Ex-Fujitsu engineer says he was never aware of duties as expert witnesspublished at 13:35 British Summer Time 25 June

13:35 BST 25 June

Emma Simpson
Business correspondent, at the inquiry

What to make of the ex-Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins? So far at least, he comes across as an engaged and straightforward witness.

His defence is clear - he was never made aware of his duties as an expert witness saying, “I’d have done things differently if I’d been aware of my responsibilities".

He’d had no legal training.

Did he feel under pressure by the Post Office or PO lawyers, he was asked.

There were cases where they were “trying to put words into my mouth”, although he said he wouldn’t have allowed them to do that unless he agreed with them.

He was clearly an expert in how Horizon worked but his credibility as an expert witness was shot to pieces by 2013.

The BBC has spoken to former sub-postmistress Seema Misra outside the Post Office inquiry, after she read the apology by ex-Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins in his witness statement.

Asked if she accepts his apology, she replies: "No."

"He could have done it ages ago," she says, adding no-one can understand what she's been through.

"Let's see how cooperative he is with the inquiry," she says - he's giving the first of four days of evidence, follow along by pressing watch live above.

Image source, PA Media

The case of Seema Misra, a sub-postmistress who was wrongly sentenced to 15 months in 2010, is one of the most widely known miscarriages of justice which happened during this period.

Gareth Jenkins was called on to give evidence in court to the effect that Horizon worked as intended, which helped put Misra behinds bars while she was pregnant.

Misra was sent to Bronzefield prison on the day of her eldest son's 10th birthday after being wrongly convicted of stealing £70,000 from her Post Office branch in the village of West Byfleet in Surrey.

She served four-and-a-half months and gave birth to her second son wearing an electronic tag.

Earlier this year, the BBC revealed how Jenkins rephrased some of his expert testimony to avoid "damaging concessions" on the advice of a Post Office prosecutor.

Misra and her lawyers should have been made aware of those changes under a legal process known as disclosure, but they were not.

When she became aware of the documents this year, Misra told the BBC they "could have saved me, or it could have turned the case the other way round".

• You can read the full story here

Here's the section of Gareth Jenkins' witness statement where he talks about Seema Misra's case:

"I am truly sorry that she was wrongly convicted. I did not know that Mrs Misra was pregnant at the time of her conviction and only learned of this many years later.

"This makes what has happened even more tragic. I can only apologise, again, to Mrs Misra and her family for what happened to her.

"I did not lie in my written evidence nor in my oral evidence.

"I did not intend in any way to be misleading. The idea that I would lie about Horizon, knowing that an innocent person could be convicted and imprisoned, is completely abhorrent to me."

He wrote that lawyers "wanted me to say that it looked as though Mrs Misra had stolen money rather than that it was incompetence".

Tom Espiner
Business reporter, at the inquiry

Gareth Jenkins was the expert witness in the case of Seema Misra, who was jailed while pregnant, and on her son's 10th birthday.

In his written testimony to the inquiry, Jenkins said he was "truly sorry" that Misra had been wrongfully convicted, adding that her being pregnant makes her conviction "even more tragic".

"I can only apologise, again, to Mrs Misra and her family for what happened to her," he wrote.

Talking to the BBC in a break in proceedings, Misra was visibly emotional.

In tears, she said she did not accept his apology, after what she had gone through.

She added she wanted to hear "why on earth he did what he did", which she hadn't heard yet.

Beer is really drilling down into what went on behind the scenes with the Castleton case.

In June 2006, a meeting was held to discuss the case, which Jenkins attended - he says he had "no recollection" if his duties as a potential witness were discussed then.

In late July, Jenkins was formally asked to provide expert testimony in the case.

Another engineer, Anne Chambers, did the initial analysis on his behalf, and then Jenkins reviewed the work and agreed to "front" the final report.

When she submitted her analysis, she wrote: "If this isn't at all what you wanted, please let me know - I don't really know what I'm doing."

In September, Jenkins was told he wouldn't need to give evidence in the case after all for "evidential reasons".

He replied, "fine, I won't try and understand what this means" - Chambers was selected as the expert witness, though Jenkins provided some further analysis.

The inquiry is told Chambers was an "extremely reluctant witness" but Jenkins says they didn't discuss that in depth - adding he wasn't aware of the "gory details".

Image source, POST OFFICE HORIZON IT INQUIRY

Beer is going into Castleton's case in detail. The inquiry is shown a 2005 document where Jenkins provided notes on how the Post Office could rebut his evidence of Horizon failings.

He was asked by lawyers if they could argue there was "nothing wrong with Horizon because it simply reflected the information entered onto it".

Jenkins says he believed that to be true at the time and "I stand by that today as well".

In the same document, Jenkins said the most likely explanation in Castleton's case would be "misoperation or fraud" rather than bugs - but says the underlying data would need to be investigated to come to a full conclusion.

He accepts that without that, his assessment would be speculation.

The inquiry is then shown a later document where that reference to needing to see the full data - which Castleton's lawyers had already requested - has been removed.

Jenkins says he does not know why that was changed, adding: "Perhaps I didn't realise at the time how important that qualifier was."

Now we're hearing about the case of Lee Castleton, a sub-postmaster who was wrongly pursued in the civil courts by the Post Office for supposed losses at his branch.

He always argued the Horizon system was to blame.

The inquiry is shown a request from Post Office lawyers to Jenkins for evidence rebutting Castleton's claims about Horizon, setting out what was required of him and his duties to be truthful in court.

Jenkins says he can't remember receiving the letter and only became aware of it when the police investigation into him began in 2020.

Beer pauses to "help" Jenkins and warns him that discussing his conversations with solicitors could be read as him waiving privilege in those matters, meaning the inquiry would be entitled to ask about those conversations more broadly.

The lawyers tells him he can waive that privilege if he wants to "but doesn't want him to do it by accident".

"I don't want to do that either," Jenkins says, to some laughter from former sub-postmasters listening to the evidence.

Image source, PA Media

Horizon system was essentially robust, says Jenkinspublished at 11:29 British Summer Time 25 June

11:29 BST 25 June

Tom Espiner
Business reporter, at the inquiry

Gareth Jenkins came out with some strong statements at the beginning of his evidence today, saying in his opinion, the Horizon system was robust.

Jenkins was one of the software engineers who helped design the system, and he acted as an expert witness in cases which saw sub-postmasters, including Seema Misra, wrongfully imprisoned.

He lived and breathed the development of Horizon, although he wasn't its chief architect.

Jenkins later pulled back a bit from his views about the integrity of Horizon, saying with hindsight he should have done more research into bugs and errors before giving evidence in court.

He added that perhaps he had been "wrongly confident" that Horizon accounting bugs were quickly resolved, adding with hindsight, he would have done things differently.

Jenkins' views - that Horizon is essentially robust and on the whole was working well - have echoes of George Thomson, the former leader of the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters.

Thomson said in his evidence to the inquiry last week that the Horizon system was "very robust", and that the only scandal was the Post Office's "stupidity on steroids" in handling the situation.

Jenkins unaware of advice he was 'fatally undermined' as witnesspublished at 11:18 British Summer Time 25 June

11:18 BST 25 June

Emma Simpson
Business correspondent, at the inquiry

We’ve spent the morning digging into his role at Fujitsu and what Gareth Jenkins knew about bugs, errors and defects.

Dive into his witness statement and you can read his evidence on his role as an expert witness.

He says he never knew about the so-called Clarke advice until 2020, seven years after barrister Simon Clarke warned the Post Office that Jenkin’s role as an expert witness had been “fatally undermined” because he didn’t reveal the existence of bugs.

He advised Jenkins shouldn't be used again to give evidence.

“This advice was highly critical of me and has had far reaching consequences. I was not aware of this advice (nor any such criticism of my integrity) at the time it was produced.”

And this was while he was still assisting the Post Office with “various matters” including the group civil proceedings.

This was the legal battle between sub-postmasters at the High Court. It wasn’t until the quashing of convictions at the Court of the Appeal in 2020. That’s pretty extraordinary.

The inquiry is being shown a document which refers to changing Horizon's suspense account function where disputed transactions at Post Office branches could be held while they were investigated and trading could continue.

Beer points out that reducing that function meant that sub-postmasters who had discrepancies in their accounts would have to pay the difference quickly in order to keep trading.

That document - which Jenkins says he contributed to but did not author - refers to having the ability to "more tightly control and police the use of the suspense accounts".

Beer asks if the Post Office believed these accounts were being used by sub-postmasters to conceal fraud, but Jenkins says he wouldn't have been aware of that.

Jenkins does say there were "various discussions about the behaviour of postmasters" but believes the main reason the Post Office was "keen to reduce the usage" of those accounts was in order to cut back room costs.

Beer returns to Jenkins's suitability as a witness in Post Office prosecutions.

Jenkins says his approach to his work as an adviser was "primarily to look at what was happening in a particular branch at a particular time", rather than take an overall view of the Horizon system.

He says he "didn't see the giving of evidence" as being any different to that approach.

We're likely to hear a lot more along this line of questioning in the coming days.

Jenkins has dismissed the suggestion that he was the "chief architect" of Horizon, saying it was another engineer, Alan Ward.

The inquiry has previously heard highly critical evidence from another manager on the Horizon project, who said there was poor coding, standards and testing within the team in the late 1990s.

That manager, David McConnell, said there was "a total disengagement of the chief architect Gareth Jenkins", and described the team as being like the "wild west" and "crazy".

Jenkins tells the inquiry today that he did not have overall responsibility at that time, and did not work closely enough with the team working on the payments systems to know if all those problems existed.

Image source, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Beer is pressing Jenkins over his suitability as a witness in Post Office prosecutions if, as he has told the inquiry today, he did not have a full overview of all the known problems with Horizon.

Jenkins says no one from the Post Office ever came to him to make him aware of the problems he did not already know about.

He also says it didn't occur to him to ask for more information about bugs which he hadn't already been drafted in to advise on fixing.

Jenkins says he "was confident, possibly wrongly so, [bugs] were quickly fixed and weren't left to fester in the system and have a larger impact".

Asked if it was appropriate to rely on this confidence when giving evidence in court, Jenkins says: "With hindsight, I would have done things differently."

This portion of the questioning is all about who knew what and when about bugs in the system, both with the earlier version of Horizon and then its online upgrade.

Jenkins says that he did not personally have a knowledge of all the various known bugs in the Horizon system, and that there were "problem managers" and people in a customer service department who might have had an "overall knowledge of how the system was operating".

Jenkins says he usually became aware of problems when he was drafted in to advise on resolving them, which Beer describes as "happenstance".

The lawyer presses him over how he could give evidence in court about Horizon if he didn't have a full oversight of all the problems that were being discovered.

Jenkins says he didn't know he needed that information in order to give evidence, adding: "In hindsight, I realised that I should have been doing more research."

Image source, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

We've just heard Jenkins make some defiant comments about the reliability of Horizon and tells the inquiry he doesn't accept all the findings in the Alan Bates court case, which ruled there were problems with the system.

He says "even today I don't know what bug actually did cause that problems that people have suffered from".

Asked if he believes the system was "robust" - a word which was used repeatedly by the Post Office to defend it - Jenkins says "it depends exactly what you mean by robust" and says it was "not infallible".

He goes on to say there were "probably individual problems which affected individual branches" but that he "thought the system was working well".

There's a brief pause as Beer realises Jenkins is being troubled by a fly which is buzzing around him.

"If it becomes too much, we'll break and get rid of it," the lawyer says.

Someone watching today's evidence mutters: "It's a bug."

Unlike with previous witnesses, Jenkins did not choose to make a statement at the outset of the session.

During previous hearings, some witnesses - though not all - have chosen to begin by making an apology to sub-postmasters.

We're straight into the questioning, which is focusing on Jenkins' background and role with Fujitsu - the company that built the flawed Horizon IT system - or ICL, as it was known when he joined.

He was one of "10 to 20" people working on the Horizon system from 1996 onwards, and from 2008 to 2015, Jenkins worked on Horizon Online, the inquiry is told.

Jenkins was on a retainer to work as a consultant for Fujitsu until 2022 for "around half a dozen days a year", though he says he did very little actual work for the company from around the Covid-19 lockdown onwards.

However, during the group litigation action - which was brought about by Alan Bates and others - he was spending a couple of days a week assisting with that case.

Before the evidence begins, Sir Wyn Williams, chair of inquiry, tells Jenkins that he has a right to decline to answer a question if there is a risk the answer would incriminate him.

Jenkins is told he must make the chair aware if he does not intend to answer a question on those grounds.

We already know Jenkins is under police investigation and his lawyers have unsuccessfully petitioned the inquiry to rule his evidence can't be used against him.

Image source, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Today's evidence session at the Post Office Inquiry has begun.

Gareth Jenkins - the former Fujitsu engineer who helped design the faulty Horizon software at the centre of the Post Office scandal - is being sworn in. He will be questioned by inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC.

You can watch live by pressing play at the top of this page.