A Post Office boss should be sacked after admitting he “bantered” about Horizon IT issues during the scandal, subpostmasters have demanded.
Ex-postmaster Lee Castleton said the Post Office should dismiss Rodric Williams, the firm’s current head of legal for dispute resolution and brand, after he agreed an email chain joking about postmasters' concerns was “top bants between mates”.
The inquiry was shown a 2014 email in which Patrick Bourke, the Post Office’s then government affairs and policy director, described a BBC probe into Horizon as “clutching at straws a little bit”. Mr Williams replied saying: “I swear you are the only person I’ve met more cynical than me, and then by some considerable margin...” The pair then joked about this being “ a serious badge of honour”.
Asked by inquiry lawyers if this email exchange was “in the banter category” or “top bants between mates”, Mr Williams replied with a laugh: “I’d say, yes.” Mr Castleton, who was left bankrupt after losing his court fight against the Post Office over a £25,000 shortfall at his branch, said Mr Williams “should absolutely not continue to hold his role”.
Ex-subpostmaster Lee Castleton was played by Will Mellor (left) in ITV's Mr Bates vs The Post Office (Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock)“I don’t think the Post Office should be involved in remediation at all – especially not people like that,” he told the Telegraph. “This is the reason why so many people feel re-criminalised going in to ask for money – so if anybody feels re-criminalised in that scenario because of people like that then those people don’t deserve to be in those jobs.”
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Chris Head, who was formerly Britain’s youngest sub-postmaster and a victim of the scandal, added to the Times: “His involvement in helping postmasters’ attempts [for compensation] is absolutely scandalous, it’s disgusting. “He should be removed, alongside anybody who was involved in the actions of the Post Office.”
The inquiry later heard Mr Williams branded Mr Castleton as “someone who wants £5.2million after providing inadequate services for all of nine months”. He made the remark about the former subpostmaster, who was played by Will Mellor in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, in a November 2013 email.
Mr Williams, who joined the organisation as a litigation lawyer in 2012, admitted there was a "bunker mentality" among the organisation's staff in relation to the media's treatment of Horizon. The inquiry saw a journalist's request in 2014 asking when the Post Office last did research into subpostmasters’ satisfaction with Horizon.
In an email about the request at the time Mr Williams said: "We don't need to do research on Horizon - it's the system we provide to our agents and require them to use. If agents don't like it, they can choose not to provide services for us. The vast majority of our agents and other users work with it just fine, and we're not required to bespoke our point of sale accounting system to the whims of each individual agent."
Asked by the inquiry whether his view at the time was that "subpostmasters could either use Horizon or leave", Mr Williams told inquiry lawyers: “Yes.”
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