Horizon boss was also chairman of courts during Post Office cases

Tim Parker accused of a conflict of interest after attempts to block legal appeals by postmasters

‘For all its faults, Horizon is not a bad system at all and we’d incur risks if we looked to replace it’

THE former chairman of the Post Office presided over its attempt to block an appeal by convicted postmasters while he was at the same time leading the country’s courts service.

Tim Parker has been accused of a conflict of interest over his role as chairman of His Majesty Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS), while occupying the same position at the Post Office.

Under his leadership the Post Office tried to block appeals by postmasters and mistresses against convictions for theft and fraud as a result of the flawed Horizon computer accounting system.

Mr Parker issued an apology on behalf of the Post Office when one group of 44 postmasters finally had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal in October 2020.

But critics have now pointed out that he would have previously overseen the decision by the Post Office to spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on legal fees in an attempt to block appeals.

Mr Parkerwas appointed chairman of the Post Office in October 2015, two years before 555 sub-postmasters launched a group legal action against the organisation.

In April 2018, he was appointed chairman of HMCTS, which oversees the running of the country’s courts, including the Court of Appeal.

Kevan Jones MP, a member of the Horizon compensation advisory board, said: “The fact that Tim Parker was the chair of both the Post Office and the courts service has certainly raised people’s eyebrows. Mr Parker needs to say exactly what his role was, what he knew and when he knew it. From 2015, before Alan Bates’ court case against the Post Office, he oversaw the spending of taxpayers’ money defending something that was indefensible.”

Over the preceding years the Post Office had defended the use of Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system and between 2009 and 2015 prosecuted hundreds of postmasters using flawed evidence of fraud based on the accounting system.

While he gave his £75,000-a-year salary at the Post Office to charity, Mr Parker has been accused of doing nothing to halt the plight of the postmasters and allowed his chief executive to pursue the strategy of aggressively pursuing them through the courts.

Following his appointment as chairman, Mr Parker maintained that Horizon should not be scrapped and said that to abandon the computer system would incur “considerable risk”.

In June 2016, he told Sub Postmaster, the official journal of the National Federation of Subpostmasters: “I’ve been involved in some major IT transformation projects, and the amount of cockups, delays and problems we came across don’t bear thinking about. I think that, for all its faults, Horizon is not a bad system at all and we’d incur considerable risks if we looked to replace it.”

This came despite a confidential report by the forensic accountants Second Sight, commissioned by the Post Office, having described the Horizon system in April 2015 as in some cases “not fit for purpose”.

Mr Parker was also leading the Post Office in March 2019, when it tried to get the senior judge in the case brought by the group of postmasters led by Mr Bates to be replaced on the grounds of bias. The Court of Appeal threw out the attempt by the Post Office to force Mr Justice Peter Fraser to recuse himself from group litigation, ruling that the application “never had any substance”. Mr Parker, 68, has now told The Daily

Telegraph that because of his role as chair of both the Post Office and HMCTS he had recused himself from the process of trying to get the judge removed.

The Post Office eventually agreed to a £58 million settlement with the postmasters in December 2019, after Mr Justice Fraser ruled that bugs, errors, and defects in the Horizon system had caused shortfalls in branch accounts.

The year after, following the successful appeal by an initial 44 postmasters and mistresses to overturn criminal convictions linked to the Horizon scandal, Mr Parker issued an apology on behalf of the Post Office.

Mr Parker did not respond to requests from this newspaper for an explanation of his role in the Horizon scandal, but limited himself to issuing a brief statement through British Pathe, the film archive firm he owns.

The statement said: “In light of the ongoing public inquiry, Mr Parker has asked me to let you know that he is doing no calls with the media, at all.

“To the question on recusing himself, he has asked me to tell you that that is correct. Also that he was appointed chair of HMCTS in 2018, several years after POL [Post Office Ltd] ended prosecutions of sub-postmasters.”