UKGI00014068 - Letter from Edward Davey MP to Mary Glindon MP re: Mr Peter Holmes’ problems with Post Office Ltd

Evidence on official site

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UKGI00014068
Edward Davey MP
Mary Glindon MP Our ref: 220186
House of Commons Your ref
London
SW1A OAA
October 2010

our constituent,
i, about
ie delay in replying.

Thank you for your I
Mr Peter Holmes of
problems he experienced wi

apologise for

Under the postal sector reforms introduced in 2001 by the previous Government,
Royal Mail (which includes Post Office Ltd (POL)) was given greater commercial
freedom, as the management and unions had requested, and Government has
assumed an arm’s length role as a shareholder in a public limited company. Subject
to agreeing its strategic plan with us, the Board can structure the business as it
decides best to meet the challenges of market development and changing customer
needs.

The issues raised by Mr Holmes are operational and contractual matters for POL
and the Government does not have any role in the day to day operations of the post
office network. I understand that POL continue to express full confidence in the
integrity and robustness of the Horizon system which has been operating for 10
years and typically processes 230 million transactions a month from over 30,000
counter positions in nearly 12,000 post office branches.

The integrity of Horizon is built on tamper proof logs, real time back
ups, and absence of ‘backdoors’ so that all data entry or acceptance is at
branch level and is tagged against the log-on ID of the user. I also
understand that Horizon creates a separate audit file of every
transaction done with every record written to the log having a unique
incrementing sequence number. This is retained remotely for seven years
and cannot be altered in any way. Therefore, in any legal case relating to the
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system or allegations that data was missing, this audit log can be produced to
identify exactly what was recorded onto the system in the branch concerned
at the time concerned. Help lines are available. If an error occurs through a
user mistake — there is a full system in place for investigation and error
resolution. If there is a local disconnection of the system at a branch for any
reason, IT controls detect the outages and raise recover alerts to the branch
to check and update the accounts.

In cases of suspension and termination of contract, subpostmasters are
contractually entitled to be accompanied at appeal hearings by a National
Federation of SubPostmasters’ representative or friend. Appeals are heard
by a senior POL manager not previously involved in the case and legal
avenues are also available if the subpostmaster continues to feel his contract
has been wrongly terminated.

I have however recently met with representatives of the Justice for

Subpostmasters Alliance to listen to their concerns and my officials are
following up with Post Office Ltd some of the points made.

EDWARD DAVEY