WITN10370148 - Email from Jonathan Swil to Christa Band re: Post Office

Evidence on official site

WITN10370148

WITN10370148
From: Swil, Jonathan
Sent: 01 April 2014 19:42
To: Band, Christa
Subject: FW: Post Office
Christa
To fill you in on what happened after you left.
1 Chris talked about how the CEO and others are focussed on dealing with concerns about whether the Scheme
itself has been “ fair” (as opposed to Pot Office’ s treatment of SPMRs vis-a-vis the underlying facts of their
claims). We (or more so Rodric and I) talked about how it is really a meaningless/nebulous legal concept and that
there’ S no obligation to be fair in some general sense to SPMRs in the scheme so that if we haven’ t treated some
applicants “ fairly” (e.g. being heavy handed with our investigation of their complaint), there is some obligation to

compensate those applicants. He wants us to think about what fairness means in the context of the scheme. Plainly
there are different ways of being fair and measuring it, not all of which are relevant in a legal context but I will have a

think of some ideas as it feeds into what they want from us on point 2. This may be where JR comes in but it doesn’ t
mean that compensation is the end point. They didn’ t say anything about our recommendation that we seek advice
on JR but we may want to say what we say about fairness with an eye to JR concepts, even if we don’ t express it in
legal terms. It seems to me fairness could mean

- treating all applicants consistently

- assessing all complaints by references to the same, objective criteria i.e. appearance of impartiality

- giving applicants where possible access to the same information we have (Chris talked about in, say, the financial

industry the “ asymmetry” of information between regulated entities and customers and thought it a relevant concept
here)

- giving all a chance to be heard (i.e. by inviting applications to the scheme) and reasons for rejection from scheme/
mediation or etc.

- with a view to your point about other SPMRs’ expectations, not taking unexpected steps which would benefit any
SPMRs if only they had known to apply i.e. farness might go beyond the scheme and apply to any SPMR.

- agreeing to institute the scheme itself. We didn’ thave to do even that. Any expectations of precisely how they would
be treated in the scheme are therefore beyond “ fairness”

Anything else?

I think the point of this is to try to put an end internally to the idea of compensating people who have complained

about how they have been treated in the scheme. i.e. if we can say we ve done the things above or (which ever of
them are relevant) then we should stand by that and not think we need to be sweet and kind and hold applicants’
hands and not be mean to them (sorry, but that is what it seems to me they were saying the CEO thinks).

2 Carolyn below (the consultant they have brought on in the last day or so) has been tasked with preparing a
PowerPoint which will be going to the CEO and Exco setting out next steps and recommendations. Her
slides are based on our paper from yesterday. She will be sending it through later tonight or tomorrow
morning. Belinda (who seemed completely sick to death of all of this by the way and described herself as
“ frazzled” ) has asked that in addition to including some wording on what “ faimess” means, to revi
comment on the slides during the course of tomorrow. Let me know if you want to be involved in that. They
are on another tight timetable so they are expecting our input tomorrow. Given it’ s a PowerPoint which
Carolyn has largely already prepared, I don’ t think it will require a great deal of time.

Jonathan

From: Swil, Jonathan
Sent: 01 April 2014 19:14
To: ‘carolyn.low
Cc: Band, Christa
Subject: Post Office

Carolyn
My details are below and Christa is copied.
Kind regards
Jonathan Swil

Managing Associate (Solicitor, New South Wales)
Linklaters LLP, London

tal AE
Fax

WITN10370148
WITN10370148