Campaigner Alan Bates appears before Post Office Horizon IT inquiry – UK politics

At 10 o’clock the next state of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry starts, and I will be following it closely here. Alan Bates – the real life character featured in the ITV drama that did so much to focus attention on the scandal will take the stand at Aldwych House and tell his story. 

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Alan Bates has been talking about how he did his due diligence before taking over the branch he ran

In his statement he said a key attraction to working with the Post Office was that it would provide secure employment, based upon the fact that it provides a community service, and has an established brand. He also looked forward to the opportunity to run a secondary retail business alongside the branch.

KC Beer is asking him about when the Horizon IT system was installed in his branch.

Bates says:

I expected to be able to track down any transaction that I’d undertaken – myself or my staff had undertaken – at the branch, one way or another. There are a variety of ways of interrogating systems, and the data on the systems, and I presumed that the system would enable you to do that at the outset.

There was very little flexibility in Horizon, as I saw it at that time, for reports that you could control the parameters of your searches. There were a set of reports, don’t get me wrong, there were a set that were already built into the system, but they were quite restrictive. It did seem to cause problems.

Away from the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry for a moment, here is a video clip put out by Rachel Reeves from her media round this morning, where the shadow chancellor promised a Labour government would deliver two million more NHS appointments, emergency dental appointments and primary school breakfast clubs funded by a crackdown on tax avoidance.