What were PR executives involved in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal doing? - Robert Minton-Taylor

It was reported in the national press in December 2023 that the interim head of PR and media at the Post Office between February 2012 and December 2012 helped write a ‘story’ vigorously defending the faulty Horizon IT system that was then ‘cut and pasted’ as evidence in witness statements used in the prosecution of Post Office operators.

It's alleged that the Post Office’s media team was asked to “Combat the assertion that the review is an acknowledgment that there is a problem with Horizon.”

The criminal prosecutions expert to the ongoing Post Office enquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is reported to have said that: “A form of words was put together … a significant part of that asserting there were no problems … even where faults were being understood [by the Post Office].”

There are two professional bodies governing the behaviour and ethical conduct of public relations practitioners in the UK – the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), the world’s only chartered PR body, with 11,000 members and the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) that looks after the interests of 35,000 individual members either working as freelancers, agencies or corporations in 80 countries.

Under their rules members are expected to maintain the highest standards of professional practice, integrity, confidentiality, financial propriety and personal conduct in carrying out their duties.

Andy Green, founder of AndyGreenCreativity, and I have asked the CEOs of the CIPR and the PRCA to investigate any alleged professional misconduct of their members working for the Post Office and Fujitsu on the introduction of the Horizon IT software programme. Andy and I fully acknowledge that junior PR people working for the Post Office and Fujitsu on the roll out of the Horizon IT software may not have been fully aware of the consequences of their actions in massaging the messages being put out by their respective organisations to the media.

But someone on the PR teams at the Post Office and Fujitsu should have been more intellectually curious to question why so many were being accused of fraud.

It simply is not a defence in PR to say you didn’t know or were ordered to do something which you clearly thought was wrong.

It is the essence of our profession that we ensure that communications are honest, truthful and transparent and that clearly that was not the case here.

On a personal note I regret that it was only after watching the ITV dramatisation 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office' that spurred me take action on this matter with the CIPR and PRCA.

I should have taken a leaf out of my journalist training to ask the who, why, what, where, when and how when this scandal first reared its ugly head in the late 1990s.

Robert Minton-Taylor is a visiting fellow at Leeds Beckett University and a public governor for Airedale NHS Hospitals Trust.