
Gareth Jenkins: I was really referring that to his level of expertise rather than mine.
Mr Beer: What expertise did he have in the malfunctioning of equipment within branches?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, he had been examining the Helpdesk calls.
Mr Beer: What –
Gareth Jenkins: And that’s really what I – that’s really what – he – I believed that he had an understanding of what were routine calls and, therefore, I was believing – if he said that they were of a routine nature, I was believing what he said.
Mr Beer: What was Mr Dunks’ job?
Gareth Jenkins: He was part of the Security Team.
Mr Beer: Had he got any expertise in the functioning of equipment within branches, to your knowledge?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought that he was experienced in analysing Helpdesk calls.
Mr Beer: Experienced in – what, good at reading?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we turn to some of the Helpdesk calls then, please. POL00061793. Do you recognise these as being the logs from the Helpdesk for the branch?
Gareth Jenkins: I recognise them as being that now, yes.
Mr Beer: Did you examine them at the time?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did not.
Mr Beer: You’ve said in your witness statement, “I am not aware of any fundamental issues”, ie with equipment in the branch. How were you able to say that you were not aware of any fundamental issues?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I’d read Mr Dunks’ witness statement.
Mr Beer: Did anyone suggest that that was an appropriate thing to do, in answer to a question or a suggestion that there was faulty equipment in the branch, you would read somebody else’s witness statement who said they’d read the logs, and therefore you form a qualitative conclusion that there weren’t fundamental issues?
Gareth Jenkins: No one has suggested to me that that was inappropriate.
Mr Beer: You just did that yourself?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Did it occur to you that, in order to give evidence to a court as to whether or not there were fundamental issues with equipment in the branch, you should actually look to see whether there was evidence of fundamental issues with equipment in the branch?
Gareth Jenkins: That was outside my area of expertise.
Mr Beer: Why didn’t you answer the question, “I understand there’s an issue with or a suggestion that the equipment in the branch is faulty, or might be faulty. That’s outside my area of expertise”, full stop?
Gareth Jenkins: I was just referring to Mr Dunks, who I thought had done that sort of analysis.
Mr Beer: Yes, but you allied with it, didn’t you, by mentioning it, by quoting from it and saying, “I’m not aware of any fundamental issues”?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not seen it that way at the time.
Mr Beer: Do you see it that way now?
Gareth Jenkins: Potentially.
Mr Beer: If we look at some of these Helpdesk records, then please. Can we look at page 37, please, at the bottom. If we just go to the bottom of the page, thank you, I think this is a record of a report on 2 May. Do you see “Opened and closed”, 2 May on the middle of the page, that’s it. Thank you.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The “Problem” text is:
“Critical Alert Received … at [then there’s a date and a time]. Event description: A fatal error has occurred. A corrupt storage unit was detected on volume %1 with LPN %2. Unit type %3 … The message store will be shut down abnormally.”
Can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: I can.
Mr Beer: Can you help us as to what that is?
Gareth Jenkins: That is sounding like a hardware problem on the disk at that time but that was out of hours but I don’t think that would have caused any problem to the branch accounts because that would mean that Riposte just wouldn’t be able to function. So the counter would effectively be dead, until either the message store was deleted and recreated or the base unit swapped.
Mr Beer: So a corrupt storage unit at the branch being detected and the message store was going to be shut down abnormally?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: If we go to the top of page 40, please, do you see the entry at the very top:
“BASE UNIT SWAPS ‘Warning!! Do not change the mirror disk and PC together – if you are in doubt contact SMC or HIT’. ‘Please can engineer print balance snapshot and contact SMC to synchronise message store before swapping out the base unit’.”
Can you help us, what does that mean?
Gareth Jenkins: The simple answer is I don’t know. That looks like some sort of instruction to the engineers as to what they need to do.
Mr Beer: To print a balance snapshot and then synchronise the message store; why would that be necessary?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it is to do with the case of where there’s a single-counter branch, where there is only one counter with what’s called a mirror disk, removable hardware drive, and what’s supposed to happen in those cases is that the removable drive is supposed to put into the new counter –
Mr Beer: This was a multiple counter branch though?
Gareth Jenkins: So, therefore, I don’t think that’s relevant to a branch like West Byfleet, which had more than one counter.
Mr Beer: Do you know why it would be recorded on a Helpdesk call log?
Gareth Jenkins: No idea.
Mr Beer: Is what we’ve read so far evidence that nothing happened that fell outside the normal working parameters of the system?
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so.
Mr Beer: Can we look at page 40 –
Gareth Jenkins: Again, I’m not aware of what was normal. I was relying on Mr Dunks knowing what was normal.
Mr Beer: Did you know how he knew or not knew what was normal?
Gareth Jenkins: No, but the fact that he was saying it was normal, I took his word for it.
Mr Beer: Thank you. If we scroll down the page, please, and look for the entry at, thank you. It looks, at 13.03, as if an engineer arrived, and then the third entry of 13.03, the one above that, please, “Engineer swapped ADSL cable”; can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Then if we look, please, at page 41, the same day, can we see a further record of a call:
“Critical NT event [this is under ‘Problem Text’] Riposte Error … The … server is unavailable.”
Can you see that?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I can see that.
Mr Beer: Then, under the call activity log, “New call taken by David Sweetlove”, and then the substance of the message again. So it looks like, continuing on the same day, there is still a problem, doesn’t there?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, whether it’s the same problem or a different one. The other one was to do with a comms cable. This is to do with the a problem with the background process.
Mr Beer: Are they unrelated?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think so but I don’t know.
Mr Beer: Again, would you be able to say whether this is evidence of something falling within or outside the normal working parameters of the system?
Gareth Jenkins: From my experience, I wouldn’t be able to tell one way or the other.
Mr Beer: It seems, over the next few pages – I’m not going to read them all in the interests of time – but the base unit was replaced because Mrs Misra’s screen had frozen on an error message which said, “Please wait whilst the desktop connects to Riposte” and successive reboots had failed to rectify the problem. Would that be the system working within or outside its normal parameters?
Gareth Jenkins: Certainly, base units did fail occasionally and therefore I would see that as being a normal sort of occurrence.
Mr Beer: Would you want to check data that happened at about that time to see whether it was affect by the failure of the base unit?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t have data for that period. I was focusing my attention on the time that I’d been asked to look at, which was December 2006 to December 2007, and this was before that time.
Mr Beer: Do you know why you didn’t have data for the period of the indictment, which was about two and a half years, for the theft count?
Gareth Jenkins: The Post Office had – I know now that Post Office had decided that on the grounds of costs but, at the time then, I just knew that I’d been asked to look at data for that period of 13 months.
Mr Beer: One thing you’d want to do if you were examining these records is correlate the problems that are shown in the Helpdesk to the transaction data to see whether there was any connection between the two?
Gareth Jenkins: I realise now that that is something that I should have done. At the time, I was not aware that I needed to look at the Helpdesk calls and correlate them against the message store.
Mr Beer: In your witness statement, you had said, we saw, “I understand there is a suggestion that equipment in the branch might be faulty, I’m not aware of any fundamental issues, it’s being covered by Mr Dunks”. Did I not occur to you, “I need, on the one hand, the Helpdesk data or the logs and, on the other, the underlying data to correlate them and I’ve got neither”?
Gareth Jenkins: I realise that now but I didn’t at the time.
Mr Beer: Are you aware of any discussion within Fujitsu as to whether that would have been the appropriate response to the suggestion of faulty hardware on a continuing basis within the West Byfleet branch: you need to do both of those two things?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not aware of any such discussion.
Mr Beer: Can we turn to page 45 a few weeks later. This 17 June 2006, page 45. If we scroll down. 17 June, new call taken, this is under the “Call Activity Log”. Thank you:
“… the online services are down, PM has …”
Do you know what that abbreviation means?
Gareth Jenkins: No, is the simple answer.
Mr Beer: It looks like she was being told to reboot; is that sort of turning on and off again?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: If this was the same error messages as Mrs Misra had previously received, would that be evidence of the system working within or outside its normal parameters?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it was expected to be normal that you would get occasional hardware failures in branches. I have had no experience of the – of how often they occurred, and I was happy to rely on the fact that Andy Dunks had said that the hardware failures in this branch were normal.
Mr Beer: If I carried on pointing out reports of hardware failures in the branch going right up to December 2006, including where a base unit replacement was necessary because the counter kept turning itself off in the course of transactions, your answer would be the same: you were relying on Mr Dunks; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: I think so, yes.
Mr Beer: Did you consider the possibility that, on any one of the occasions where the engineer was replacing hardware, they may have failed to take necessary steps to synchronise the message store?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t consider that.
Mr Beer: That would be problematic, if they failed to do that, wouldn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: But it would also probably have been very obvious at the time.
Mr Beer: On the data that you didn’t have and therefore couldn’t analyse?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So, in answer to the question, what did you do to respond to the suggestion that hardware faults at branch were persistent and affected balancing, is that you relied on reading Mr Dunks’ statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Thank you. Can I turn the investigations into shortfalls at West Byfleet by looking at the transcript POL00029406. Again, this is the transcript we looked at earlier. Can we look at page 58, please, at D, thank you. This is Mr Tatford asking you questions. He asks you:
“… have you – in your analysis of these just under half a million transactions, have you seen any sign, even the slightest symptom of any computer fault?
“Answer: No, but then I’ve been doing very sort of high level rough analysis on the stuff. But to find – to do any detailed investigation you need to have some sort of idea about a fault happened at that particular time.”
That was a reference to the ARQ data, the half a million transactions, wasn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: I think you knew and you realised that the Post Office had only authorised the extraction of ARQ data for the period of the 1 December 2006 until 31 December 2007, so 13 months?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The indictment period, did you understand, was the 29 June 2005 until 14 January 2008, in relation to the theft count, so a period of about two and half a years?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I may have seen that sometime but, as far as I was concerned, the only data I had to analyse was for the limited period.
Mr Beer: Did you clock, did you realise, I’ve got data for only about half the relevant period for the theft?
Gareth Jenkins: That was the data I was given and that was the data I was asked to look at.
Mr Beer: But did you at the time realise –
Gareth Jenkins: And I think I made that clear that that was the period I had – I thought it was well known that that was the data that I had to look at and, therefore, the only data I could comment on.
Mr Beer: Did it strike you as incomplete, in the sense that it didn’t match the period of the theft charge?
Gareth Jenkins: That was what I’d been asked to look at.
Mr Beer: You say here:
“… I’ve been doing very sort of high level rough analysis on the stuff … to do any detailed investigation, you need to have some sort of idea about a fault happened at that particular time.”
So do I understand this to be what you were saying: although you say that there would be evidence of faults in the data, you did not conduct any analysis to try and locate such faults in the data because you didn’t have a data range to narrow down the search.
Gareth Jenkins: The data that I had was – it wasn’t really possible to do that because I was trying to correlate the cash movements against the cash declarations, and they just didn’t correlate and, therefore, I wasn’t able to track down where losses had actually happened to investigate in detail.
Mr Beer: So the answer –
Gareth Jenkins: And that’s really what I was trying to say there.
Mr Beer: Sorry?
Gareth Jenkins: And that’s what I was trying to say with that answer there.
Mr Beer: So the “No, but”, the “but” is very important, because you’re saying, “I actually haven’t been able to do any real investigation because I need to know when the fault is supposed to have occurred, so that I can use that information to narrow of the search down and look in this half a million transactions”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, yes.
Mr Beer: Had Fujitsu developed any sort of knowledge bank about the kind of events or patterns that you could do searches on in order to identify evidence of known faults?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t know.
Mr Beer: None to your knowledge?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t think of any at the moment.
Mr Beer: The questioning continues:
“Have you been given any information at all from Professor McLachlan as to any particular fault that might have been happening at a particular time?
“Answer: Other than the Callendar Square problem, no.”
Would you agree that that approach really throws the burden onto the defence for coming up with suggestions as to what to look for, and then only then would you be able to search through the 500,000 transactions.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and I think I’d indicated that in some of the emails that I exchanged with Jarnail Singh earlier in the year.
Mr Beer: “We need the defendant to identify where the particular fault is before I can look for the particular fault”; that’s what you were saying?
Gareth Jenkins: I suppose so, yes.
Mr Beer: But Fujitsu did keep PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs, didn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Could you not have used those in the indictment period for two-and-a-half years to find out what other known faults were in play during the relevant time?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I did look for whether there were PinICLs associated with that branch.
Mr Beer: Yes, not PinICLs associated with that branch, PinICLs or PEAKs or KELs that identified known faults that were in play, which were in evidence, during the time that the theft was alleged to have taken place? You could use that as a narrowing tool, couldn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I realise that now. I didn’t think of it at the time.
Mr Beer: Isn’t that a straightforward or an obvious approach, rather than saying, “It’s up to you, defendant, to tell me where to look in my system for faults, I’ve got a Knowledge Base which identifies faults, I’ll use that to look in the data”?
Gareth Jenkins: When you put it that way, I realise that now, but that was not the way I was thinking at the time.
Mr Beer: That would have given you, even on the limited 13 months that you were given, a clue or ideas as to what to look for in the ARQ data, wouldn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I understand that now.
Mr Beer: But what you were saying is that there was too much data to do any detailed investigation, the only thing that’s been suggested is Callendar Square, which they knew about because of Lee Castleton’s case, “That’s the only thing that I’ve got to go on”?
Gareth Jenkins: That’s what I am saying, yes.
Mr Beer: Those things, the PinICLs, PEAKs and KELs, they would have given you an idea what to look for in the ARQ data but the defence couldn’t do that, could they, because they didn’t have the PinICLs, PEAKs or KELs, did they?
Gareth Jenkins: That’s true.
Mr Beer: Do you know that Professor McLachlan repeatedly asked for disclosure of what he called Fujitsu’s records of known faults?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m aware that he asked for that, yes.
Mr Beer: That had been repeatedly denied him, that request, hadn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Post Office had decided not to meet that – respond to that request.
Mr Beer: So the very tool, if the burden was going to be thrust on to the defence, that might have enabled the defence expert to carry out the task that didn’t occur to you, that was denied them, as well, wasn’t it, by the Post Office?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Was there any prohibition or nervousness or ban on revealing the existence of the Known Error Log in legal proceedings, that you’re aware of?
Gareth Jenkins: Not that I’m aware of. I certainly discussed the existence of it with Professor McLachlan.
Mr Beer: Is that why he was asking for it, do you think?
Gareth Jenkins: It could well be. After we had a – I think it was shortly after a meeting I had with him that he actually requested that sort of information from Post Office.
Mr Beer: Did you form a view about the denial of that material to him?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t think that it would actually help him a lot but I was prepared to sort of – if Post Office had come back and said to give that material for him, then it wasn’t something that I would have been concerned about.
Mr Beer: Can we go forward in the transcript to page 59, please. Mr Tatford asked you, at A:
“… if a computer problem led to a problem with the actual figures on the accounts, would you – would that problem manifest itself to the staff at the post office?”
“Answer: Clearly, if there’s a problem in the accounts then – and there were losses and things like that showing, I would expect the staff to be complaining to the Helpdesk to investigate what’s gone on and that could – that might trigger an investigation by ourselves.”
Gareth Jenkins: That was my understanding of how things were supposed to work. I now realise that the Post Office Helpdesk wasn’t actually very good at passing things on when they should have been.
Mr Beer: The trouble with the answer, therefore, is that it assumed that the Helpdesk handled calls as they should, rather than batting them off?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, that was the assumption I had.
Mr Beer: Can we look at some call records, please. At POL00061793. Page 22, please, and if we scroll forwards, please, and look at the bottom of the page, a call on 20 February 2006 at 10.42. It’s opened at 10.42 and closed two minutes later. If you look at the text, the caller, on the left, is Mrs Misra –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: It says “Mrs Seema” but it’s Mrs Misra.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The problem is recorded as:
“[Postmistress] states that showing £6,000 down from balance …”
Yes?
Gareth Jenkins: I see that, yes.
Mr Beer: Then text underneath it, “Call closed”. So two minutes after the call, after Mrs Misra says that the system is showing £6,000 down from balance, she’s told it’s an NBSC issue.
Gareth Jenkins: I see that, yes.
Mr Beer: Then if we scroll down, please. 10.45, can you see that, the next call record?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Mrs Misra again, this one is closed down in three minutes:
“[Postmistress] states that showing £6,000 down from balance. Advised [it’s an] NBSC issue. [Postmistress] stated she was talking to the NBSC and got cut off …”
Then the fuller text in the next box down:
“call close … I advised [postmistress] I would put her through. [Postmistress] was happy with this.”
Then scroll down, please – and keep going. 3.40, same day, call opened and closed within two minutes. Seema Misra, the call.
“[Postmistress] states that her system is showing different values for certain products.”
Then if we scroll down, just stop there:
“Call close by Matthew Fry: [postmistress] states that her system is showing incorrect values. [Postmistress] transferred.”
Next day, the 21:
“… last couple of weeks they have had problems with Horizon kit and it is always showing that they are down in money.”
Carrying on:
“Call closed … she has been advised by the NBSC, advised [postmistress] to follow this …”
Just stopping there, I’m not going to go through all of these, there’s a lot of them. Did you access these call records as part of your work preparing to give evidence in witness statements and then orally in Seema Misra’s case?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did not.
Mr Beer: Did you therefore not correlate any of this information with the data in the limited period of the 13 months that you had?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did not.
Mr Beer: I think from your earlier answers, I took that you didn’t know that the Helpdesk was perhaps not as effective as it should have been, that people were, for example, continually rerouted to the NBSC?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, well, it was the NBSC, I think, that was responsible to handle that sort of call but I now understand that they didn’t do it very well.
Mr Beer: Does any of this help or hinder us with assessing Mr Dunks’ statement that all calls are of a routine nature and don’t fall outside the normal working parameters of the system?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t do that sort of analysis of the calls at the time. I just took his word for what he had actually said as the summary.
Mr Beer: Do you think you probably should have looked at it before allying yourself with what Mr Dunks was saying?
Gareth Jenkins: With hindsight, I can see that, yes.
Mr Beer: I think once the trial started and Mr Dunks was testifying about the calls, you started make some enquiries then, didn’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: I did indeed. He referred to one call that had been referred through to SSC and Anne Chambers had actually examined the data for the branch at a particular time. I think that was sometime in 2006 and I did contact her to ask if she had any more useful information, and I did look at the PinICL that was associated with that.
Mr Beer: Let’s just look at that briefly, FUJ00153395. So this is in the course of the trial.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You’re emailing Anne Chambers on 13 October 2010 at 3.15:
“Anne,
“In court today Andy Dunks was asked about all sorts of Helpdesk calls.
“One of them looked interesting …”
Then I think that should read “so”:
“… [so] I searched PEAK for more info.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: I think that’s the PEAK you attached. There’s a pdf at the top –
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so.
Mr Beer: – ending in 673:
“Do you remember anything about it?”
“NB I’ve not been asked to get this info officially so you’re in the clear still!
“I’m at …”
Gareth Jenkins: “Home”, I think that’s supposed to say.
Mr Beer: “… if you want to ring me.”
Why did the PEAK look interesting?
Gareth Jenkins: Because it was one that had been raised to do with a discrepancy in the branch that had been investigated by her. So I can’t remember now exactly what the PEAK said. I think she said she did a full investigation and couldn’t find any problem but I was just wondering if she had anything to add to that.
Mr Beer: The “you’re still in the clear”, presumably, do you mean by that that she was keen not to give evidence again?
Gareth Jenkins: I think that’s what that’s referring to, yes.
Mr Beer: Therefore, you hadn’t been asked to get this officially so there wasn’t a prospect of her being dragged into these proceedings?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct, yeah.
Mr Beer: The defence didn’t have access to the PEAKs, did they?
Gareth Jenkins: No, they didn’t.
Mr Beer: So you had a privileged position in relation to Fujitsu’s records?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Did you think at the time that that may give the Post Office an unfair advantage over the defence?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think I thought it through at the time but I understand now why you’re asking the question and, yes, I accept that that wasn’t right.
Mr Beer: That aside, do you think that whatever had piqued your interest in the PEAK, you should have discussed it with Professor McLachlan or at least shown him the document, together with any information that Anne Chambers gave you in response to your request to ring her if she wants.
Gareth Jenkins: Again, I realise now that that’s what I should have done but I wasn’t aware then that that was something that I needed to do. I’d not been asked to look into this at all. I just happened to have picked up listening to Andy Dunks’ evidence that there was this software call that had come through and, therefore, I thought that I would do a little bit of digging myself into it, and no one had asked me to do that, so that’s what was behind this, to see if it would actually shed any light of what had been going on.
Mr Beer: I think when you came to give evidence, you were actually asked about Mr Dunks’ oral evidence when you were giving evidence?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember that at the moment, sorry.
Mr Beer: Let’s have look. POL00029426, at page 7. If we scroll down, please, at H:
“… you are aware, are you, of the witness statements of Mr Dunks –
“Answer: Yes, I am.”
Then this is Mr Tatford:
“– who provided a rather exhaustive list of all the calls to the helpline. Do any of those calls to the helpline – I do not know if you heard his evidence yesterday?
“Answer: Yes, I did indeed.
“Question: Did any of what you have read or of what you heard yesterday from Mr Dunks, did that cause you any concern as to your view that there is no evidence of any computer fault?
“Answer: No, I – I’ve not – I haven’t got Mr Dunks’ experience in examining call logs and things like that but I was quite happy with his comment that the level of calls from the branch were typical for other branches.”
Do you think, on reflection, that reply obscured more than it revealed?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t at the time. I understand now that maybe that would have been an opportunity to talk about the conversation – well, I’m not sure whether I spoke to Anne or not but, certainly when I looked at the PEAK, there was nothing there to show that there was actually a problem at the time and I believe the PEAK showed that she’d done some examination and not found any faults. So, therefore, I didn’t see the need to mention it in that sort of context.
Mr Beer: But the level or the number of calls, whether or not that was typical of other branches, was beside the point, wasn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought that what I was saying there was – I’m not quite sure what you would have expecting me to say there because, as I say, I was doing as I’d done in my witness statement, saying that I thought that Mr Dunks knew better how many calls would be typical in a branch such as this.
Mr Beer: Well, you say, you don’t know what I would have expected you to say – and I’m not going to put words into your mouth – but something like “I know that hardware faults can lead to accounting irregularities, one needs to go through the Helpdesk call records very carefully to look for those hardware irregularities and then cross-compare them to the ARQ data, using that as a key to look for errors. I haven’t done that and, in any event, I’ve only got 13 months’ of data which is about half the relevant period”.
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not thought it through in that way but, with hindsight, maybe I should have said something like that.
Mr Beer: That would be the complete answer, wouldn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Possibly.
Mr Beer: Can we look, please, at FUJ00153390, 11 October, which I think is the second day of trial?
Gareth Jenkins: The first day, I think.
Mr Beer: The first day?
Gareth Jenkins: The first day, yeah.
Mr Beer: First day of trial at 7.00 at night.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You’re sending, essentially, is this right, the NT event logs?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: That’s because of his requests or focus on Callendar Square; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. I think during the trial we’d actually gone through the event logs on my laptop and he’d asked me could I send him a copy, so I did so.
Mr Beer: You answered some questions about these logs – if we look at those in the trial – as you just said, POL00029406, at page 67 at C. This is you being asked questions by Mr Hadrill.
Just scroll up a little bit, so we can see the question before. Thank you. So at C:
“Questions are asked about Callendar Square and, lo and behold, you summon up then a third log and it is called an NT log. Yes?
“Answer: Yes.
“Question: Which you had not bothered looking at before?
“Answer: I had looked at them before when I was – produced my statement on what happened in Callendar Square back in March.
“Question: You had never given Professor McLachlan the benefit of looking at them?
“Answer: That’s true.
“Question: You are compiling a –
“Answer: He hadn’t asked me for them.
“Question: Sorry?
“Answer: He hadn’t asked me for them. I had passed on the information from Callendar Square”, et cetera.
Gareth Jenkins: I think that’s just an example of me not understanding that I had a responsibility for doing any disclosure.
Mr Beer: Aside from that, is it right to say that neither you nor Professor McLachlan had time in the course of the trial to analyse the data for anything other than the signs of the Callendar Square bug.
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember exactly what we had. I did give him the full NT event logs for the full period that had been provided to me back in February. Back in February, Anne had done an analysis of the NT events and – to see whether there were any problems there, and we hadn’t seen anything that was startling about – from the NT events and now I was sharing these logs with Professor McLachlan.
Mr Beer: You said that the pair of you sat in front of your laptop in the course of the trial?
Gareth Jenkins: I believe so, yes.
Mr Beer: Was that searching for, or analysing the data for, signs of the Callendar Square bug?
Gareth Jenkins: That was the main reason that we were looking at things then, yes.
Mr Beer: You and he didn’t have time to analyse all of the data for any signs of bugs?
Gareth Jenkins: No, but he was – as I say, having given him the things, then he was free to look for anything he wanted and come back to me with specific questions. I don’t believe that he did so but believe that Mr Hadrill did, as part of the dialogue here.
Mr Beer: Can we go back to page 58, please, just go down to D. Would you agree this was an important part of your evidence, between D and G? It’s essentially the core of what you were saying.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I think so.
Mr Beer: The question:
“[Has] your analysis of … just under half a million transactions … seen any sign, even the slightest symptom of any computer fault?
“Answer: No, but then I’ve been doing very sort of high level rough analysis … to do any detailed analysis you’d have to have some sort of idea about a fault happened at that particular time.”
“Question: Have you been given any information … from Professor McLachlan [about a particular fault]?
“Answer: Other than [Callendar Square], no.”
Do you agree that a complete answer would have included the following: however, Professor McLachlan hasn’t been provided with all of the records that are available to me”?
Gareth Jenkins: I wasn’t aware that I needed to say that and, by then, he had had the information. But, as I say, I didn’t know that he needed – I didn’t know that he hadn’t got it until the Monday.
Mr Beer: A complete answer would be, “He has asked for, but has not been given Fujitsu’s records of known errors”?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t know that I needed to say that. I thought he could have said that himself, if he thought it was important.
Mr Beer: “And that it’s possible that if he or I or of both of us had examined the records for all known faults operative in the two and a half years of the alleged theft, we would have had a better idea what to look for in the 500,000 transactions”?
Gareth Jenkins: I understand that now. I hadn’t at the time.
Mr Beer: The testimony continues by Mr Tatford asking you:
“No. And, in relation to computer problems, you have told us at the beginning of your evidence that a computer problem displays symptoms?”
“Answer: In my experience, yes.
“Question: … would a computer problem on the Horizon system display symptoms for the people working in the post office?
“Answer: Not necessarily for the people working in the post office but if there were investigations carried on, there would be symptoms in the logs.
“Question: And if a computer problem led with the actual figures on the accounts … would that problem manifest itself to the staff at the post office?
“Answer: Clearly, if there’s a problem in the accounts then – and there were losses and things like that showing, I would expect the staff to be complaining to the Helpdesk to investigate what’s gone on and that could – that might trigger an investigation by ourselves.”
Do you accept that a complete answer would have included, “Mrs Misra, I understand, did call the Helpdesk about shortfalls in her accounts”?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think, at that stage, I was – yes, I probably would have heard Mr Dunks saying that but I didn’t think that I would have needed to have said that.
Mr Beer: “I’ve investigated an investigation by a member of the SSC staff and she, Anne Chambers, decided there was no sign of a system problem and so the call wasn’t taken any further at that stage”; ought you to have disclosed that?
Gareth Jenkins: Looking at that now, maybe. But, at the time, it didn’t occur to me that that was relevant.
Mr Beer: A complete answer would be “Professor McLachlan and I haven’t been able to check whether that investigation by Anne Chambers was adequate because the Horizon data that we’ve got begins in December 2006 and, therefore, it doesn’t cover the period of those calls in February 2006”?
Gareth Jenkins: Again, I understand that now but I didn’t at the time.
Mr Beer: A complete answer would be, “I haven’t examined the call logs themselves but, even on what I know from Andrew Dunks’ evidence, there were numerous calls regarding hardware failures, which I know from my experience can lead to accounting irregularities”?
Gareth Jenkins: Again, I understand that now but I didn’t think of it at the time.
Mr Beer: And a complete answer would be, “I’ve given, a couple of days ago, Professor McLachlan the NT event log which might help about this possibility but he’s only had it since the first day of the trial, I’ve not myself looked at it for any other signs other than the Callendar Square bug”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I had looked at the events for anything else that was unusual back in February.
Mr Beer: Okay. What do you mean, “unusual”?
Gareth Jenkins: There are some events that you get sort of on a fairly regular basis, so I was looking for ones that I could see that would have caused a problem.
Mr Beer: Overall, were you untroubled by, and happy with, the evidence you’d given at trial?
Gareth Jenkins: At the time I was. I clearly appreciate now that it wasn’t as good as it should have been but, at the time, I felt happy with it.
Mr Beer: Can we look at FUJ00225196. Look at the second email on the page from you on 22 October, subject “Court told postmistress had ‘her fingers in the till’”:
“Penny, I did a Google search last night and found this from last week.”
It’s an article from Surrey Online, essentially getsurrey.co.uk.
Gareth Jenkins: The reason I was interested in that was because it referred to me as “Professor Jenkins”, rather than Mr Jenkins, and that was the reason I was expressing an interest in there. It was nothing to do with the actual trial, as such, it was that I had magically acquired this title of Professor in the article, as obviously a typo.
Mr Beer: You say:
“They don’t seem to have updated it yet to add in the guilty verdict.
“Looks like I’ve acquired a new title!”
Gareth Jenkins: Which is what that last comment was about.
Mr Beer: Then if we scroll up:
“Nice one Gareth. Looks like you now have a sideline of resident expert witness in future Post Office fraud cases.”
Which was indeed the case, wasn’t it? You did have a sideline as resident expert witness?
Gareth Jenkins: I did in a few cases.
Mr Beer: Did you subsequently pass this on to anyone else, that you had –
Gareth Jenkins: I probably sent it home, so that my wife could see the article and, again, the reason for that was to do with the fact that I’d been referred to as a professor.
Mr Beer: Thank you. That can come down.
Following your evidence in the Seema Misra case and the guilty verdict, you were asked to provide a series of generic witness statements, weren’t you?
Gareth Jenkins: This was about a couple of years later, yes.
Mr Beer: Yes, in October 2012?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we look, please, at POL00096978. This is from Mr Singh to you, copied to others.
“Dear Mr Jenkins
“Welcome from your annual leave …”
I’m going to read this, as I usually do, exactly how it’s written:
“… and your assistance advice in the past prosecution cases and I understand you are assisting my colleagues at present. I need your urgent assist judge has this morning ordered the prosecution to have the following report ready to be served within Seven days. On advise Post Office Limited have appointed one of their investigators, Helen Rose as Disclosure Officer dealing with Horizon challenges. She has prepared a document/spreadsheet detailing all such cases, past and present, approximately 20 in total, although none thus far successfully argued in court. Post Office Limited have been advised to obtain, an experts report from Fujitsu UK, the Horizon system developers, confirming the system is robust. Post Office Limited maintain the system is robust, but in light of adverse publicity, from legal viewpoint is that defence should be given opportunity to test the system, should they still wish to do so, on consideration of our report.
“You will need to consider Disclosure Officers document/spreadsheet (see attachments) and need to address in your report the followed issues:
“1) A description of the Horizon system (in laymen’s terms so that a jury can understand what it is and what it does).
“2) A declaration that it is yet to be attacked successfully.
“3) A summary of the basic attacks made on the system concentrating on any expert reports served in past cases. If there are none then state that no expert has yet been found by any defence team civil or criminal to attack the system (at the moment there seems to be little more than [gripping] by defendants that the system must be at fault without saying how).
“4) Plainly, like all accounting systems, there is room for human error (keying in wrong amounts etc) are you able to state that innocent human error is unlikely to produce the types of discrepancies of many thousands of pounds over many months.
“If you require any further information or wish to discuss please do not hesitate to contact me.”
As far as you’re concerned, is this essentially the origin of the request for the generic witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, it is.
Mr Beer: You’ll see from the top of the page that this was sent to you on 1 October 2012, and you ended up signing the generic witness statement on 5 October 2012?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So, in a relatively short period of time, and the message says that this was urgent?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The request was framed in a way that the generic witness statement, as perhaps is obvious from its title, was not going to address the specifics of any particular case?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Did you form a view at the time as to the adequacy of the instructions that you were being given here?
Gareth Jenkins: Not really. It was – I suppose, a better way to describe it: it was a typical garbled email from Jarnail Singh.
Mr Beer: Given that it was a “typical garbled email” from Jarnail Singh, didn’t that cause you concern?
Gareth Jenkins: I tried to make the best sense of it that I could.
Mr Beer: Can we look at your reply, please. POL00096983. A little later that day – can we just go back, please, to POL0006978. Yes, that was at 11.04 in the morning.
Let’s go back to POL00096983, your reply at 2.10, you say:
“… here are the two existing reports I mentions …”
It looks like it may have been catching!
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, sorry. Typing is not one of my strong points.
Mr Beer: “… I [mentioned] regarding Horizon and Horizon Online integrity.
“I’ll try and produce a further short report addressing your specific points below in the next few days.
“Hopefully that will cover off your requirements.”
So you were sending back the Horizon data integrity reports about Legacy Horizon and Horizon Online that we looked at yesterday?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Why were you sending those back as the answer to his question, essentially, or part of the answer?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I thought they were part of the answer to his question, and they would give him something to be going on with whilst I tried to frame a report addressing the specifics that he raised.
Mr Beer: Can we look at your third witness statement, please, at paragraph 541, at page 186. You say:
“I provided my two data integrity reports to Mr Singh … because I thought they were a good starting point for the purposes of grabbing Legacy Horizon and Horizon Online and the mechanics of their respective audit trails. As I have explained in my second statement to this Inquiry, these reports were not a survey of bugs or other issues which had affected Horizon and had not been prepared for that purpose.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Mr Singh had asked you to prepare a witness statement, essentially, that said, amongst other things, that the Horizon system was robust, hadn’t he?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember exactly what he was saying but what I thought – I thought this was a good start in terms of trying to address the robustness of Horizon, yes.
Mr Beer: If we just go back, it might not have been a witness statement. I just want to check that.
Gareth Jenkins: He was asking for a report, I think.
Mr Beer: A report?
Gareth Jenkins: There was a report I produced, which later got turned into a witness statement.
Mr Beer: Okay, so he was asking for a report that addressed, amongst other things, to confirm that the system was robust.
Gareth Jenkins: So what I – so the next day I think I did produce a Word document in the form of a report which covered what I thought was the scope of what he was asking.
Mr Beer: Confused as Mr Singh’s request might have been, why didn’t you write back and say, “No, I can’t just provide a generic witness statement that’s to be used in support of a prosecution. I can only look at branch-specific data to examine whether there’s evidence of a specific problem at a specific branch”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I had sought guidance from my colleagues within Fujitsu as to how I should address Mr Singh’s request.
Mr Beer: Your approach in the past was, “It’s all about the branch, it’s not about the system in general”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Why wasn’t that your reply to him immediately, “I can’t give you a genericised statement. You need to be looking at individual data which is branch-specific”?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not thought of it that way. I thought I was just providing a high level overview of how Horizon was working in general.
Mr Beer: Thank you. If we can stop there and take the afternoon break until 3.15, please. Thank you very much.
(2.58 pm)
(A short break)
(3.15 pm)
Sir Wyn Williams: Have you had a sufficient break Mr Jenkins?
Gareth Jenkins: I think so. I’d like to just get the day over with, please.
Sir Wyn Williams: Fine.
Mr Beer: I’m aiming to finish by 4.00.
Can we look at your third witness statement, please, at page 184. 534, you’re referring to Mr Singh’s email, the one that we looked at before the break.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: You say:
“[It] didn’t mention any specific prosecution, name any [subpostmaster] defendant or provide any information about any prosecution that my statement was required for. I understood that what [Post Office] wanted was a generic statement that did not go into the specifics of any case and that responded to the four issues Mr Singh had set out in his email.”
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Then you say at 535:
“Mr Singh’s email … described and attached two documents …”
Then you give the references, the second which was an Excel spreadsheet list interesting number of previous prosecutions, that’s the one ending in 468 –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – sorry, ending in 089.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “[648] was a Word document describing five of those prosecutions. These five prosecutions [including] two which I knew about (Rinkfield and West Byfleet). I didn’t know about [any of] the others at the time.”
I’m not going to take you to the underlying documents, to the Excel, but the spreadsheet had 25 or so branches listed in it where there had been a prosecution and Horizon issues had been raised. On that list, Hughie Thomas’ branch was not listed.
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember. I’m sorry.
Mr Beer: Would you have gone through that list –
Gareth Jenkins: I would have skimmed through looking for ones that I recognised and I think I recognised about three or four of them, something like that. I think I listed them in the first draft of my report, the ones that I did recognise.
Mr Beer: So you didn’t see that the list was incomplete because it didn’t list Hughie Thomas’ branch in Wales?
Gareth Jenkins: I took it at face value.
Mr Beer: I see. Therefore, there was nothing triggered in you that this list that the Post Office are providing me with doesn’t provide a complete picture of all prosecutions in which Horizon integrity had been raised?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I – it was presented to me as a list of – like that, so I took it on face value and just didn’t consider it in that much detail.
Mr Beer: Okay, and if we go down the page to 537, you say:
“Whilst I understood that Mr Singh wanted a generic report that did not address the specifics of any given case and that responded to the four issues he had identified, I was concerned that I did not know exactly I how to approach this task.”
I think that’s a reference to – that you made earlier in your evidence before the break –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – when you said, “Yes, and I went off to the Fujitsu lawyers”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, actually looking at this, it wasn’t the lawyers at this point but it was certainly –
Mr Beer: Managers?
Gareth Jenkins: – managers and things, yes.
Mr Beer: You say:
“That is why at 11.52 I emailed Peter Thompson (Head of Customer Services), Howard Pritchard (Head of Security) and Ian Turner (Development Manager and my boss) copying Pete Newsome and James Davidson, saying ‘help please’ and seeking ‘urgent guidance’.”
Can we look at that please, FUJ00156645. Thank you. This is the email you’re referring to.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: So Jarnail Singh sent the email with the four requests in it, and you say:
“Help please.
“I’ve looked through the attachments on Jarnail’s email and it isn’t at all clear exactly what he wants. I suspect he wants a further report explaining why Horizon integrity is okay. I had hoped that somebody would have sent him the report I produced … for Dave Smith 3 years ago while I was on leave.
“However before I contact Jarnail I need some guidance as to how this fits into my priorities. Should I drop everything else and concentrate on [keeping] Jarnail happy (one extreme) or should I wait for …”
Is that a change proposal?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because I could see that this could involve quite a bit of my work and, therefore, it needed to be paid for by Post Office.
Mr Beer: A change proposal, ie a formal mechanism raising this work?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “… to be raised and processed before I start (the other extreme) or more likely, some in-between course.
“As a matter of courtesy, I would like to get some kind of response to Jarnail today at least indicating what we (I) propose to do.
“I’d appreciate some urgent guidance. Until I get some I shall do nothing further on this other than send a holding email to Jarnail around 5.00 if I’ve heard nothing by then.”
So your concern appears to be to secure management sign-off as to where this sits within your day-to-day priority –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – rather than concern with complying with the substance of the request that was made to you?
Gareth Jenkins: At that stage it was really a case of, yes, is there something I should be doing urgently or not, or should I be doing at all, even.
Mr Beer: You don’t question in this, where you’re seeking guidance, the appropriateness of the requests that are being made to you?
Gareth Jenkins: I’d not thought of that but, clearly, it was open for my management to say that it was inappropriate.
Mr Beer: Does that reflect the fact that you didn’t see the task as fundamentally inappropriate, namely providing a generic witness statement that wasn’t branch-specific, and might be deployed without any reference to an analysis of underlying data?
Gareth Jenkins: I’ve now realised that was totally inappropriate but I didn’t at the time.
Mr Beer: That’s why we don’t see you raising that –
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: – in this email; is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes. I was assuming that he knew what he was doing and was asking me to do something that was appropriate.
Mr Beer: We saw, I think, at 3.10 that day, you sent over the two Horizon integrity reports?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Does that mean that that was essentially the holding response that you are referring to in the last paragraph here?
Gareth Jenkins: It could be. I can’t remember the consequences of what happened at that time but that was clearly a sort of holding response.
Mr Beer: What assistance, if any, did your managers provide you?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember. I may have had a conversation with one of them or something in the meantime to agree that that was something that should be done. I just can’t remember the details.
Mr Beer: What about more generally, the plea for help that you were making in this? I don’t think we’ve got a –
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think that I’ve seen an email responding to that but I think, later on, some of the Fujitsu lawyers got involved in the report that I was drafting over the next couple of days but I can’t remember the exact details of that.
Mr Beer: Can we go forward in your witness statement, please, to page 187. Third witness statement, page 187, and paragraph 545. You say:
“I understand that the question is being asked in this Inquiry of why I didn’t, in my draft report, refer to bugs, errors [and] defects which had affected Horizon. Quite simply, I didn’t think [Post Office] wanted a report which did anything apart from addressing the four issues Mr Singh had asked me to address. In terms of Mr Singh’s general reference to wanting a report ‘confirming the system is robust’, my draft report referred to the components of Horizon that ensured that the writing and storage of data had integrity. My belief was that if and when there were problems in the system, that would be detectable and leave traces and we would pick those up in any specific case. My view (and I think this was the common understanding in Fujitsu) was that there would be problems (there always are) but they were spottable and there were mechanisms to spot and fix them, and all of these components made the overall system robust.”
If that was your state of mind, if that was your appreciation, did you take any steps to check that all bugs were being picked up, handled and fixed?
Gareth Jenkins: Not at that particular time, no, but I thought that the processes that we had in place were doing that sort of thing and I still believe that they did.
Mr Beer: You don’t reply to Mr Singh by saying, “Look, the system plainly has bugs but we hope that the system we have in place works. It doesn’t work 100 per cent of the time, or at least I can’t say it does. I can’t say anything more than that, ie that’s how the system is designed to work. I need to check underlying raw data to see whether or not there is any evidence of a bug, known or unknown, impacting on the data”?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t think I needed to make a response along those lines, though I clearly understand with hindsight that perhaps I should have done.
Mr Beer: If we go forward to page 548, please, which is over the page, you say:
“It appears that there was legal oversight of the provision of my report at Fujitsu. No one from [Post Office] or Fujitsu suggested that my report needed to detail any bugs, errors or defects which had arisen in Legacy Horizon or Horizon Online. David Jones …”
That’s the lawyer?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “… had been involved in Mrs Misra’s case, in which he had passed on to [Post Office] my raising the Craigpark issue (which lawyers in Fujitsu and [Post Office] knew about anyway). The Callendar Square bug that featured in Mr Castleton’s case and Mrs Misra’s case. Mr Singh was well aware that my approach in Mrs Misra’s case was that the underlying data needed to be considered for any evidence of a system issue at a particular branch. I now know that [Post Office’s] Criminal Law Team were aware of the Receipts and Payments Mismatch bug. Plainly, there was a far greater exchange of information between Fujitsu and [Post Office] about the problems that arose from time to time in Horizon than this. But even in terms of just those individuals dealing with this request for a report, there was clearly knowledge within [Post Office] of a number of Horizon-related problems. No one suggested that these should be included in the report that [Post Office] had asked me to produce.”
You say, “No one suggested this should be included in the report”?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Forgive me whilst I take a lozenge.
Sir Wyn Williams: Yes.
Mr Beer: This report was going to form the basis of a witness statement that you were in due course to sign?
Gareth Jenkins: I don’t think I knew that at this time.
Mr Beer: By the time that you signed the witness statement, you knew that the report that you drafted formed the basis of that witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: That witness statement was going to be backed by a statement of truth?
Gareth Jenkins: And I believed that the report, as it was written, was true.
Mr Beer: Did you not know that the picture was more complex than was presented in the final draft of your 5 October generic statement?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not sure what you mean by “more complex”.
Mr Beer: Well, for example, you didn’t include a caveat linking your limited information on any individual case, or saying that Horizon was not fault free?
Gareth Jenkins: I accept that I did not include those caveats. I didn’t think I needed to, at the time.
Mr Beer: This tends to suggest, this paragraph, that you thought perhaps that it was the responsibility of others to tell you what qualifications you needed to include in your report and then witness statement. Is that what you were intending to say here?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I would – I was seeking guidance. I didn’t receive any guidance to do other than that which I did and, therefore, I think there were a number of opportunities where others who were more knowledgeable of these things than me to actually suggest that I added further things in to there, and they didn’t suggest that to me.
Mr Beer: Thank you. Now, I think it’s right that you prepared a draft report on 2 October 2012, and then a witness statement on 5 October 2012, and between those two events there had been some revisions. One of those revisions was that somebody had inserted the words “I understand that my role is to assist the court” in the opening paragraph of the witness statement?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: Those words weren’t in the draft report that you had submitted originally back on 2 October?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: Do you know who inserted them?
Gareth Jenkins: I think I’ve recently understood that it was one of the lawyers in Cartwright King but I’m not 100 per cent certain of that.
Mr Beer: Did you ask a question about why somebody had written something into your witness statement that said, “I understand my role is to assist the court”?
Gareth Jenkins: No, it didn’t seem to – it didn’t seem to contradict anything that I’d said in the report, so I thought it was just something that needed to be included in it as a legal document.
Mr Beer: You, I think, had had some concerns about both Post Office’s and Fujitsu’s management of the prosecution cases and your requirement to give input into them?
Gareth Jenkins: I’m not quite sure –
Mr Beer: Taking a step back, by October 2012, you said that their management of the case was chaotic, the Post Office.
Gareth Jenkins: And certainly the subsequent events over the next few months with this use of the generic statements was even more chaotic, yes.
Mr Beer: By this time, did that concern about their management of the cases trigger anything in you in thinking why is somebody adding “I understand my role is to assist the court”?
Gareth Jenkins: No, it didn’t. I just assumed everyone – that others knew what they were doing.
Mr Beer: Did you ask yourself: are there any legal reasons for including this?
Gareth Jenkins: I assumed that the reason it had been added in was it needed to be done and I couldn’t see any harm in it being included in there.
Mr Beer: If we can go back to your witness statement, please, page 194, paragraph 571. You’re dealing with the last paragraph of your signed witness statement of 5 October 2012, the generic witness statement, and you say:
“The concluding paragraph of my witness statement addressed the fourth and final issue.”
That’s the fourth and final issue in Jarnail Singh’s email of 1 October?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: “To recap, Mr Singh had asked me to confirm that innocent human error was unlikely to produce large discrepancies over a number of months. The wording I used in response was …
“‘In summary I would conclude by saying that I fully believe that Horizon will accurately record all data that is submitted to it and correctly account for it. However, it cannot compensate for any data that is incorrectly input into it as a result of human error, lack of training or fraud (and nor can any other system)’.”
By this, were you seeking to imply that Horizon was both robust and infallible?
Gareth Jenkins: I certainly wasn’t saying it was infallible.
Mr Beer: Were you seeking to imply that it was robust?
Gareth Jenkins: I was saying that it would accurately record what had happened and I believed that it did.
Mr Beer: You knew, I think, that the Post Office wanted statement, to use this statement, to rely on it to show that Horizon was robust. That had been what was said in Mr Singh’s email to you?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember the exact wording but I’ll take your word for it.
Mr Beer: What did you think, then, the purpose of your generic statement was? What was it going to be used for?
Gareth Jenkins: To show that you could rely on the data that was found in the audit trail from Horizon.
Mr Beer: That limited purpose?
Gareth Jenkins: And that’s what I was trying to say here, yes. And the description in the statement is primarily about describing how the audit trail worked and how it was actually recording the data that had been input into the system and how it was stored into the audit servers and retrieved for ARQ data.
Mr Beer: What this doesn’t do is look at the other side of the coin and look at instances where Horizon doesn’t accurately record all data because of bugs, errors and defects in the system, does it?
Gareth Jenkins: I am not aware of bugs, errors and defects that stop it recording things, other than the hardware issues that we spoke about this morning, and that was already being referred to in the integrity paper that was associated with this statement.
Mr Beer: Can I turn briefly to look at the use of the generic statement, POL00097061. If we scroll down, please. I should give you the context by looking still further down. The case of Patel:
“Hi Gareth …”
This is from Sharron Jennings in the Post Office:
“This is the one that you supplied the expert report and witness statement for the week before last. Apologies for not explaining that properly in the previous email, it was a blanket email for all witnesses! It is unclear at this stage who will be required as witnesses and which evidence will be accepted without the need for attendance. I just thought if I let everyone know they can pencil it in and then I can let you know nearer the time.”
Then scroll up.
Gareth Jenkins: Well, in fact, if you go further down there, then what had happened was I’d had this email out of the blue asking me to reserve some diaries for a court date for something I’d never heard of before.
Mr Beer: Yes.
Gareth Jenkins: And that was what I was flagging up here at this point.
Mr Beer: Let’s look at that, then, if you want to look at it.
I think you accurately summarised it. Keep going. There’s an email from Ms Jennings, saying that Patel is up for trial at Peterborough Crown Court, yes?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Then you reply further up, saying:
“[I don’t know anything] I’m not aware of this case …”
Yes?
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, yeah.
Mr Beer: Then she gives that explanation:
“This is the one you supplied the expert report for”, et cetera.
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: Then further up, please, which is where I want to look here, your reply:
“Thanks for the clarification. I had not understood that that related to a specific case.”
There, the “that that related to a specific case” –
Gareth Jenkins: By that I meant the witness statements.
Mr Beer: – ie, the generic witness statements?
Gareth Jenkins: The generic witness statements, yes.
Mr Beer: So she was saying you supplied a witness statement for the case of Patel and you’re saying, “Well, hold on, I’d understood that my generic witness statement was not in relation to a specific case”.
Gareth Jenkins: Correct. That was my understanding.
Mr Beer: Continuing:
“… I thought that was a general statement. If I am required to go to court for that, I think I need to have some more background on the specific case and exactly what is [required]. I appreciate that is not covered by my statement, but if I need to be an expert witness, I need to understand what is happening.”
By this time, had you realised that you were performing the function of an expert witness?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but without understanding what that really meant.
Mr Beer: What did you understand it to mean?
Gareth Jenkins: Someone who had good knowledge of how Horizon operated.
Mr Beer: This is a slightly different formulation from what we’ve seen before, where you are referring to yourself as an expert witness, isn’t it?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because – well, I knew people had been referring to me as an expert witness in the past and I now realise that I just didn’t know what an expert witness actually meant. But I assumed that what I’d – the function I’d performed in the past was what was required of me again.
Mr Beer: By this time, were you aware that an expert witness had a special status in legal proceedings?
Gareth Jenkins: I was aware that there were some differences but I didn’t understand all the legal niceties involved in such things.
Mr Beer: What was the extent of your understanding of the “some differences”?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, for example, I think I was aware that I was allowed to sit in court and listen to other witnesses, which I understand a witness of fact was not allowed to do.
Mr Beer: From whom did you gain that understanding?
Gareth Jenkins: Because I was asked to do so during Mrs Misra’s trial.
Mr Beer: Who explained that the reason you were allowed to sit in was –
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember –
Mr Beer: – because you were being treated as an expert witness?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, but that was all I knew that made it any different from anyone else, but I didn’t really understand the legal niceties of it, I’m afraid.
Mr Beer: Who explained that to you?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember. Possibly Mr Tatford, I’m not sure; or it could be Mr Longman. I don’t know. I don’t think Jarnail Singh was actually around very much during the trial.
Mr Beer: By this time, 19 October, did you understand that an expert witness had particular responsibilities?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did not.
Mr Beer: Did you draw a link between describing yourself as an expert witness and the line that had been inserted in your generic witness statement that you had a duty to the court?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I didn’t realise there was any link between them. I do now but I didn’t then.
Mr Beer: Did you, when the line was inserted in your witness statement, with you saying to the defence and to the court that you understood that you owed a duty to the court, ask anyone, “What duty do I owe to the court?”
Gareth Jenkins: I just assumed it meant to tell the truth, which is what I’d do anyway.
Mr Beer: Did you question why somebody was inserting something into your witness statement that was very obvious to you already?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I didn’t.
Mr Beer: Did you ever ask, “What are these duties that I owe”?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I did not.
Mr Beer: If you were completely oblivious to the status and responsibilities of an expert witness, why were you describing yourself as one?
Gareth Jenkins: Because that’s what other people were describing me as.
Sir Wyn Williams: In Mrs Misra’s trial, were you present throughout the whole time?
Gareth Jenkins: No, and, in particular, I was only present during the first week. I never heard the evidence that she gave, and the first time I saw that was about two or three years ago, when preparing for –
Sir Wyn Williams: Yes. So it follows from that that you weren’t present when the judge summed up to the jury?
Gareth Jenkins: No, because that was the second week. I’d gone home after –
Sir Wyn Williams: That’s all right.
Mr Beer: You were expressing some concern, in this chain, that your generic report was being used, was being deployed, in a specific case?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Can we turn forward, please, to POL00097137 – can we scroll down, please, and again, please – an email from Rachael Panter to you, under the heading “Horizon expert report”:
“As you may already be aware, your expert report detailing the reliability of the Horizon system …”
First of all, did you understand that you had produced an expert report?
Gareth Jenkins: I had produced a report which then got converted into a generic witness statement.
Mr Beer: Did you understand that it was the statement of somebody who was being treated as an expert witness, or did you still regard yourself as a witness of fact, or didn’t you make the distinction at all?
Gareth Jenkins: I didn’t make the distinction. As I say, the first time I became aware of the duties of an expert witness was in about 2020/2021, something like that.
Mr Beer: “… your expert report detailing the reliability of the Horizon system …”
Did you understand that the document you produced was a document which detailed the reliability of the Horizon system?
Gareth Jenkins: I took that as a description of the document I’d produced, which I thought was more of a description of the reliability of the audit data that came out of the Horizon system, but I didn’t quibble about the difference between those two.
Mr Beer: She continues:
“… has been served as evidence in a number of Post Office cases that are at various stages of the court process, most of which are listed for trial in the early part of next year.
“It should be noted that most, if not all cases raising the Horizon system as an issue, have been unable/not willing to particularise what specific issues they may have with the system, and how that shapes the nature of their defence.
“As we already have your detailed report, I would like to serve it in each case below …”
Then six cases are set out:
“Your expert report has already been served in the Nemesh Patel case. I would like to serve your report in the remaining cases, and have attached a case summary of each case listed above so that you may familiarise yourself with the facts of each case.
“… Please could you read the case summaries attached and send 5 original signed and dated copies of your report to me as soon as possible.”
Did you understand what you were being asked to do here?
Gareth Jenkins: Not really. I think I was just being asked to actually send her five copies – signed copies of the statement and – as I responded, saying, “Well, why can’t you use the one you’ve already got?”
Mr Beer: This was a month or so after your pushback on the use of the generic statement in a single case –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – saying that you hadn’t seen the underlying data.
Gareth Jenkins: No.
Mr Beer: You’re now being told that it’s being used in six cases. In fact, it had already been served in one.
Gareth Jenkins: I think that one was the one that I was already aware of –
Mr Beer: The same?
Gareth Jenkins: – yes.
Mr Beer: What was your reaction? Did you not think, “Well, hold on, I’m similarly unhappy that my generic statement is being deployed in individual cases when I’ve seen none of the underlying data in any of those cases”?
Gareth Jenkins: I think it was – I sort of took that as read, having already made that point, admittedly to someone else, and the pushback was really, “Well, why don’t you just get on with it? You’ve already got the signed statement, why do I need to be involved?”, because I’d been told before that I didn’t need to be involved. And I also sought some guidance from management as to the fact that this had been sprung on me out of the blue.
Mr Beer: Can we scroll up, please. We see your reply:
“Can’t you use the report I have already sent to you? There is no mention of the case on the report.”
By that, are you meaning that you could just serve it times six –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – because it’s not a case-specific report; there’s no defendant name in it?
Gareth Jenkins: Correct.
Mr Beer: Then you say:
“You need to be addressing such requests through Post Office rather than to myself.”
Then:
“… there is no commercial cover in place”, ie that there isn’t any allocated spend to this?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: Is that right?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, that’s right. And I then copied the email to the people who should have been involved in sorting out those commercial niceties, and so on.
Mr Beer: Penny Thomas and James Davidson?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, and also Jane Owen, who I knew was Penny’s counterpart in Post Office.
Mr Beer: So at this point, what was your state of mind, “I’ve produced this expert report, as it’s described, which is generic; I’ve been told that it’s been deployed in the Patel case; I’ve pushed back against that, saying I’ve seen none of the underlying data; and then I’m told it’s being deployed in five other cases, can I provide some more copies of it”?
Gareth Jenkins: I was even more confused because it implied that it had already been employed in an unspecified number of cases, so – in which case, why was I being asked to sign it five times? So I was just generally confused.
Mr Beer: What about the more fundamental issue that you’d raised beforehand about the appropriateness of using a generic statement without looking at underlying data?
Gareth Jenkins: I thought I’d already made that point and didn’t feel the need to repeat it at this point.
Mr Beer: Thank you. That is all I want to ask you about the use of the generic statement.
Just one last topic before we conclude my questions, and it concerns the decision not to continue to use you as a witness in support of Post Office prosecutions.
Gareth Jenkins: Okay.
Mr Beer: Can you recall what you were told about that?
Gareth Jenkins: I can’t remember the exact detail. I’ve covered it in my witness statement but, basically, it was along the lines that I was been told that I couldn’t be used any more for some sort of legal reasons, and it was never explained to me what those reasons were. I now understand, I think, a bit more of the background but I didn’t find that out until 2020/2021.
Mr Beer: I’m going to come to the email in a moment.
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: Were there any conversations with you explaining why the Post Office didn’t want to use you as an expert witness in legal proceedings against subpostmasters in the future?
Gareth Jenkins: Not that I can remember, other than the email which I suspect is the one you’re about to show me.
Mr Beer: Yes. Can we look, then, at the email, FUJ00156923, and look at the email at the bottom of the page. We’re a year and a bit on now, December 2013.
Gareth Jenkins: I think there had been some emails between myself and Rachael Panter over the intervening months saying, “Where are we in terms of are there any more cases I need to worry about, and diary management?” And I’d effectively been fobbed off on those.
Mr Beer: Exactly so –
Gareth Jenkins: But there was nothing to say, “We can’t use you because”; it was just a case of “nothing for you to do”.
Mr Beer: I haven’t gone to those because they don’t say anything of substance and whether or not you’re to be used and, if not, why not.
Gareth Jenkins: Yeah, yeah.
Mr Beer: 3 December 2013, James Davidson to a wide group of people, including you –
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – with the subject “Horizon Integrity Challenges”:
“Folks,
“Mike, Pete and myself …”
Just decoding who that is.
Gareth Jenkins: I assume that is Michael Harvey.
Mr Beer: And Pete Newsome?
Gareth Jenkins: Pete Newsome, I would think, yes, as opposed to Peter Thompson.
Mr Beer: Remind us, Michael Harvey?
Gareth Jenkins: He was a lawyer. Well, I think he was a commercial manager but I believe he was also a qualified lawyer. But I think his role at this point was as a commercial manager.
Mr Beer: And Pete Newsome?
Gareth Jenkins: He was a liaison between Fujitsu and Post Office, and particularly involved with the prosecution side of things.
Mr Beer: “… met with Post Office lawyers last Friday to discuss the proposal Post Office have come forward with for an Independent External Expert review of the integrity of the Horizon system. In essence, the problem that Post Office have is that they are being given legal advice that the ‘rules of evidence’ mean that submissions which in the past have sufficed to support prosecutions (namely the input from Gareth Jenkins), cannot be used in future prosecutions. They are therefore seeking the view of an external expert who can warrant that the data they are basing prosecutions upon has integrity.
“In the meeting, we were successful in moving the discussion away from a full ‘system’ review (which would not achieve their aims and is unworkable in practice) to focus it on what we are calling the ‘Core Audit Process’. This scope is aligned to the audit we were intending to do in 2012 and for which we had already agreed a terms of reference with KPMG.”
That was the paper for which you had written some terms of reference?
Gareth Jenkins: Indeed.
Mr Beer: “The attached slides describe the Core Audit Process and sets out a terms of reference for an audit that is achievable and that we could support. We have made it clear to Post Office that whilst we will cooperate and provide access to our experts (in a controlled way) we reserve the right to challenge any findings of an external expert. The support will also be chargeable and a CT …”
What’s that?
Gareth Jenkins: Commercial Terms. So it’s basically a contract between Fujitsu and the Post Office.
Mr Beer: “… is being drafted by myself in parallel. All content has been reviewed by Mike, Pete, Gareth.”
Scroll down:
“Can you review the terms of reference?”
I’m not going to read the rest of it.
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: The first paragraph of that email explains that the problem that the Post Office has is that they are being given legal advice that the rules of evidence mean that the input from you cannot be used in future prosecutions?
Gareth Jenkins: And I took it at face value as that, and I thought that meant okay, I was off the hook and didn’t need to get involved in any more legal proceedings.
Mr Beer: Were you content with that?
Gareth Jenkins: Oh, yes.
Mr Beer: You were happy not to be involved?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, because I preferred to be working on my day job, which was designing changes to the system, rather than being involved in prosecutions.
Mr Beer: Was that the extent of what you were told as to why you were no longer the Post Office’s expert witness of choice in their prosecutions?
Gareth Jenkins: As far as I can remember, yes.
Mr Beer: Did they ever tell you about a legal advice that they had received which concluded, in broad terms, that you had broken your duties to the court and had given evidence which was unreliable and, therefore, you could not be relied on for those reasons?
Gareth Jenkins: No, I didn’t understand any of that until 2020.
Mr Beer: Thank you.
Sir, they are the only questions that I ask.
Sir Wyn Williams: Thank you.
Just on this, the only persons who communicated with you in this email, they are your fellow employees of Fujitsu?
Gareth Jenkins: Well, they’re more senior than me –
Sir Wyn Williams: More senior, but Fujitsu people?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes.
Sir Wyn Williams: So the explanation to you came from your own employers, in effect?
Gareth Jenkins: Yes, I’m just checking that. As far as – yes, all those people there, I think, were Fujitsu people.
Sir Wyn Williams: Right. Did you ever have any direct reason from Post Office employees as to why you were going to not be a prosecution witness any more?
Gareth Jenkins: Not that I can recall.
Sir Wyn Williams: Right. Fine. Thank you.
Mr Beer: Thank you very much indeed, sir. They are the questions that I ask. I think we’re going to start with Core Participants tomorrow at 9.45.
Sir Wyn Williams: All right. That’s it for the day.
(3.57 pm)
(The hearing adjourned until 9.45 am the following day)