“I’m afraid that when an incomplete curiosity … meets a toxic culture, bad things happen.”
Robert Swannell, Former Chair of UKGI and Marks and Spencer (provided evidence to the inquiry)
Boards Wales takeaways:
- There’s no such thing as ‘too big to fail’. If anything, large organisations should be especially vigilant on good governance
- Poor governance had disastrous real-world impacts that devastated lives, families and impacted on whole communities
- The scandal was rooted in IT, but flourished in poor ethics, weak organisational culture and bad decision-making
- The trade union, supposed to represent sub-postmasters, was ‘toothless…. a failure’.
The scandal
The Post Office Horizon scandal is one of the biggest examples of governance failure in recent years.
Initially an IT failure, which resulted in thousands of entirely innocent sub-postmasters being pursued for alleged financial shortfalls, it became an issue of governance when the Board ignored red flags and demonstrated a lack of sufficient expertise in IT to be able to properly hold the developer of Horizon, Fujitsu, to account.
The Institute of Directors has published a detailed review of lessons learned from the Inquiry into the Horizon scandal. The report as a whole is worth reading, and summarises the lessons as:
- New Directors quickly became absorbed into the organisation and accepted the false narrative of the situation
- The Board became a bubble and did not sufficiently engage with other stakeholders to test the validity of the dominant narrative
- Red flags were presented to the Board multiple times but not acted on
- Board members were insufficiently curious about relevant reports or information
- Perhaps controversially, the IoD recommends that ‘a high level of tech literacy should be seen as a pre-requisite for Board membership’
The scandal was only resolved when Alan Bates, a sub-postmaster from Llandudno, successfully campaigned for years over the injustice, culminating in being featured in an ITV documentary.
Alan was subsequently awarded an Honorary Degree from Bangor University for his role in bringing the Post Office to justice.
My thanks to Ian Blackburn of Sport Wales for highlighting this report.