POL00285355 - Post Office stakeholders (BEIS) document.

Evidence on official site

Stakeholders

POL00285355

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BEIS SoS

Usually the SoS has no strong feelings except not being embarrassed by us. The GLO is important because we are being
sued by Postmasters — politicians have mixed feelings about us but LOVE constituency Postmasters and will always
side with them versus us if they can. When we make that difficult it is stressful.

BEIS Minister - Kelly

Kelly shares the above and is an active Minister who wants to be more informed. She takes the hits when MPs are
cross with us — the GLO, the “sham” of the consultation process, the NFSP work etc— so she has met directly with the
team doing the consultation and meets the NFSP alone etc. Trust is built with her by being close to her team (not
UKGI) and then communicating directly as well. She would like to do more and meet more people (she told Mo that
she would like to know “what's really going on”) but has diary challenges. Her heart is in the right place and she is
much brighter than some in Victoria Street would allow. Talk to Kelly, don’t send her long academic papers.

BEIS Alex Chisholm

Alex doesn’t want us to do anything that might damage his career prospects.
Alex meets us very rarely to date. His views have been developed, starting with the last funding round, when he and
Greg Clarke concluded that UKGI had gone native and they were anxious about Government investing, via us,

commercially (not their skill set) and how did they stop us throwing “good money after bad”?

As a result, we got Tom into UKGI and then a separate and additional BEIS policy team so that they were more in
control.

He has been infuriated by the GLO which he thinks we should have settled ages ago — and said so last year.
He has to manage between us and Treasury and that is often difficult.

Overall, BEIS have a lot of conversations about us not with us — but so would a private equity shareholder and we
should not resent that, just work to improve it.

BEIS Policy team

Carl and Eleanor etc are very pleasant and just try to grease the wheels between us, Kelly etc.

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BEIS Comms team

They and our Comms team works closely with each other — they seem to get on well but Kelly has a dig occasionally
about them being listened to more. She clearly feels they are better at political news management. They may be: we
always tend to hide away as much as we can and sometimes we need to tell our story.

UKGI

UKGI has the role of overseeing Government’s commercial interests. They are generally ineffective and pleasant.

UKGI Tom C

Tom and team (he prefers Alex Cole). Tom admires Alex Chisholm and is scathing about everyone else. He knows they

have too many people etc. His role is to ensure they are protected as shareholders so he will focus on decision-making:

more to the Board, more formal reporting and more assurance. If he feels he is being obstructed, he is very angry and
difficult and Tim has taken the view we should just suck it up and appease him. He is often Executive in tone and not
tactfully so. In addition to his formal duties, he has a lot of deal experience and can be helpful in how we approach
decisions. That said, I don’t believe that has changed our minds on anything...In practice, BEIS will disavow Tom
whenever it suits them: he is now man-marked on the GLO sub-committee by Richard Watson.

UKGI Tom A

He is UKGI but does policy. He has no influence and is endlessly bureaucratic: Mo despaired of working with him.