Dear UK Government Investments Limited,

According to the review into the Post Office Ltd Senior Executive Remuneration (Department for Business and Trade, August 2023, link below), a draft letter requesting Shareholder approval of the POL CEO’s and CFO’s participation in the Transformation Incentive Scheme (TIS) was commented on by UKGI in July 2021 (5.1 (L)(1)):
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk...

By July 2021, however, it was known that the Inquiry had been elevated to a Statutory footing. As such, it was not anticipated to conclude its work until the autumn of 2022; that is, not until months after the end of the financial year for which the Inquiry-related bonus was to be awarded.

Please can you disclose the comments made by UKGI on the draft letter to which the DBT review refers.

Please can you also disclose any further communications between UKGI and the Post Office which refer to the TIS Inquiry metric/targets between December 2020 and August 2022.

Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Shaikh

Dear UK Government Investments,

I would like to request an internal review into your decision not to disclose information in response to Question 1 of my FOI request submitted on 18 August 2023.

You have cited the qualified exemption under Section 36 (2)(b)(i)(ii) and (c) of the FOI Act without due recognition of the public interest in disclosure which I maintain far outweighs this exemption.

The FOI request concerns decisions around the payment of an Inquiry-related bonus metric to senior executives at the Post Office which, thanks to mainstream media coverage, is now widely understood to have been both unjustified and grossly unethical given that the Inquiry is still in progress and that the overwhelming majority of Post Office victims are yet to receive full and fair compensation.

You may be aware that the payment of bonuses under the Inquiry metric has been referred to the Metropolitan Police for investigation into possible criminality, whilst the Postal Minister Kevin Hollinrake has promised to ascertain whether or not a breach of the 2006 Companies Act has occurred (Westminster Hall debate, 13 July 2023).

As you will know, due to the severity of this incident, both the Post Office and the Department for Business and Trade commissioned reports into how such bonuses were sanctioned given the relevant metric had not, indeed could not, have been achieved. Tellingly, neither of these reports included within their remit the role of UKGI or the Accounting Officer for the Department for Business in approving the bonuses. This, despite a UKGI representative sitting on the Post Office Remuneration Committee; Tom Cooper’s very function in this role was to assist the Shareholder in maintaining an appropriate degree of oversight.

Despite this lack of scrutiny, the episode gives rise to serious and unanswered questions concerning the quality of oversight of the Post Office both by yourself in your stewardship role of Government assets and, separately, in the oversight of the Departmental Accounting Officer. These channels of oversight ought to have stopped unearned bonus payments in their tracks but they did not. Information which I have reasonably requested may help to shed light on how this was allowed to happen, either through unintended negligence or because the wrongful awards were deemed acceptable and therefore somehow inconsequential.

Governance failings at the Post Office - up to and including the role of UKGI and its Shareholder - have already contributed to the greatest miscarriage in British legal history. If you are to hide behind a Section 36 exemption on this matter, what assurance can the public have that anything has changed? How are we to believe that UKGI’s oversight of PO governance has been strengthened in the light of the Horizon scandal if such a failing over bonuses has been allowed to arise? And how are lessons to be learned (and seen to be learned) if failings are protected from scrutiny in what you circumscribe as your ‘safe space’ but what might rather be seen as a convenient ‘hiding place’?

With regards to question 2 which you reject under Section 12 of the Act, I would like to refine this question to within the timeframe of the beginning of June 2021 until the end of February 2022.

Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Shaikh

Dear UKGI Freedom of Information Team,

Thank you for your internal review and for your decision to disclose the comments made by UKGI on the July 2021 draft letter from the Post Office to the DBT in which Shareholder approval was sought for the inclusion of its CEO and CFO in the TIS bonus scheme.

Given you have identified 245 documents within scope of the second part of my FOI request, I would like to refine the timeframe of this question further.

Please can you disclose all communications between UKGI and the Post Office which refer to the TIS Inquiry metric/targets in January 2022.

Many Thanks,

Yours sincerely,

Eleanor Shaikh

Dear UKGI Freedom of Information Team,

Thank you for your recent disclosure.

I would be most grateful if you would disclose all communications between UKGI and the Post Office which refer to the TIS Inquiry metric/targets in February 2022.

Many Thanks,

Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Shaikh

Dear UKGI Freedom of Information Team,

I have, unusually, received no acknowledgment of my follow-on request submitted to you on 25 November 2023. This pertains to a FOI request originally made in August 2023.

Please can you advise when I can expect to receive a response from you.

Many thanks,

Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Shaikh