Andy Dunks’ Big Problem

Andy Dunks giving evidence today

Fujitsu’s Andy Dunks has a problem. He signed dozens, possibly hundreds of witness statements attesting to the integrity of the Horizon IT system without, it seems, taking the relevant amount of care to see if the information he put in his witness statements was true.

These witness statements were used in the successful prosecutions of Subpostmasters. Today was about was probing to what extent Dunks knew (or should have known) the information he was presenting (or the way he was presenting it) was inadequate.

Unlike his previous appearance before the Inquiry, Dunks was given a reminder of his privilege against self-incrimination by the Inquiry chair, Sir Wyn Williams, at the beginning of the day. This suggests Dunks is now a person of interest to the ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into this scandal.

Blurred Lines

Dunks’ job as part of the security team at Fujitsu was to turn round requests from the Post Office prosecution team. They would ask for data on the operation of the Horizon system and the logs of calls made to the Horizon helpline and they would dictate how much data was presented in Dunks’ witness statements.

Dunks was required to assert that the information he was providing was not only accurate but that it demonstrated the Horizon system was operating as it should.

Because Dunks admitted he had no expertise in the technical basis of the information he was being asked to supply to the Post Office, Dunks told the Inquiry he would discuss it with the experts at SSC – the Service Support Centre on the sixth floor of the Fujitsu HQ in Bracknell. This was where the third and fourth line support engineers were based, dealing with Horizon problems and fixing them.

Having discussed the call logs or ARQ (archive transaction and branch counter) data (mainly call logs in Dunks’ case) he would then write up his witness statement. Unfortunately, he claimed the knowledge and information he supplied to the courts in those witness statements as his own, rather than an understanding he had gained from speaking to colleagues.

Jason Beer KC, who asked Dunks questions on behalf of the Inquiry, wanted to know more.

“Did you realise when you were undertaking that task, going off to speak to, or speaking down the phone to people in the SSC, writing things in your witness statements that were based on what they were telling you, about which you had no clue yourself, that you were blurring lines?”

Dunks did not understand the question, so Beer tried again.

“When you were doing this, writing witness statements that were in part based on what other people had told you, the facts themselves, you yourself, could not speak to from your own personal knowledge. Did it occur to you that you were blurring lines?”

“No.” replied Dunks.

Jason Beer KC

Peach and Chambers

We know that after SSC engineer Anne Chambers had given evidence in Lee Castleton’s case, the manager of the SSC, Mik Peach, refused to allow his staff to give witness statements, as Chambers had found the whole experience unpleasant.

Beer wondered if Dunks had ever considered the strange position he was in, providing sworn witness statements to the courts on the basis of second hand information provided by a team of people – the experts – who themselves were refusing to give evidence themselves.

“No I don’t, I didn’t see it like that, no,” he said.
“Did you think at all as to why the SSC didn’t want to go to court anymore?” probed Beer.
“I can’t remember my thought process, but I do remember that Mik Peach was quite protective of his team in all respects of doing things”, answered Dunks.

There is no evidence of Dunks having conversations with people in SSC. He said he wouldn’t call his colleagues – he would often go up to see them on the sixth floor. He didn’t take notes of the conversations or refer to them in his witness statements, but he was, of course, relying on them to inform the knowledge in his witness statements, which begged the obvious question from Beer:

“Would you agree, Mr Dunks, that you from your own perspective… you could not say that what you were being told [by your SSC colleagues] was right or wrong?”
Dunks agreed he had to “rely” on what SSC told him “because these are the people who dealt with these calls”.
“You yourself couldn’t know whether what they were telling you was right or wrong?” asked Beer.
“Yes, I suppose so yes”, agreed Dunks before applying some impressive mental gymnastics to tell Beer that because he had been told what was going on by SSC, that knowledge had become his. Or in his words: “once I’ve spoken to those people or asked questions about this, that and the other, I had that understanding. So it was within my… own knowledge.”

Flawless routine

What is extraordinary is that in his decade-long stretch of providing witness statements to the courts for the criminal prosecution of Subpostmasters, Andy Dunks did not once find a single call to the Horizon helpline that suggested IT error might be to blame for a branch discrepancy. Every single call was, according to his witness statement of “a routine nature”.

Beer explored Dunks’ methodology for doing this. A common assumption was that if the call from Fujitsu SSC was referred to the Post Office’s National Business Support Centre (NBSC) then it was not a technical fault, but a business issue or user error, especially if the call was not bounced back to Fujitsu from NBSC.

This noted Beer, involved two assumptions. That the diagnosis by SSC was correct, and that NBSC properly dealt with the call. Dunks agreed.

Beer then wanted to know about the boilerplate statement of truth which Dunks attached to every witness statement. He took it from a template which had lettered paragraphs. The paragraphs were apparently swapped in and out of each witness statement provided by witnesses at Fujitsu as required. In one version of the template statement, paragraph Q states:

“There’s no reason to believe that the information in this statement is inaccurate because of the improper use of the computer. To the best of my knowledge and belief at all material times the computer was operating properly, or if not, any respect in which it was not operating properly or was out of operation was not such as to affect the information held on it. I hold a responsible position in relation to the working of the computer.”

It does read like dreadful legalese because it is. Beer asked if Dunks was required to include this paragraph in his witness statements.

“I don’t know that the requirements were”, replied Dunks.
“Why did you include it?” asked Beer.
“Because it was in the witness statement template that we were told to use”, said Dunks.
“How did you know whether it was true or false?” asked Beer.
“Well, actually I don’t”, conceded Dunks, before realising what he was admitting to. He then suggested the paragraph was expressing his view that everything was “operating as it should and as it’s expected.”
Beer wanted to know what the “it” was in Dunks’ sentence.
“The counters and…”
“So stop there. You believe when you signed a witness statement that included that paragraph that it was testifying to your belief that the counters were working properly?”

Dunks agreed – he added that “it” also meant data integrity. Beer wanted to clarify.

Jo Hamilton, far left at the front

“So this is providing a view, an opinion, an assessment on Horizon itself in your mind?”
“In respect of the branches and integrity of data, yes, in my opinion”, responded Dunks.
“I’ll ask again, how would you know whether that was true or false?” asked Beer.
“I would have made that my opinion based on the investigation that I carried out.”
“How could you tell, how could you say there was no reason to believe that the information is inaccurate because of improper use of the computer?”
Dunks did not know. He agreed it was an “assumption” based on his “opinion on an individual basis of every call that I looked at, and I was being asked for an opinion and that was my opinion.”

Beer reminded Dunks that in his witness statement he said that paragraph Q related only to: “confirming that I had not improperly used the audit extraction software to manipulate the data I was exhibiting and that as far as I was aware the software had run properly when extracting the data.”

In fact, Beer noted, Dunks went further in his witness statement to explicitly state: “I did not believe I was verifying that the system as a whole was operating properly at all times or that there could not have been any software errors that affected any of the information held within it.”

Dunks agreed that’s what he meant.

Beer took him to a review Dunks conducted of the data in the South Warnborough Subpostmaster Jo Hamilton’s case. The call logs and summaries of their content had been appended to Dunks witness statement.

Graham Ward, a Post Office investigator, emailed Dunks after reviewing an electronic copy of his witness statement.

Ward spotted a call made by Hamilton in 2004 to the Fujitsu helpline. It was recorded as a “critical NT error” by the helpdesk operator. Ward told Dunks that this entry in the helpdesk log “appears to suggest a fault.” He asked Dunks “Can you simplify what this means?”

Dunks agreed to do so, and there, it seemed, the paper trail ended. The witness statement was not updated. But Dunks insisted to Beer he would have carried out an investigation before deciding not to update his witness statement. Beer wasn’t sure about this. He took Dunks to the call log in question and noted that it referred to two entries in the Known Error Log, one of which suggested the error had multiple causes and multiple potential solutions. Beer asked Dunks:

“So reading the entry on the helpdesk and reading these two KELs which… you would have done, how were you able to say that what you read did not disclose anything other than the system operating properly?”
“I’d had discussions with someone within the SSC to explain what was going on. We’d looked at the call to see what the steps were, and I mean this is a known error log, so these errors have been seen before”, said Dunks, a little lamely.
“Is that a good thing?” asked Beer. “How were you able to say that this had no effect on the proper operation of Horizon?”
Dunks waffled. “It was still working as expected. There may have been a fault at the counter, but again, that’s within the boundaries and integrity of the Horizon system. I believe… in my opinion… at the time it was working as it should do and there wouldn’t have been any integrity issues with the data between the branch and the Horizon.”
“Did you look at the data to see whether there were any integrity issues?” asked Beer.
“At the data?” asked Dunks.
“Yeah.”
“No.” replied Dunks.

Page Cut

Dunks came completely unstuck when he was questioned by Flora Page, a barrister representing Seema Misra. Page took Dunks to a witness statement he submitted in the Misra case on 29 January 2010, in which he told the court “I can confirm that all the calls mentioned from West Byfleet Post Office to the Horizon System help desk are of a routine nature”.

Flora Page, with Ed Henry KC on her right

The Witness Statement appeared to have been printed out alongside an email chain between Anne Chambers and Gareth Jenkins (two SSC engineers). In reviewing the West Byfleet branch date Chambers told Jenkins:

“There are several entries on the 1 Sysman 2 126023 tab which require some further investigation. I’ve added some highlighting.

“Counter 1 on 2/3 May 2006, and 4 Feb 2008. I don’t know whether the counter was replaced, or whether the messagestore was deleted and copied from another counter. The Powerhelp/TfS calls may illuminate this.

“I don’t know if the counter was used while these errors were occurring. It may have been. If they have any complaints specific to these times, perhaps they should be checked out???”

Page told Dunks that Chambers “makes it absolutely clear that the calls [to the helpline by Seema Misra] required some technical investigation and some cross-checking [of the ARQ data] to find out what lay behind them and whether they were indeed ‘routine.”

Dunks agreed that’s the intent behind Chambers’ email. Page then showed Dunks how the email chain reached him, via a message from his colleague in the Fujitsu security team, Penny Thomas. In her email Thomas told Dunks: “I requested the events to be checked to support your witness statement; I’ve had a chat with Gareth this morning and as no transaction data has been requested it is pointless going further with the exercise. However, you may like to check Anne’s comments against the calls in your witness statement.”

Page asked Dunks: “Would you accept that when you were sent this email chain, it put a burden on you to check your witness statements and make sure that what you’d said in them was correct and not misleading?”

Dunks agreed wholeheartedly, saying: “Well, that would have been my… process throughout.”
Page made sure: “So you say now, do you, that you did all the work that was set out in Ann Chambers’ witness email here?”
“I hope to think I did. I don’t remember what that involved and what I did specifically”, said Dunks.

Page pointed out his problem. “At this time there was no ARQ data. How would you have done it?”
“I had the data to carry out and to be able to make that statement. So I had the data.” countered Dunks.
“You had the call records. but you didn’t have the ARQ data, it hadn’t yet been produced.” said Page.

Dunks floundered. It was hard for him to suggest he’d done a proper (any?) investigation without the data he needed to do it. “I can’t remember what I would have done,” he tried, “but I would have done something.”
Page was having none of it: “Well, we do not see, do we, a further witness statement in which you qualify or say anything at all about the statement that we’ve just had a look at, in which you claim… all the calls were routine.”
“If the statement didn’t need updating, because that statement was in my opinion still true, there was no update needed”, replied Dunks, using the same tack he’d adopted before lunch with Jason Beer. But this time there was no escape.
“How could it still be true when those investigations had not been carried out and could not be carried out?” demanded Page.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said the skewered Dunks, “but I would have done checks.”

With his witness statements giving succour to the courts that there were no problems with the Horizon IT system, Andy Dunks condemned several dozen innocent Subpostmasters to lives of penury and anguish. There is not a shred of evidence to support his repeated claims of diligent investigation behind the statements he produced for the Post Office. I understand the well-tanned Mr Dunks is taking a holiday next month to experience the Olympics in Paris. He is still employed by Fujitsu.


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61 responses to “Andy Dunks’ Big Problem”

  1. Dunks and Jenkins were the sacrificial offerings from management at Fujitsu, basically management saving themselves from any blame..not only these two but all management should be held fully accountable.

  2. Many of these witnesses are/were not inept. They are intelligent, well-educated, and, judging by their emails, articulate. They haven’t forgotten things. They knew what they were doing. But now they have to appear dumb. The alternative is that they were part of an overarching, systematic and cynical undermining of the judicial system, from the shocking conduct of the investigations, the wrongful prosecutions, the misleading witness statements, the suppression of evidence, the unfair contracts, the hiding of reports, the ‘outspend them’ strategy, the plausible deniability, the misleading prospectus, the deletion of minutes, the missing information, the character assassination, and the lies.

    This is what corporate/government conspiracy looks like when held up to the light.

    Sometimes, in their denials, and logic-twisting, they cannot avoid absurdity.

    The computer I typed this on is, as far as I know, robust, but I must stress that on this point I am reliant on informal conversations I have had other people whom I assumed were experts and whom I trusted.

    1. It’s a fair analysis of the sort of thinking and the people that enabled/nurtured this scandal to become the monster it is. However I think you give them too much credit in terms of their intelligence and abilities to critically think this through. This isn’t the ‘deep state’ at work here, this isn’t a carefully orchestrated conspiracy to undermine the legal system. I believe this is a tragic and perhaps random coalescence of a group of people over at least a decade lacking in a number of core competencies yet being allowed to enable and grow this cancer at the heart of it all: Horizon and POL management. Each participant at whatever level or distance enabled a different strand of this carcinoma to thrive based on conveniences that suited THEM to the detriment of the actual victims – the SPMs. I won’t list the core competencies here but they span the entire spectrum of human frailty/failure.

    2. Great comment! I can also confirm that the computer I am typing this on, seems to be robust!

  3. I agree with most comments Dunks is a stooge/patsy is seems blissfully unware of the gravity of the situation. I think it is called the Dunning-Kruger effect he gives off an air of confidence using words like doing his due diligence yet clearly not appreciating what that means.
    He also said he was giving his opinion in witness statements and I court when he was supposed to be a witness of fact not an expert witness who is qualified is allowed to give an opinion.

  4. Richard Hopkins avatar
    Richard Hopkins

    Dunks’ inability to name the author of the Fujitsu ‘boilerplate’ sections of their witness statement has some potentially interesting background that I don’t believe the Inquiry has directly explored in the hearings yet.

    The Fujitsu statement attesting to the proper operation of “the computer” is a more or less direct quote from Section 69 of PACE – which was repealed in April 2000 – just weeks before the first Horizon-based prosecution.

    The Fujitsu wording said:

    “To the best of my knowledge and believe at all material times the computer was operating properly, or if not, any respect in which it was not operating properly or was out of operation was not such as to effect the information held on it.”

    S.69 1b PACE said:
    “…that at all material times the computer was operating properly, or if not, that any respect in which it was not operating properly or was out of operation was not such as to affect the production of the document or the accuracy of its contents;”

    The wording is near identical.

    1. Of course the Inquiry is aware of that. Of course those using the templates were not. There’s nothing relevant to explore in these phases.

  5. Dunks was obviously completely out of his depth. Who on earth was managing him? He seems barely to have considered that the reports he was providing to the Post Office were resulting in people losing their livelihoods and even being jailed.

    Where was the duty of care the Post Office and Fujitsu owed towards the SPMRs? It really would be a travesty if individuals like Dunks and Jenkins now end up being prosecuted and jailed while Board Members get off scot-free. The Executive Board members of POL seemingly claim that they were unaware that all this was going on between 2001 and 2015. That is no excuse. It was their responsibility to know. And from the initiation of the Project Sparrow in 2014, Perkins and Vennells were on a mission to prevent the unsafety of historic convictions from coming to light.

    1. Wasn’t Donna Munro managing the ARQ team?

  6. Peter Michael Ward avatar
    Peter Michael Ward

    “I was being asked for an opinion and that was my opinion”.

    And the court believed that he was competent to voice that opinion despite him not being technical. Nobody ever asked him how he came to his opinion, and whether it was valid for him just to ask others and take their view at face value.

    It seems he wasn’t taking his responsibilities seriously enough. But surely someone in the court should have probed the whole basis of his claims? As with Gareth, it seems nobody in the court challenged him. If for some reason the defence lawyers were incompetent and overlooked such things, surely the court (judge?) has a responsibility to confirm that a witness’s claims to expertise are valid?

    Or was it simply that the courts also wanted to see convictions by whatever means and didn’t want to point out anything that might prevent them?

    I hope lessons will be learned from this on the way courts discharge their responsibilities.

  7. Unless I am missing something, I cannot understand why Andy Duncs was selected to provide witness statements. His job role does not seem to include any knowledge of Horizon. His only relevant skill would seem to be the ability to extract logs from the archive. Surely Fujitsu management had an obligation to select someone with the appropriate skills and the lawyers an obligation to sit down with a prospective expert witness and review their expertise and candidly explain their duties and what they are signing up for.

    It does not seem surprising that Mr Duncs was out of his depth. He should never have signed the template document but these days we are all in the habit of agreeing to lengthy terms & conditions without reading let alone understanding them. Of course taking a chance with Amazon’s t&cs when buying a kettle is not comparable to taking a risk with the life of a postmaster but this is why the lawyers should have sat down with their witness and had an in depth discussion.

  8. If this was about even minor health and safety breaches there would be a very clear responsibility up the chain of command. Like others I suspect that Dunks and Gareth Jenkins were asked to stand in the spot marked X – where the gloop falls on them. Like some Brian Rix farce.
    Mik the manager seems to have had his head screwed on, realised the wide scope of the task and the even more onerous responsibility. So if he wouldn’t stand on the “gloop X”, someone somewhere got Dunks and Jenkins to do it. That feels pretty like “conspiracy to pervert” to me. Doubtless they’ll all have colanders for memory when asked.
    None of this would work if someone had hurt their back.

  9. The phrase “to the best of my knowledge” seems to do a lot of heavy lifting in many witness statements.

    1. OK after reading your statement and not having much time to respond yesterday, it took a whole load of pondering this blog during today, which reminded me of some distant exploration in the past, to fathom what it was about your addendum to this witness statement by Dunky dunker………mmmmmm
      So I go out my ”Secret Cult” ( Pete Hounam, Andrew Hogg) book and read:-
      ”you can find highly spiritually motivated people in every parish church, let alone cult…..( or even Fujitsu or POL)… But where SES and other Cults (orgs) must accept criticism is in their very intolerance of criticism. There appears to be no place for the rebel, the person who will not accept every tenet of their faith. There is therefore a weeding process whereby only the most devout and obedient remain. In this milieu competition for one member to become holier than another is enhanced…..’

      Finally I understood what is troubling me about a London based (POL)/ Japanese based (Fujitsu) based org, perhaps or not, infiltrated by the school of SES, (School of Economic Science) but for sure only after reading the ”I believe” ” I believe” statements delivered by Dunks, and to be honest more recent CEO’s at the inquiry, to flick back and reread troubling testimonials potentially of those held captive by ‘cult’ restrictions………read again Dunky Dunks responses ( I told myself today) and the ”I believe” statements::-

      i.e . Dunk like a novice newly intiated into ”cult ” practise of being on receiving end of passing down of knowledge from ‘master’ to ‘novice’………….

      ”but he was, of course, relying on them to inform the knowledge in his witness statements,

      agreed Dunks before applying some impressive mental gymnastics to tell Beer that because he had been told what was going on by SSC, that knowledge had become his. Or in his words: “once I’ve spoken to those people or asked questions about this, that and the other, I had that understanding. So it was within my… own knowledge.”

      “There’s no reason to believe that the information in this statement is inaccurate because of the improper use of the computer. To the best of my knowledge and belief at all material times the computer was operating properly, or if not, any respect in which it was not operating properly or was out of operation was not such as to affect the information held on it. I hold a responsible position in relation to the working of the computer.”

      I believe… in my opinion… at the time it was working as it should do and there wouldn’t have been any integrity issues with the data between the branch and the Horizon.”

      Hmmmmmm …………sorry but I know I am well, nearly right…..but not pretending to be an expert………….

  10. Have to say big thankyou for the write up Nick and loved reading replies, It’s Wednesday today, hope you get some lovely sunshine for the few minutes you get time for outdoors……………….in between blogging etc…
    Must advise you got to Malham and soak up the wonderful healing, soothing, heartwarming soul feeding atmospherics of ‘God’s Own County’, to counteract the immorality, lack of integrity and dumb stupidity you are being forced to encounter, endure and write about for us readers of your magnificent detailed forensic blog etc………………………but watch out for the bulls guarding the gate to the Cove………..

  11. Many of the points he was pressed on were too subtle for him to grasp. A disconnect, in the end, in the way he went about his role and what was formally expected of him. Omissions and inconsistencies were highlighted which he did not quite accept or understand. Bottom line, the evidence he had or was given based on his assessment and with assistance from the Support Services and technical experts pointed to no issues with Horizon. It appeared to be incomplete/blinkered with many unsafe? assumptions and thus possiby incorrect. Much like Gareth Jenkins position that all other information available about Horizon and not disclosed was not relevant and his assessment remained correct – it was not Horizon. So, crucially, we have a stalement whether there was genuine fraud/theft or not. All we have is doubt which is of course enough to throw the case out as events have shown.

  12. So our champion at mental gymnastics and jumping to conclusions is off to the Olympics?

    We’ve heard evidence from the Whitehall synchronised heat map swimming team who failed to deep dive.

    We’ve witnessed the lawyers trying to wriggle out of disclosure while rather obviously wearing their budgie smugglers for their briefs.

    We’ve witnessed how the PR guy perfected his javelin throw at the competition. A complete tosser.

    We’ve seen how executives competed in the relay. Scared of catching a bug they passed the baton quickly. No chance of ‘jogging’ their memory.

    We’ve seen how POL tried to fix the boxing final between themselves and Bates by employing a heavyweight ringer. When that failed they tried to nobble the judge.

    We’ve seen how the POL Horizon computer system got compromised by bugs. It left its Windows open, didn’t wrestle with the consequences and failed to relay or accurately score calls for content.

    About as convincing as a Russian anti-doping investigation.

    You say that Dunks is still employed by Fujitsu and our tanned man is off to Paris?

    Andy Dunks in his swimming trunks ?

    He somehow doesn’t remind me of a Fosters budgie smuggler, more as Peter Kay in his classic advert for John Smith’s where he performs a running bomb in a diving competition and ends up losing his shorts in the pool.

    You see too much detail in that mental picture, unlike Andy and other members of team Horizon.

  13. I’m not a lawyer, but as I understand it the subtle difference between Dunks and Jenkins is that Dunks was used as a “witness of fact” and therefore should only testify to things he personally knew to be true, not hearsay from the sixth floor and elsewhere. Jenkins was an “expert witness” and could give his opinion but should have disclosed things that he knew might undermine his opinion.

    The “get outs” so far appear to be “I wasn’t told my duties” and the more incredulous “when I said ‘the system’ was working correctly I meant the PC I was typing on at the time was working correctly”.

  14. Mr Dunks could be called the ‘template’ man – one of many, many individuals in this sorry and tragic saga that exhibited the exact same traits: a level of (gross) incompetence, often manipulative (if not downright dishonest) and lazy ( as in not taking ownership of the serious task in hand – for example writing witness statements without checking actual data ), a lack of sufficient intelligence to grasp the importance and gravity of the situation he was placed in and hiding behind the ‘procedures’ and safety of a rotten corporate culture (Fujitsu in his case, there are many more such companies). He is one of many exactly like him creating this ultimately murderous web of actions that led to many thousands of ordinary and decent people to be ensnared in causing real visceral pain and hardship and death (we know of at least 1 suicide and possibly more with many victims suffering with stress related illnesses). ALL contributors to this tale are currently free with many enjoying cushy employment or comfortable retirement while the survivors are still waiting for compensation and justice.

  15. Much of Mr Beer’s and Ms Page’s questioning focussed on shortcomings in Mr Dunk’s witness statements in SPMs’ court prosecutions. This might be a dumb question but how come the SPMs’ defence briefs didn’t raise similar questions during the prosecutions?

  16. Stephen Henson avatar
    Stephen Henson

    Hi Nick.
    I thought it particularly strange when he queried the meaning of Boilerplate with Ms Page denying he’d ever heard it before. Mr Beer had covered the use of Boilerplate inserted text earlier.

  17. l got the impression that Dunks was psychologically absent from most of yesterday’s evidence giving. This was his only way of coping with the knowledge that he is in up to his neck in culpability. Although, he is not a very bright man at the best of times it seems. When being questioned by Flora Page at the end he queried what she meant by the term ‘boilerplate’, despite the fact that Jason Beer had already used this term several times in his questioning earlier and it has cropped multiple times in other documentation to do with the inquiry. A sign that Dunks had zoned out to save himself from psychological damage.

  18. Thinking back to my time providing statistical info from computer systems, this makes terrifying but very familiar reading.
    It relates to a manager with no tech skills being expected to sign off on information as accurate & complete, when he (usually a “he”) is completely dependent on the tech staff to tell him what to say.
    In my case, I usually had to provide auditable datasets to support my assertions – but exactly how the dataset related to the work actually going on in the real world was largely uninspected…
    I tried to get staff & managers to understand how what they recorded would be used, but in a busy office, would that always happen??

  19. I love your write ups and insight, thank you. However, in this one you miss the bit about the office culture in Fujitsu which is revealed in the questions from Flora Page. I found it quite shocking.

    1. Yes, this was awful.

  20. It transpired at the end, that the slow-thinking, evidence-suppressing, non-analytical ‘analyst’ Dunks is still employed by Fujitsu. That should be the basis for its own inquiry. Don’t they have a functioning HR Department?
    It seems that whatever the PO asked him to say or do, he did. No intelligence, professional curiosity or integrity. And no empathy. I agree with Nick, this guy will almost certainly be facing charges.

    1. Not at the end. At the start. And in his w/s. Same job throughout.

      1. Indeed. I got that wrong. Although I think my reply should be “I didn’t start watching at the start and with hindsight I can see now that what you are saying is correct. As far as I can recall, that wouldn’t have been my thought process at the time ….from what I knew then…… and so on and so forth.”

  21. I think there is more to the part played by Dunks in this tragedy than meets the eye. He is appears to have been doing a basic job at Fujitsu but (unless I’ve missed it) it hasn’t been nailed down who was his boss and how he got into the position of producing witness statements etc. It seems to me that after the SSC manager, Mik Peach, refused to let his team appear as witnesses, POL and Fujitsu need a stooge to just sign off to the fact that Horizon was robust and do the basics in court. Template witness statements were produced and Dunk was chosen as the perfect patsy to sign them off. The fact that Dunk refuses (pretends to not remember) to name anyone above him or who told him what to do and say and the fact that he is STILL employed by Fujitsu, suggests a trade off for his taking the blame for Fujitsu and POL with regard to misleading the court – ‘you keep your mouth shut and come across as just a thick employee unaware he was committing a crime and we will still employ you and pay you well’. Like Jarnail Singh, his email communications are a lot more articulate and cynical (about the subpm’s) than his stuttering ignorance at the Inquiry. You don’t just appear in court without being instructed and/or coached by internal managers and lawyers. He even appeared at the GLO litigation in the High Court. Whilst he deserves his own day in court, in the dock this time, I hope this Inquiry get to the top people in this scandal and doesn’t just prosecute the lackeys.
    PS Nick, I can’t find where he was warned about self-incrimination in his first appearance at the Inquiry last year, I think this is his first warning.

    1. Correct – thanks to those who have let me know. I’ve corrected accordingly with apologies.

      1. Good points and clearly kept on the payroll to keep a lid on matters. A complete fool blindly appeasing the bosses ….no wonder he’s got a sun tan.
        Stupid and wicked character who needs to be in front of a jury….

    2. Outraged of Putney avatar
      Outraged of Putney

      Absolutely agree with this. Mr Dunks was too blinkered/favoured/dense to see that he was everyone else’s fall guy but those feeding him and letting him put lies into court process should all be identified and called out.

      Secondly, I think Mr Marshall KC has already made this point many times: the points made in this piece – and it also struck me about the points made by Mr Moloney KC when questioning Gareth Jenkins – are really bread and butter cross-examination/challenge points. The apparent fact that hosts of criminal defence solicitors, criminal defence barristers and Crown Court judges seemingly just accepted Mr Dunks’ unverified assertion without any hint of identifying his non-existent sources or technical qualification or limited investigation reflects very badly on my profession (and the continued underfunding of publicity funded criminal defence work). Not as badly as the wickedness of those on the prosecution/POL side but still depressing.

      1. Outraged of Putney avatar
        Outraged of Putney

        “publicly” funded – sorry

        Looking at later comments I’m glad it’s not just me who thought this

  22. Retired manager avatar
    Retired manager

    Nick, thank you for yet another helpful and enlightening summary.
    It was quite a challenge to follow the obvious confusion in Andy Dunks’ mind as there were so many ambiguous variations in basic assumptions in language and logic, such as what is the difference between knowing a “fact” and knowing a “fact” to be true. While it is easy to be hard on Dunks, there goes most of humanity. This is similar to Vennells’ shortcomings in not knowing the difference between “tell me this is not true” and “tell me if this is not true”.
    The evidence of the reluctance of other Fujitsu staff to be involved in prosecutions creates the image of a squad of soldiers being asked to step forward and volunteer for a suicide mission, and Dunks being the only one who did not step back!
    While Dunks is of interest being so close to where the rubber of this Post Office/Fujitsu vehicle hits the road (and we do need to know the mechanics of that), we do also need to know how the steering mechanism worked, i.e. his direct line management such as Peter “hang them out to dry” Sewell – will he be called? So to extend the metaphor, when this vehicle ran over all those sub-postmasters, was it deliberate vindictive intent of the driver (unlikely), was the driver blind (incompetent), was the driver was lost (misled), was the driver distracted, trying to go too fast, was the steering faulty (management), or the brakes faulty (governance)? Easy answer: all the above.
    It is also clear from today’s documents that there was genuine stress and anxiety amongst the Fujitsu staff for a long time. We should recognize that that they too were victims of sorts caught in overwhelming circumstances greater than what their moral courage was able to extract them from, looking for comforting validation from their colleagues, while trying to put bread on their families’ table and be home in time for dinner!

    1. Excellent metaphors. Very well put, and with obvious humanity. Yes, we’re all pretty tardy at work, booking holidays and going off piste with non work stuff. But no one so far has owned up to anything. All those giving evidence so far seem to have no awareness of how telling plain simple lies can cause long lasting and deep misery. As Emily Dickinson exquisitely expressed it…….
      It’s such a little thing to weep-
      So short a thing to sigh-
      And yet-by Trades-the size of these
      We men and women die!

    2. ALASTAIR BARKLEY avatar
      ALASTAIR BARKLEY

      I’m confused as to why Dunks was required to produce a ‘witness statement’ attesting to the ‘fact’ that Horizon was operating correctly.

      On the occasions that I have had to produce such a witness statement, it’s been to state that I possess first-hand information relating to the commission of some form of unlawful or potentially unlawful act (saw mugging, burglar disturbed, traffic collision with personal injury) or to provide information relating to a crime that’s unavailable otherwise – e.g. the physical injuries I documented after my surgical team had opened up a young police constable who’d been stabbed (and that I’d removed and retained about nine inches of broken-off carving knife from his abdomen), all this when I was a surgical intern in North London ca. 1979.

      But, this isn’t the case here – Dunks is a ‘Witness of Fact’ as opposed to an Expert Witness, but he is being asked to state that a complex system is working normally – something that does require specialist (although not necessarily expert) knowledge and, indeed, something in the case of Horizon that’s likely beyond the competence of one individual to attest. Consequently, it’s perfectly reasonable (essential, in fact) for Dunks to give an ‘Opinion’ rather than ‘Witness’ about the operation, normal or abnormal, of Horizon as he (Dunks) understands it, as well as incorporating any relevant information he (Dunks) can get from other appropriate sources regarding Horizon’s operation. I mean, how can he (or anybody else) be in a position to ‘witness’ that Horizon – the whole shebang – was working without fault?

      Dunk’s failures are at least two, or more,-fold. Firstly he didn’t know (and most likely was never properly told) exactly what was required of him as regards to the many statements he provided. And having provided the first few witness statements without adverse feedback, he just carried on – rinse and repeat. Secondly, he could easily have explained that his ‘opinion’ was based on his own knowledge and how, on the basis that it was necessary for the purposes of providing the statement, how he made reasonable enquiries to validate that knowledge – as well as how he obtained. where necessary, additonal, relevant, confirmatory information from other Fujitsu staff/departments; information he was able to take ‘on-trust’ given that it came from reliable sources – as evidenced by the positions and/or job responsibilities of other company employees concerned. That’s not ‘hearsay’ and, furthermore, it doesn’t require everybody involved to be regraded as an ‘Expert’ nor does it need every member of a potentially large specialist team that might attest to the proper operation of Horizon to be required to give their own individual witness statement. Dunks is so obviously not the sharpest tool that he hasn’t been able to mount any sort of defence about this under questioning (and, sadly, it’s evidence that the intensive coaching Fujitsu have most likely been giving him since the Inquiry began hasn’t been of much benefit). Had Andy taken the trouble to explain how he arrived at his opinions, how he knew stuff and then explained as to whom he had asked to fill him in on the even more complex stuff, – names, dates notes, that sort of thing even better – his life now would be much easier. As it is, a position he might reasonable have maintained is untenable.

      Beer so fell over himself in his hurry to demolish Dunks (think: ‘fish in a barrel’..) that I think he forgot to prepare properly. Normally so sharp, I thought his ‘”How do you know a fact…?” and “When does it become ones own knowledge?” were contrived, logical contortions and actually a bit puerile. Dunks – as the proverbial rodent mesmerised by a cobra – wasn’t any real opposition.

      I was day-dreaming a bit about being in Dunks’ shoes and how I’d do a bit of skewering of my own.

      1. Reading Nick’s report, but having given up on the tedium of listening to Inquiry evidence for now, I too was struck by, “when does knowledge become mine?”

        If I don’t know the result of a football match, and ask someone who does, I then know the result. I would probably read a report or watch highlights, thus verifying the information I was given but until I do, the result is in ‘my knowledge’.

        So it seems that what Dunks did was to ask someone, and what he did not do, was seek any verification – but then he might not have been able to understand the technical details anyway. “Eyes glazed over.”

      2. I wondered if Jason Beer just got completely bored of incisive questioning that was getting him absolutely nowhere. I was amused to hear him deliver, at the very end of his session with Andy Dunks, another example of his rare but priceless sarcastic offerings: “Thank you very much Mr Dunks, you’ve been very helpful indeed”.

  23. Truly awful…..
    Bone idol individual who clearly hasn’t an ounce of conscious….

    I hope the police take it further..

    1. A very idle idol………………………….mmmmm:-)

  24. Kay Feltham-Jones avatar
    Kay Feltham-Jones

    Just as with Dunce’s (sorry, Dunks’) first appearance before the Inquiry last year, today’s was both compelling and infuriating – I spent a lot of time shouting at my screen. Jason Beer KC frequently had to repeat or clarify perfectly coherent questions because Dunks apparently didn’t understand them.
    It became clear, pretty quickly, that Dunks is a process man – give him a template and an order and he’ll follow them. I wondered on a couple of occasions why he never added any intelligence to his tasks and then realised he had none to add. He is the very embodiment of a useful idiot.
    I was astonished when Flora Page referred to the “boilerplate” paragraphs in Fujitsu’s standard witness statements and Dunks asked her to repeat the term and then said he’d never heard it before – Jason Beer KC had only used it at least half a dozen times during his questioning today!
    There are so many POL and Fujitsu staff and lawyers I want to see prosecuted for their part in this appalling scandal and Dunce (sorry, Dunks) is right up there with them. Only when they are standing in the dock might the feel the true gravity of what they subjected SPMs to. Shame on them all.

  25. Why should the SPMs have to pay legal fees out of their compensation payments since their predicaments were not caused by themselves?

    1. They shouldn’t. The Post Office and Fujitsu should pay all costs.

  26. Another discredited POL employee. The list grows. In Mr Dunks case, perhaps some humility during his giving of evidence, exhibiting at least a degree of culpability, might have helped his(perhaps inevitable) case when it is decided what he wil be charged with.
    Perhaps surprisingly, given that a recall(to the inquiry) almost invariably indicates a serious possibility of prosecution, Mr Dunks remained combative when confronted with his misdemeanors, almost to the point of ridicule.
    It seemed to me that he has completely failed to grasp the seriousness of his predicament, perhaps maintaining the illusion that since Fujitsu have not sacked him, he has a “get out of jail free card”. He will inevitably be humbled soon.

  27. About ten minutes into this morning’s session with Andy Dunks document FUJ00152209 is put up on the screen. It is clearly dated 29/02/2005. Jason Beer even reads out the date “29th February 2005”. 2005 was not a leap year!

    1. And Beer said we hav had enough of public telling us this!

    2. I think you should send an email to the inquiry to let them know

    3. Maybe the Fujitsu computers also can’t cope with non-leap years correctly and flag an attempt to enter a non-valid date?

      Written as someone who writes software.

  28. ‘ Fujitsu’s Andy Dunks has a problem. He signed dozens, possibly hundreds of witness statements attesting to the integrity of the Horizon IT system without, it seems, taking the relevant amount of care to see if the information he put in his witness statements was true.’

    Ah…but…as he said, when ‘someone told him something’ it became ‘his’ knowledge. Regardless of whether it was right or wrong, truth or lies, black or white, it was HIS knowledge now and therefore true as he understood it and without clarifying any aspect, at all, ever. What a prize berk.
    What kind of defence of his ignorance is that anyway?
    Who is advising him? Del-boy Trotter?

  29. Another one of those excruciating episodes to watch. I think rating them on an excruciation scale of 0 to 10 scored by Singhs may be useful.

    I would give Mr Dunks 7 Singhs out of ten for today’s performance, while Mr Ward’s recent education on not leaving tracked changes in documents scores a 9. Jarnail, as usual, scores a perfect 10 every time.

    1. Paula Vennels avatar

      I think the “Singh” scale should become a new SI unit for “bullsh*t”. I’ll certainly be using it professionally from now on.

  30. The fact he is still employed by Fujitsu tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they are taking the enquiry. Andy Routine Dunks, 4 calls a week was normal?
    You can just imagine SSC saying look it’s not a problem Andy now piss off and stop bothering us we have some bugs to sort out.

    1. But they didn’t sort them?

  31. He joins Jarnail Singh, Graham Ward and Gareth Jenkins in the list of those who have grossly failed in their duty to the court for criminal cases, and will surely be taken away…

  32. Julie Dickson avatar

    Cynical old me thinks the reason why Mr Dunks is still employed by Fujitsu is that they know full well he can’t afford the kind of legal representation he needs, and may be tempted to cough names higher up and turn state’s witness.

    1. You may be cynical Julie, but you are also extremely insightful.

    2. Indeed. A well known policy to keep staff from going against former employer. Keep them employed with a good pension etc and they will not say too much.

  33. It’s becoming clear that one of the findings of the inquiry needs to be that witness statements need to include an explicit explanation of what assistance the witness received in preparing it. Too many of the POL/FJ witnesses put in information that they had heard from others (without attribution) and chunks of boilerplate text copied from other statements or supplied by the lawyers. How many times have we heard “I didn’t understand it, I was just told to say it” and “I assumed it was correct because I had no reason to think otherwise”?

    1. Lawyers up and down the country will resist that. A lawyer I know, in a completely different field, told me it’s almost universal common practice for witness and expert statements to be drafted by the lawyers.

      I think judges and defence counsel will need to be afforded the time to challenge evidence much more, though, so these cracks can be exposed at trial.

  34. PCOJ Investigator avatar
    PCOJ Investigator

    If you ever wondered about the etymology of the phrase

    * A SLAM DUNK *

    your quest has ended.

    Bookmarked. In due course, my firm will put in its bid for asset recovery services.

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