In Ed Davey's reply to Bates he says the government has an "arms-length relationship" with the Post Office so it has "commercial freedom to run business operations" without interference from its only shareholder.

He says he appreciates the concerns, but a meeting "would not serve any useful purpose".

Bates goes on to say it was "very hard to engage" the government on the issue.

Beer quotes from Bates' witness statement, in which he said Sir Ed's letter appeared to be a standard template response, and from a letter sent to Sir Ed at the time, in which Bates describes the reply as "disappointing" and "offensive".

Bates' letter also describes Sir Ed's 2010 response as "little different to the one I received seven years ago" from the minister responsible for the Post Office in 2003.

In another later, he also criticises Davey's comment about the government having an "arms-length relationship" with the Post Office, saying it is this attitude that has "allowed a once great institution to be asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits".

The inquiry now looks at a letter Bates sent to the former minister for postal affairs, Ed Davey, on 20 May 2010, just two weeks after the general election.

In his letter, Bates writes on behalf of JFSA, and lays out that they have found there is "nowhere else to turn for help".

"In every instance the Post Office acts as judge, jury and executioner," Bates wrote, adding that accused sub-postmasters were then "deserted" by the NFSP. He said that there was evidence that Horizon was faulty and it could "easily" be found.

In the letter Bates further calls the Post Office’s “flat refusal” to allow expert examination of the system that is holding back this “major scandal from breaking” and that it is “just a matter of time until the real truth about the Post Office and Horizon is exposed”.

He also explained how the Post Office "stonewalled" anyone who contacted them or their MPs. Bates then asked for a meeting with Davey.

Sir Ed, who is now the leader of the Liberal Democrats, served as a minister in the coalition government.

Asked why he's dedicated the time since he left the Post Office in 2003 to his campaign, instead of returning to other work, Bates says the "key issue has always been to expose the truth".

He says he didn't set out to spend 20 years doing it, nor expect to do so much of it by himself, but that as the scandal became more complex, it got harder to share the work.

"It was encouraging along the way. One of the things we did do is bring people together," he adds.

He says that, before the campaign, "people were lost out there...they were wandering around wondering, ''What have I done wrong?'"

"They were suffering so badly," he says. "It had an enormous effect on their lives."

Asked about what challenges the Post Office put in front of them, Bates laughs and says "disclosure is a good one".

He goes on to say "all they did is cause problems" and says they were not forthcoming about details of cases.

"They used to take months and months to progress" in an initial mediation, he says.

Bates also said it felt like he was banging his head against a brick wall to get anything out of the Post Office "because they were determined to protect the brand at all costs".

"They didn't want anything coming out or being disclosed that might cause damage to post office" he added.

In case you missed it today's session began with a long statement from inquiry counsel Jason Beer on the Post Office's late disclosure issues.

Sam Hancock
Reporting from the inquiry

Alan Bates described himself earlier as stubborn. It's this characteristic, he said, that has seen him through the sub-postmasters' fight for justice - not something he "set out to spend 20 years doing".

Since returning from the morning break, a lot of the evidence we've seen shows just how fastidious Bates has been in his bid to first make issues with the Horizon IT system known and then how the Post Office dealt with them.

He sent letters not just to various Post Office managers, but a former MP and the National Federation of Subpostmasters too.

In one such correspondence, he tells his support manager at the Post Office: "It seems your organisation will do anything and everything to try and keep the failures of Horizon hidden."

There's then a line, which inquiry lawyer Jason Beer KC says could be seen as "prophetic", where Bates says he can "assure you of my continued and now increased resolve to bring the real facts" to the surface - "regardless of whether it takes years".

There are loud laughs around the room, once again, when we're given a moment to read that line for ourselves. One thing seems clear - Bates is well liked by the majority of those watching on.

Beer is asking Bates a series of questions about the support offered by the National Federation of Sub-postmasters (NFSP) to those involved in the Horizon scandal.

Bates is very clear in all his answers that the NFSP did not offer him or anyone else any help.

Asked how much the NFSP has helped him with seeking compensation, and how much it helped other sub-postmasters, Bates says he was not offered help and that he has "not heard of one instance" where the NFSP did such a thing.

Beer now asks Bates about the setting up of Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), the campaign group intended to draw attention to the scandal.

Asked who he meant when he said elsewhere that sub-postmasters had been "abandoned" by other organisations, Bates names the National Federation of Sub-postmasters (NFSP), the membership organisation tasked with representing sub-postmasters.

"The federation was absolutely useless. They were just another department of Post Office," he says.

He adds that there was an "awful lot of pressure" from the federation to support Post Office.

Bates then throws Beer off by bringing up a letter that was going to be discussed later in which the NFSP says it is "now of the view that Horizon works well and that there are no real problems in Post Offices".

Image source, Post Office Inquiry

The inquiry barrister now asks Bates why he thinks the Post Office was trying to keep the “failures of Horizon hidden”.

Bates says there were a number of reasons.

He says the field personnel didn’t understand the issues “to any great depth” and just seemed to follow the corporate mantra of "Horizon is robust and everyone else is wrong".

Bates says they also did not seem to want to engage in any useful discussion about how to improve things and that when they did do anything it was all on the surface, "for show rather than to change things in any meaningful way".

The inquiry is now looking at a letter Bates sent to his Post Office manager following the termination of his contract.

In it he says the Post Office seems willing to do "anything and everything to try and keep the failures of Horizon hidden", regardless of who it has to "trample" in the process.

And, in words that now feel prophetic, Bates describes his "continued and now increased resolve" to bring the issue to the attention of "those who will have no choice but to act, regardless of whether it takes years".

Image source, Post Office inquiry

The inquiry is going over a letter about the decision to terminate Bates' contract with the Post Office.

It describes him as unsuitable to be a sub-postmaster.

Bates says when he joined the Post Office he was sold the position as being a "partnership" with them but he soon learned this was "one sided" and "basically you do whatever you were told".

"They didn't like it if you raised any queries no matter how justified they were," he adds.

Image source, Post Office Inquiry

The inquiry is now going over a letter sent on 20 January 2004 by the general manager of the Post Office's commercial network to Betty Williams, Bates’ MP at the time.

The letter states that a “comprehensive review” had been undertaken into the issues raised by Bates and that the decision to terminate his contract was “not only correct” but “the only sensible option”.

Asked whether he was involved in the review, Bates says he wasn’t and that it was one of his “big objections” that no one ever contacted him about the issues and that he was never asked to participate in any review, which he says was “carried out behind closed doors” before his contract was terminated.

Sam Hancock
Reporting from the inquiry

During that break, I caught up briefly with Jo Hamilton, a former sub-postmistress who was falsely accused in 2006 of stealing £36,000 from her Post Office branch in South Warnborough, Hampshire.

She was persuaded to plead guilty to a charge of false accounting, before her conviction was eventually overturned in 2021.

Hamilton's here today, as she has been in the past, sitting with her legal team at the front of the room.

She tells me Alan Bates is a "good man" and that his evidence shows "how annoying they [the Post Office] found us".

"He knew far more than I knew about computers so while he knew he had done nothing wrong, they told me I had and I believed them. That's the difference," she says.

I ask her if anything she's heard this morning has surprised her, to which she laughs and says simply "no" - before putting what's left of her coffee down and rushing back into the inquiry room as Bates' evidence resumes.

Asked whether he received any response to his letter to Leighton, Bates says he got an acknowledgement from Leighton's office, but no response.

Beer then shows the inquiry a response Bates did receive from someone in the Post Office's operations department.

The letter refers to visits by Post Office personnel to Bates's branch as part of steps to resolve the balancing issues.

Image source, Post Office inquiry

Bates confirms that two people did visit the branch, but says they could access the system "no further than I could, so it was absolutely no help at all".

Asked whether he received additional training on the Horizon system, as was also claimed in the letter, Bates says he can't recall being given any.

In his letter to Leighton, Bates wrote that he did not have "endless funds to fight this injustice".

Asked why he was concerned about the funds available to each side to fight the case in court, he replies: "I was being advised you probably wouldn't afford to take Post Office on."

He says the management style of the Post Office was "outdated" and tried to "bludgeon its will" onto sub-postmasters.

His letter also warned of the risk of bankrupting sub-postmasters and them losing their businesses.

The inquiry starts up again with the barrister showing a letter from 7 August 2003 to the then-chairman of Royal Mail Allan Leighton.

Bates says he wrote it to "make him aware of what was going on" if he had not known in the hopes he could take it onboard and intervene.

Jason Beer KC says it was still early on during the Horizon roll-out but Bates exclaims "I knew it was wrong".

He says early issues had already appeared and he knew others had experiences issues as well.

"Surely someone should have been looking at all of this and taking it into consideration," Bates says.

Before the break Alan Bates explained he did not follow the instructions from the Post Office to "bankrupt" himself.

Inquiry barrister Jason Beer went on to ask Bates about the termination of his contract, to which Bates said "they didn't like me standing up to them" and that the Post Office didn't have answers to his questions.

Watch the exchange below.

The inquiry has resumed. You can watch by clicking Play at the top of this page.

Stick with us for all the updates.

Theo Leggett
Business correspondent

The latest hearings of the Post Office inquiry kicked off with a lengthy and scathing statement from Jason Beer KC, the barrister leading the inquiry’s own legal team.

In it he described how, despite having been set strict deadlines, the Post Office had produced thousands of relevant documents late, many of them over the past week.

Beer said such late disclosures were something which the Inquiry had become “extremely and unfortunately familiar with” since it began.

He described the situation as “sub optimal” and “highly disruptive”.

He added that since the last set of hearings concluded in February, more than 73,000 documents had been submitted.

However, the inquiry chair, Sir Wyn Williams, insisted the hearings would continue as scheduled.

There would, he admitted, be “cases where documents have not caught up with witnesses, so to speak, which is highly undesirable”.

But he insisted he was “unshakeable” in his belief that the Inquiry should not last a day longer than strictly necessary.

Image source, Post Office inquiry

While we wait for the inquiry to return, you can find Alan Bates’ written witness statement on the inquiry website here, external.

In the statement, dated 29 February, Bates responds to written questions from the inquiry. It's a lengthy read - more than 60 pages - but provides a detailed account of his version of events.

Just before the inquiry took a break Beer pulled up more pieces of evidence; including a document called Horizon Integrity. In the document, it says Bates has become "unmanageable", and Beer asks if it was ever explained to Bates. There are laughters and Bates answers, "No, not at all".

It also describes Bates as describing as struggling with accounting, to which Bates laughs and responds saying that he didn't follow the instructions of the Post Office "which was trying to bankrupt myself".

And Beer asks what was the reason of the termination of his contract, to his understanding. Bates says that they didn't like him to be standing up to them.

"The Post Office had a feeling that I was going to carry on in a similar vein going forward," he says and adds: "Unlike the reasons provided above."