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Witness Name: Mark McLean
Statement No.: WITN07280100
Dated: 03 May 2023
POST OFFICE HORIZON IT INQUIRY
FIRST STATEMENT OF MARK MCLEAN
I, Mark McLean, will say as follows...
if
Until leaving Royal Mail Group in 2015, I had undertaken a myriad of roles
across the group from Postal Delivery Cadet (1984) through to an Operations
Manager working alongside my present employer, Bank of Ireland.
From reading through the documentation, there appears to be a single
reference to NBSC. NBSC was a support function that was in place before
Horizon was even a programme & it was during this period that I was
involved. All of my comments are based on these facts so I am a little unclear
as to the value my statement will provide.
My primary role was working within the NBSC as a telephone agent before
moving to head up the team. As I have stated above, this was at a time when
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the responsibility of this service desk was to support subpostmasters on
operational queries. As branches started to migrate to Horizon these
branches were managed by the Fujitsu helpline, which was outside of my
remit/responsibility.
. My recollection is that prior to & during this time the ‘then NBSC’ (managed by
Post Office) were given little more than ‘awareness’ training as there was no
expectation that we would be managing/servicing the calls as they were all to
be undertaken by the Fujitsu helpdesk. During this time I was not involved in
any projects, meetings or initiatives in relation to Horizon other than migrating
the telephone management to the new provider. My responsibility was to
manage the network who had yet to migrate & for those branches that had
migrated, to direct them to the Fujitsu helpdesk.
. I think that it would be fair to say that the ‘then NBSC’ were very sympathetic
towards the subpostmasters who were calling as they did not feel that the
Fujitsu helpdesk was supporting them in the manner that they had become
accustomed to. The team had established good working relationships with
the subpostmasters that called the NBSC before it started to migrate to the
new provider. By the nature of the calls that we were handling it was clear
that subpostmasters were becoming hugely irate/frustrated & unfortunately
we did not have the knowledge to support them. I cannot really comment on
the service they received from the new NBSC.
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6. I don’t believe that the role that I held during this period would offer any real
insight that could inform/influence this investigation.
Statement of Truth
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