Paula Vennells ‘refused to quit £50k-a-year NHS role’ after Horizon scandal broke
Paula Vennells reportedly refused to give up a job as chair of an NHS trust after news of the Post Office scandal broke.
The former chief executive of the Post Office allegedly rejected private requests from directors at Imperial Hospitals Healthcare NHS Trust for her to step back.
The trigger was only pulled when one director threatened to resign if Ms Vennells did not go, according to The Times.
The paper reported Ms Vennells gave assurances about her conduct to remain in her posts as chair at Imperial Hospitals Healthcare NHS Trust, which it said paid £50,000 a year.
Her refusal to leave meant she was in the post for a further 16 months after a judge ruled that the Horizon system was to blame for the scandal in December 2019. However, Ms Vennells remained in her role until April 2021.
A senior source told the newspaper that Ms Vennells was “quite tin-eared”.
They said: “She was told, ‘This is not the trust’s baggage, this is your baggage – why did you burden the trust with it?’”
“Someone threatened to resign. That was what finally triggered it.”
Postmasters believe Ms Vennells was at the head of an extensive cover-up of the Horizon IT scandal. But Ms Vennels claims she was misled by Post Office’s lawyers and by IT experts from Fujitsu.
She is due to give evidence to the Post Office inquiry on Wednesday, as campaigner and former subpostmistress, Jo Hamilton, called on Ms Vennells to tell the truth at the Horizon IT inquiry as she is “heading into the corner where there’s no way out”.
Ms Hamilton was falsely accused of stealing £36,000 from the Post Office branch she ran in South Warnborough, Hampshire. She pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting to avoid going to jail and was prosecuted in 2006.
The campaigner said if she was in the former Post Office boss’s position, she would “just put my hands up” and say “I’m really sorry and this is what happened’.
She added: “We just want the truth. You’d have thought a bit of her humanity would have come out and she should have done the right thing.”
The Post Office has come under fire after ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which put the Horizon IT scandal under the spotlight.
More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Hundreds of subpostmasters are still awaiting full compensation despite the government announcing those who have had convictions quashed are eligible for £600,000 payouts.
The inquiry is yet to hear substantially from Ms Vennells, but a document submitted by her lawyers ahead of a preliminary hearing in 2021 said she was “deeply disturbed” by the judgments in the cases against lead campaigner Alan Bates and Ms Hamilton in which Horizon was found to be faulty.
Ms Vennells previously said: “I am truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system.”
A spokesperson for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust said: “NHS Improvement – now incorporated into NHS England – appointed Ms Vennells as chair of Imperial College Healthcare in April 2019 as they have responsibility for appointing chairs to NHS trusts, not NHS trusts themselves.
“In late 2020, following a referral to the Care Quality Commission under the FPPR (Fit and Proper Person Regulations) and further developments in the Post Office Horizon scandal, our trust board began a process to commission a barrister to undertake a full review of the situation and to advise on any additional actions. This was not progressed, as Paula decided to stand down in December 2020. She left the trust in April 2021.”
The Independent has contacted Ms Vennells’s representative for comment.
