The woman who presided over the Post Office IT scandal should be stripped of her CBE, MPs said yesterday.
Their demand follows Friday’s dramatic Court of Appeal ruling in favour of 39 postmasters who were falsely branded criminals.
Paula Vennells, who earned £3.7million over six years as chief executive at the Post Office, yesterday quit the boards of supermarket chain Morrisons and homewares firm Dunelm.
Paula Vennells, who was chief executive at the Post Office during the scandal, should be stripped of her honour, according to MPs
She had already stepped down from other roles but is holding on to her honour for ‘services to the Post Office and to charity’.
Labour MP Kevan Jones said: ‘She was head of the Post Office and oversaw this scandal, and yet ironically received a CBE for services to the Post Office. She should voluntarily give it up or have it withdrawn.’
Marion Fellows, the SNP MP who chairs the Post Office all-party parliamentary group, said: ‘There has been a devastating failure from Post Office Ltd during Paula Vennells’ chairmanship.
‘She should absolutely be stripped of any titles which recognise her contributions to the Post Office.’
Between 1999 and 2015 thousands of postmasters were accused of stealing from their own tills. In reality the ‘losses’ were caused by computer glitches on the Post Office’s Horizon system.
In its judgement, the Court of Appeal shamed the Post Office for hounding the accused and mounting a cover-up. It said the case was an ‘affront to the public conscience’.
MPs will today demand the Government launch a full inquiry. A string of ministers responsible for the state-owned company failed to act when postmasters were wrongly convicted.
Former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Vince Cable, business secretary between 2010 and 2015, claimed he was ‘not aware there was a problem’.
Postmasters accused of theft by Post Office celebrate outside the High Court In London after they had their convictions overturned
But Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, who has campaigned for postmasters for over a decade, said: ‘To suggest that ministers did not know anything about the unfolding Horizon scandal is clearly nonsense.’
Mrs Vennells joined the Post Office in 2007 as network director, and held the post of chief executive from 2012 to 2019. She said yesterday: ‘I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to the 39 sub-postmasters as a result of their convictions which were overturned last week.
‘My involvement with the Post Office has become a distraction from the good work undertaken by the boards I serve. I have therefore stepped down with immediate effect from all of my board positions.’
The power to take away CBEs and other gongs rests with the secretive honours forfeiture committee – and ultimately the Queen. Grounds for forfeiture include a criminal conviction, misconduct or disreputable behaviour.
RUTH SUNDERLAND: Payback time for all the broken lives on her watch
Post Office Paula has finally done the right thing and surrendered her lucrative boardroom seats at two leading retailers, as well as relinquishing her duties as a Church of England priest.
Now she should go a step further and renounce her CBE, a richly undeserved award that, with exquisite irony, was bestowed on her in part for ‘services to the Post Office’.
Handing it back is the only course of action left if Paula Vennells wishes to make amends for her part in a debacle that ruined the lives of hundreds of her own sub-postmasters.
Her conscience must surely tell her she cannot cling, limpet-like, to a decoration of which she is so unworthy.
In truth it is ridiculous she was ever given such a coveted honour in the first place. Even more so that her investiture was in 2019, when the full horror of the sub-postmasters’ plight was becoming obvious.
Returning the CBE of her own accord would spare her former employer yet more embarrassment.
She would also save herself the humiliation of a noisy and well-justified chorus calling for it to be stripped from her.
Post Office Paula should renounce her richly underserved CBE, the only course of action available if she wants to make amends
There is a precedent: James Crosby, the former chief executive of HBOS, volunteered to give up his knighthood after the bank imploded in the financial crisis.
He never quite came in for the same level of venom as fellow disgraced banking boss Fred Goodwin, whose title had to be forcibly wrenched from him.
If she is to salvage a shred of her former reputation, Mrs Vennells needs to start showing real contrition.
So far, this has appeared to be slow and grudging. Fulsome apologies have been a long time coming.
Maybe she is eaten up with regret, but she has brazenly carried on with the portfolio of high-status jobs she took after leaving the Post Office. She has remained in each of her posts right until they became utterly untenable.
Seen against the wrecked lives of the sub-postmasters, her apparent determination to maintain her career and her high earnings looks at best insensitive.
The board seats at retailers Morrisons and Dunelm are the last ones to go, and now only the CBE remains.
A career ending in disgrace was not how it was supposed to be for Mrs Vennells, 62. A former Girl Guide, devout Christian and conscientious executive, she is the last person anyone would cast as a corporate villainess. In private life, she is married with two sons and lives with husband John, a former director of a chemical engineering consultancy, in Bedfordshire.
She rose from a working-class background, studying hard at Manchester High School for Girls and Bradford University. Until the Post Office catastrophe, her career, largely in retail, had been exemplary.
And so, on the surface, it seemed to continue. In her time at the helm from 2012 to 2019, she won plaudits for modernising branches and bringing the Post Office back to profit after making large losses.
It is hard to fathom how this deeply religious family woman, described by acquaintances as ‘strait-laced’, could have presided over such a brutal persecution of sub-postmasters.
In fairness, the slowly unravelling scandal did not originate on her watch. However, during her tenure at the top she missed multiple chances to halt the hounding.
As chief executive, Mrs Vennells must bear responsibility for the contemptible bulldozer tactics used against a group of brave men and women whose lives were broken.
The culture under her management was one that chose to believe its computer system instead of its staff. This was regardless of the fact that an epidemic of fraud by hundreds of people of previously unblemished character was inherently implausible.
She has presided over one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice and one of its worst abuses of corporate power. Handing back her CBE is the least she can do.
