Petition to strip ex-Post Office boss of CBE hits 100,000 after ITV drama
A petition demanding ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells is stripped of her CBE has gained tens of thousands of signatures in a single day - reaching over 100,000.
It follows the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office examining the IT scandal that led to hundreds of workers' lives being ruined and some wrongfully convicted. More than 700 branch managers were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015, in what has been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
Ms Vennells - the CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019 – is now facing renewed calls to be stripped of her CBE awarded in 2019 for services to the organisation. In 2021 she apologised for the “suffering” caused after 39 subpostmasters’ convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal.
But a petition on 38 Degrees, which was set up three years and won just 1,000 backers, now appears to have sky-rocketed in the last 48 hours. The campaigning website shows the petition reached the 10,000, 20,000, and 50,000 threshold in the last two days amid renewed publicity over the scandal.
Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Wednesday a Tory minister also suggested Ms Vennells should consider forfeiting her CBE over the scandal. Kevin Hollinrake, the minister responsible for postal services, said the issue needed to be "looked at" as he faced a grilling on compensation to the victims.
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He said: "I've got to say if I was Paula Vennells - ultimately you've got responsibility for what happened, you are the Chief Executive. If I was Paula Vennells I would seriously consider handing that [CBE] back voluntarily". He added: "But we've got an Inquiry... looking at all the evidence. It will report and that should identify who is responsible, in the Post Office or indeed potentially in Fujitsu, and those people wherever possible should be held to account".
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Pressed on whether any individual whose lies or dishonesty has led to an innocent person going to jail should be prosecuted, he said: "That seems reasonable to me. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a prosecutor, so there needs to be a legal route to that." The Mirror revealed last month that Alan Bates, who is played by the actor Toby Jones in the ITV drama, turned down an OBE as others continue to suffer so badly.
He said: “The first thing that sprang to my mind while reading the letter was Paula Vennells still had a CBE. I felt so deeply insulted. She presided over a policy of harassing hundreds of innocent people. It’s not just that the Government hasn’t asked her to return it. What’s even worse is that despite knowing the strength of feeling about it, how people have suffered and some cases died on her watch – she doesn’t feel inclined to give it back.”
In September 2020, an independent public inquiry into the scandal, chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams was established. It became a statutory inquiry in June 2021 and is ongoing.
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