James Gregory
Reporting from the inquiry

An issue with inquiries of this nature is that the events, meetings and documentation being discussed is in some cases from almost 20 years ago.

Stevens is taking Cook through minutes of meetings which the managing director would have seen at the time, but often in his testimony this morning Cook has sought to claim he could not remember some of the specifics.

One such meeting, on 22 March 2006 - a matter of days after Cook was appointed to the role - discussed reported problems with the Horizon software.

But Cook says he does not "remember specifically" whether this was referring to software in the "testing phase or production".

He says he does not remember what he would have said at the time in relation to this being brought to his attention.

The inquiry is now being shown minutes from a February 2005 board meeting, which was the first one Cook attended after joining.

During that meeting they discussed negotiations with Fujitsu to obtain a modernised version of the Horizon software, which the Post Office wanted to be cheaper and faster than the original.

The inquiry lawyer asks if he can remember questions being asked about Horizon's accuracy at that meeting.

Cook says he recalls there being a "level of contentment" with Horizon's functioning but not its cost, and says he didn't question it because he was new to the board and thought he might be going over old ground.

Inquiry lawyer Stevens is now asking about Cook's knowledge of Horizon and turns his attention once again to his witness statement

Stevens presses Cook about a line in the statement where he says he was aware of being asked about Horizon's reliability in terms of system availability and accuracy.

Cook says that the issues he was more aware of at that time were questions of whether the Horizon IT system was there when it meant to be there - in other words, was the system turning on when postmasters logged into their computers?

He admits that later on that functionality - of the system actually being unlocked and turned on - became an issue.

"I was assured at the time that there were no critical bugs," Cook's statement reads, before asking: who assured you?

Cook answers by saying people working in IT would have taken him through demonstrations of the system as well as another former Post Office managing director, David Smith. "This was an environment where the accuracy of the system was not in question but there were issues about overnight performance," he says.

Earlier this morning, Alan Cook said he knew there were court cases against postmasters and sub-postmasters but he didn't realise the Post Office had initiated the prosecution in many of the cases.

The inquiry has restarted and we’re returning to the same theme of questioning.

Alan Cook, former managing director of the Post Office, is being shown another document. This time it is a letter from 2008 to sub-postmaster Sami Sabet setting out fraud proceedings over a £13,000 loss.

That letter - which is signed by Cook - includes a reference to it being up to the Post Office to decide "whether there is a criminal case to answer".

He is asked again by inquiry lawyer Sam Stevens: how did you see this and not know the Post Office was taking people to court?

"That is not how I read it," he says, adding: "I didn’t believe we were the only party who made that possible."

Horizon was rolled out by the Post Office in 1999. The system was developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu for tasks like accounting and stocktaking.

Sub-postmasters and postmistresses complained about bugs in the system after it falsely reported shortfalls - often for many thousands of pounds.

Some attempted to plug the gap with their own money, as their contracts stated that they were responsible for any shortfalls. Many faced bankruptcy and lost their livelihoods as a result.

The issue was actually the result of the faulty software, which wrongly made it look like money was missing from a number of branches.

The Horizon system is still used by the Post Office,, external which describes the latest version as "robust".

• You can read more about Horizon, and the scandal in full, here

This morning's evidence has been extraordinarypublished at 10:43 British Summer Time 12 April

10:43 BST 12 April

Peter Ruddick
Business reporter

It is impossible to overstate how extraordinary this morning's admission was.

The man who was in charge of the Post Office at the height of this scandal was unaware his own organisation had the power of prosecution.

Alan Cook says he assumed when he heard people mention "going to court" that the police or Crown Prosecution Service were involved. Generally, they were not.

That remained the case, he says, for three years.

Cook has pointed the blame for that lack of knowledge on the unclear wording used on certain documents, the structure of the business and his own assumptions.

Are those reasons fair? That is for the inquiry to judge.

However, it is hard to imagine another circumstance where a managing director has freely admitted how little he knew about how his own business operated.

• Alan Cook, managing director of the Post Office from 2006 to 2010, is giving evidence - hundreds of people were prosecuted while he was in charge
• He started by offering a "personal apology" to wrongly convicted sub-postmasters, saying it is an "important thing for me to say up front"
• He said he didn’t know the Post Office was doing the prosecuting in most cases
• He said he was aware there were court cases, but assumed the police or public prosecutires were involved
• It wasn't until more than three years into his job he realised the Post Office could prosecute someone without any review or approval from another body
• He admitted "too much assumed knowledge” - and said there would have been a "higher bar" had a third party brought the proseuctions, rather than the Post Office itself

Cook says he “took comfort” in knowing the Royal Mail Group had a legal team and assumed there was some oversight from there on the quality of legal decisions.

He's asked whether relying on that legal department was an error in hindsight, Cook says it was.

"I shouldn't have allowed the organisational structure to give me a sense of less accountability," he adds.

Alan Cook is now being asked about the oversight at board level and whether his investigation and security team ran probes into the prosecutions.

We wouldn't have been prosecuting each case at the board level, he says, admitting that "the organisation was too large".

He says that the Welsh example of Noel Thomas provided just before was indeed notable, but says that when he saw - at the time - that postmasters were pleading guilty, that would've confirmed that prosecutions were being carried out fairly.

He now realises, he says, that that was not the case as postmasters were being told to plead guilty.

James Gregory
Reporting from the inquiry

We've had the first laugh of the day as counsel for the inquiry Sam Stevens seems to mispronounce the name of the Welsh village of Gaerwen - one of the branches which was the centre of a fraud investigation by the Post Office.

There's a wry smile from the Welsh chair of the inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams.

But that's quickly followed by a tense exchange between Stevens and Cook.

Stevens is taking Cook to task on whether he should have known prosecutions were being initiated by the Post Office.

Cook is again emphatic in his denial that he had any knowledge this was happening and maintains he did not know the company was the "final decider in so many cases to prosecute".

Stevens asks about the the prosecution of Noel Thomas, who was jailed for false accounting in 2006 after his books fell short by £48,000.

They're looking at an investigations report detailing Thomas' case.

Stevens asks if Cook would have been told the Post Office decided to prosecute.

Cook makes the point again that he didn't realise the Post Office had the power to take the case to court itself.

James Gregory
Reporting from the inquiry

We're just pausing for a brief break in proceedings today. Already there's a clear theme developing this morning.

Inquiry lawyer Stevens presents Cook with documents he would have been privy to, which he says spells out that the Post Office was behind many of these prosecutions.

Cook then denies he had any knowledge and says he took the language used to mean the cases were being brought by independent authorities.

Stay with us as we bring you a few more lines from the morning's line of questioning.

Cook is being shown more internal documents from his time at the Post Office where specific investigations against sub-postmasters were discussed.

But he says that even if he read those papers, they still would not have alerted him to the Post Office’s broad powers to take people to court.

Where allegations of fraud were presented, Cooks says he assumed this was primarily about customers rather than members of staff.

The inquiry's lawyer keeps coming back to one question: how could you not know the Post Office was taking these big legal decisions itself?

The committee is now being shown a document that outlines an investigation activity report looking at concerns about the use of cheques as a payment method.

In it, Cook says that he "voiced an opinion" about taking steps to drive conformance, which included by "sanction if necessary".

"That doesn't really sound like me," Cook says. He then reminds the hearing that cheques were a lot more common back then and the Post Office wasn't in a position to halt those being used as that would pose an issue for customers.

The challenge was the procedure was too cumbersome in the first place, he says of the system in place.

"It is harder to conform if the process is complicated," he says, adding that you can "engineer" these processes out.

One of the things that Cook says he did when he came onboard was that he actually took the Horizon fast-version training course, which he admits was "one of the most stressful days", but at the time showed him that it's a complicated thing to do.

Image source, Post Office Inquiry

Let's take a step back to explain what the Post Office scandal is.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing because of incorrect information from a computer system called Horizon, in what has been described as the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice.

The Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people between 1999 and 2015.

Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service(CPS).

Some went to prison for false accounting and theft. Many were financially ruined.

In 2017, a group of 555 sub-postmasters took legal action against the Post Office.

In 2019, it agreed to pay them £58m in compensation, but much of the money went on legal fees.

A draft report uncovered by the BBC shows the Post Office spent £100m fighting the group in court despite knowing its defence was untrue. The Post Office has said it would be "inappropriate" to comment.

Although campaigners won the right for cases to be reconsidered, only 95 convictions had been overturned by mid-January 2024.

Read more about the scandal here.

Asked how much interaction he was having with the Post Office's investigations team at that time, he says he was "quite a visible boss".

The inquiry's lawyer returns to the same question and asks, in short, how could it be that at no point did anyone point out that the company you were running was taking the decision to take people to court?

Cook says there's a difference between "what's said and what's heard" and he continued to labour under his "presumption" there was some sort of oversight.

He continues: "We decide on our own and no-one can stop us? I never asked that question."

The inquiry is now asking Cook about the Post Office investigations team.

He says he understood they investigated all aspects of fraud, saying more cash went through the Post Office than other organisations.

He says the potential for fraud was "endless", but says he is mainly referring to issues with fraud as it may relate to customers.

Cook is now being shown minutes from a risk and compliance committee meeting that took place in 2006, saying that he felt at the time that he felt "quite strongly" that he should attend as managing director.

He explains how attending the risk and compliance meetings are something that he's always made a point of being a part of, regardless of the role he holds, as that's where a lot of the detail is and that's where the risks lie.

"The word compliance is important because you're working to a set of statutory rules... and compliance with the rules feels like an important thing for the boss to have his head around," he adds.

James Gregory
Reporting from the inquiry

I've been reading through parts of Alan Cook's witness statement - which has just been made available to members of the press.

Sam Stevens, counsel for the inquiry, is taking Cook through parts of that statement, in particular surrounding his knowledge about the prosecutions of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses during his tenure.

As we now know, one of the key issues of this scandal is the fact the Post Office itself was prosecuting a large number of these cases.

Cook says it is one of his regrets that he did not know the Post Office was the prosecuting authority in around two thirds of the cases.

He argues the language used in Post Office documentation did not make it clear that the Post Office had initiated proceedings.

But Stevens says minutes from one Post Office board meeting outlined the company has a "principle of undertaking criminal prosecutions".

Cook says he is "not blaming others for this" but he had not before encountered a situations where a trading entity could initiate its own criminal proceedings.

Asked what he would have said had he known, he says he would have been "uncomfortable" over questions of independence and would have spelled out the risks.