Paula Vennells’ evidence at the Post Office inquiry highlights an atypical approach to leadership - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Michael Green, Baghill Green, Tingley.
Now that Paula Vennells has concluded her evidence to the Post Office Inquiry, I think an initial reaction is possible without prejudging the eventual outcome.
At the very kindest, we have seen a very senior manager who didn’t really understand what she was doing, whose philosophy was to go out of her way to keep herself studiously ignorant on a subject which by any account required her personal involvement, to close her eyes where events meant she didn’t actually remain ignorant, and to continue to draw the handsome salary which went with the job she was supposed to be doing.
It may be, in due course, that the inquiry conclusion is more damning than that: but let’s stick with this least critical assessment for the moment. Because, even as it stands, it’s bad enough.
Sadly, her behaviour has been not atypical of many in managerial positions nowadays - the ‘don’t bring me problems’ approach. When the balloon goes up, they throw up their hands in horror, and say, this is awful, but I never knew.
People who are paid to resolve difficult problems but in practice run a mile from doing any such thing. And then throw up a smokescreen for as long as they can get away with it.
In the public service sector (and the Post Office, although notionally independent, is nevertheless still very much a public service), there is talk now of introducing a legal ‘duty of candour’, a duty of total honesty if you like.
Would this have helped prevent the appalling mistreatment of subpostmasters if the duty had existed at the time? Sadly, I doubt it, because the practice of ‘not me, guv’ seems so ingrained nowadays that it is almost inevitable. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that if such a legal duty were to exist, a lot of otherwise capable people would simply refuse to take the jobs concerned.
After all, the idea of actually accepting responsibility for what we do is totally alien to so many people nowadays.