POL00381455
POL00381455
Personal and Confidential
AP meeting with Susan Crichton — 31* July at 148 Old Street
I opened by saying that I had wanted the meeting because I felt uncomfortable about the fact that SC
and I had not had a conversation since the SS interim report had been published a few weeks ago. I
had not wanted to go on my holiday without talking to her.
I first asked about her health as the last time I had seen her on her own before the June Board
awayday, she had been unwell.
SC was very cool in her manner at the outset. She said she “had a number of questions” which she
wanted to ask me. She started to write down what I was saying in her notebook and I remarked that
it seemed that this was turning into something very formal which was not what I had had in mind. I
wanted to talk to her about how she was and how she felt about things.
She said she had been very unhappy about being kept outside the Board meeting for an hour and
then told that her presence was not required. She said she was not prepared to be treated as a
“scapegoat”. I said that I hoped she knew me and the Board well enough to know that we were not
interested in finding scapegoats. That was not my approach and no-one had it in mind to make her
into one. I apologised for the fact that she must have felt uncomfortable outside the Boardroom and
explained that after PV had, at my request, introduced the agenda item on SS privately, the
discussion had developed quickly and it had not been appropriate at any point to bring her in. The
agenda had been really packed, partly because we had had to add this piece of business, and I had
decided that once the Board’s private discussion was over, there was no time to pursue the
conversation further with SC. I had realised that would be difficult for her. She said that she needed
to know that she had the full confidence of the Board. No-one had told her what had been said at
the Board, though she understood that there had been some difficult questions especially from VH.
Her reputation was at stake.
I did not comment in detail on the Board discussion.
I said that the SS interim report and the timing of its publication had been potentially very serious
indeed for the PO in terms of our national reputation and the effect it could have on our funding
negotiations with the Government. In the event, it had not come out so badly partly because of the
way the Minister had handled her statement in the House of Commons. But it had been very
worrying at the time.
The Board had been unsighted on the issue. They had naturally been alarmed when they had found
out what had happened and the fact that the Board paper had been so bland had not helped to build
their confidence in the handling of the affair. (There had been the possibility of a discussion on a
Board call the previous week but because we had needed to discuss issues in relation to the strategy
and funding negotiations with the Government which required Board decisions, these had had to
come first and we had run out of time for the SS issue before people had to leave the call).
In the course of what followed, the following points were made:
POL00381455
POL00381455
SC said that she now thought it had been right to have the enquiry, as it has revealed the imbalance
of power between the PO and sub postmasters which needs addressing. This was a huge and
complex issue for the business.
I commented that I thought that although the outcome had in some ways been good for the PO, the
way the process had been handled had been deeply flawed. I had backed SC’s judgement on the
appointment of SS because we did not want to appoint one of the big four, she seemed very
confident in them and given her strongly stated opinion to having an enquiry in the first place, I had
wanted her to feel some ownership of the process once we had decided to go down that route. We
had lost control of the process; I had lost confidence in Simon Baker early on but had been told
repeatedly that he was good and capable of handling the role. I said that we should never have got
into a position where we did not see the draft of SS’s report until days before its publication (the
complete version Friday before Monday publication).
I understood that SS’s investigation had to be independent but in the civil service there would have
been someone marking it who was close to all the key people (SS, JA, JFSA) and knew what was
going on between them. By the time I had found out how SS had, in effect, changed the TOR to
which they were working, it was too late to retrieve the situation. The organisation and people in it
should have had proper time to consider SS’s findings and respond to them. SC questioned my
understanding of the end game and said the PO had seen the report days earlier; she had been
contacted by the CEO while unwell about this and had come back early from her holiday to handle it
which had not been ideal.
SC said that as a lawyer it was inappropriate for her to influence the key stakeholders. She would
have been criticised had she become close to them. I commented that if she had felt unable to play
that role, she should have flagged that up and someone else could have been brought in to perform
it (Privately I am astonished at this view which I simply do not recognise from my experience
elsewhere).
SC said she was in a very difficult position now. She needed the Board’s full confidence because so
many aspects of what she was being asked to do were beyond her control. I said that I realised she
could not control everything, but this was not like an unexpected meter exploding out of nowhere.
We needed to identify the worst things which could happen, face them, and work out how we would
mitigate them. We needed to stay close to the key players and ensure that we were building their
trust and we knew what was going on between them. This would take time. But I did not accept the
degree to which SC claimed that they were beyond her control — they needed managing.
I asked about SS’s role going forward and said I thought it was critical that we capped off their
involvement at the 47 cases already in their frame. We could not allow them to become involved in
any additional cases as we would then find it much harder to bring their involvement to an end. SC
said that would be very difficult as JA and JFSA rated them. I pointed out that we did not. It was up
to us to propose very quickly alternative arrangements going forward which would command the
respect of JA and JFSA.
We then talked about cost, the need to appoint any “independent” figures very carefully and
rigorously, and the need for SC to flag up any difficulties which were getting in the way of her taking
POL00381455
POL00381455
the work forward (see my email of 31° July to the Board recording these points). I made the latter
remark to make sure SC had not excuses for not delivering.
In the course of the discussion, SC agreed that Simon Baker had not been of the right calibre to carry
out the work required and he was now leaving the business. The difficulty was that there was an
acute shortage of able people in the business. I asked why we hadn’t decided to bring someone else
on from outside to perform the role and SS said cost had been an issue. (This was somewhat ironic
given what SS had already cost us).
The problem was that there were too many well paid people in the business not performing as they
should be. I said I had thought this issue was being tackled through more vigorous performance
management, to which her reply was that she was referring to people below SLT. I commented that
the business needed to extend its approach to managing the SLT to the levels below that.
SC apologised at the end of the meeting for the fact that I had felt let down over this and I again said
I was sorry about the way she been left outside the Boardroom. I said that I hoped she would be
able to sort out her health satisfactorily.
By the end of the conversation, SC’s tone was less formal and cool but my confidence in her
judgement on key issues and in particular her “fatalism” or reluctance to see the importance of
managing events and people rather than standing back and letting them happen, were very
troubling though I did not say this in terms.
I deliberately did not say anything about the Board’s or my confidence in her and after the beginning
of the conversation, she did not raise the point again. I did not explicitly raise the issue of the way
SS’s costs had been allowed to spiral out of control because I did not want the conversation to
become the “post-mortem” and there were already enough issues on the table between us.
PS At one point, SC referred to a recent conversation with the BIS team at which one of them had
commented that they had always felt uncomfortable about the Horizon cases. When she had asked
why they hadn’t pursued that, the person had said it was because the PO had always been so
forceful in its defence of the issue and its handling.