Post Office boss threatened to resign over £1m salary dispute, report claims
Post Office boss Nick Read allegedly threatened to resign multiple times while demanding a pay rise to take his salary over £1m, a whistleblowing report has claimed.
Mr Read is under pressure over the Post Office’s handling of Horizon and Capture IT scandals and has faced growing calls to resign over a letter in which he said more than half of the hundreds of former sub-postmasters convicted were “guilty as charged”.
He is reportedly also at the centre of a 15-page “speak up” whistleblowing dossier submitted last August by his former human resources director, who left her post in June following a fall-out with Mr Read and is in the process of bringing an unfair dismissal claim against the Post Office.
The dossier, which the Business and Trade Select Committee have requested a copy of after being informed of its existence by former Post Office chairman Henry Staunton last week, is said to include allegations of bullying, which the business department confirmed Mr Read was under investigation for.
It also claims that the Post Office chief executive sidelined the only woman in his senior leadership team and repeatedly threatened to resign in his attempts to secure a pay rise.
The Times reported that as of the weekend, the Post Office was refusing to hand over a copy of the dossier, having missed a Friday afternoon deadline set by the committee.
The committee is expected on Monday to discuss using parliamentary powers to force its release, with committee chairman and Labour MP Liam Byrne expected to table a formal motion on Tuesday if the Post Office still has not complied.
Mr Read denied to MPs under oath last Tuesday that he had ever tried to resign. Regarding the reported claims in the whistleblowing report, Mr Byrne suggested that the Post Office boss could see his job in further jeopardy if it emerged he had misled MPs, adding: “These are very serious allegations and we will pursue them to the end.”
Labour MP Kevan Jones, who sits on the independent Horizon compensation advisory board, said: “This exposé shows what the postmasters and I have been saying for a while: that the culture at the Post Office is still rotten at the top.
“Postmasters will be rightly outraged and angry at the greed, and it begs the question of where these people’s moral compass is. Read should either resign or be sacked.”
Post Office senior independent director Ben Tidswell said: “Nick Read has at times felt the weight of the Post Office’s awful history on his shoulders, and it is of no surprise that he will have had private discussions in confidence.
“However, to my knowledge he has never tendered his resignation and he continues to accept leadership responsibility.”
Mr Staunton, who left the Post Office in January and has since said he is a victim of a “smear campaign” amid a row with business secretary Kemi Badenoch, repeatedly attempted to get his then colleague a pay rise during his tenure as Post Office chairman.
Mr Read was paid £816,000 in 2021-22 and £573,000 in 2022-23, but Mr Staunton wrote to then business secretary Grant Shapps in late 2022 to suggest that the chief executive’s maximum pay package should be boosted to over £1.1m, in line with what he said would be the “lower quartile” of his peers in the private sector.
Both that and further attempts by Mr Staunton failed, but it has reportedly emerged in exchanges reviewed by Post Office sources and The Sunday Times that it may in fact have been Mr Read who was driving the efforts.
Three days after Mr Staunton first met Mr Shapps in January 2023, the Post Office’s head of HR told the former chairman that “[Mr Read] is feeling incredibly despondent”, which reportedly spiraled into the HR director’s eventual departure and the launch of bullying investigations.
Mr Read is reported to have begun pushing for a pay rise at the Post Office soon after succeeding former chief executive Paula Vennells in 2019, with Mr Staunton’s predecessor as chairman said to have tried and failed to get a change approved, reportedly due to concerns over the Horizon inquiry and the context of the public-sector pay freeze.
The Times reported that a source close to the situation said the Post Office boss had already “cried wolf three times” by threatening to resign by the time Mr Staunton joined in 2022, with the situation then worsening in late January 2023 after Mr Read sent a message to his HR director saying it had “now moved beyond a Sunday evening chat” and that his “patience has expired”.
She is understood to have shared the message – which also said “you have now forced me to seek advice, which I have done this weekend. I think you and Henry [Staunton] have some urgent thinking to do or, to quote Henry, ‘we will end up in a real self-made mess’” – with Mr Staunton.
In a meeting between the trio soon after, Mr Read is reported by the minutes as saying he was “prepared to make a drama” and “submit a formal grievance and/or make a claim for constructive dismissal”.
“I have gained advice on my legal position and PR advice on how I intend to handle this,” the Post Office chief executive reportedly said.
He added that “a casualness and a dismissiveness to managing me and my expectations” had led to his “profound” irritation and that his current pay failed to account for his job’s “complexity”, his “personal commitment” and the possible impact on his “personal reputation”.
Mr Read said in that early 2023 meeting that he had attended a “gruelling” select committee hearing a week prior but that “only two members of the board wished me luck or followed up with me after”.
He asked for an increase on his base salary and short-term bonus as well as a “meaningful” retention payment, which in total would have exceeded £1m.
When the Government instead offered a 5 per cent salary increase and no retention payment or changes to his bonus schemes, Mr Staunton said to Mr Read in an email that the counterbid was “deeply disappointing, and I said you would feel the same”.
A senior individual at the Post Office reportedly said Mr Read’s focus on his remuneration was “a self-centred fixation, and I didn’t get to hear a lot about postmasters, which upset me”, adding: “We were spending most of our time on this. It was a complete distraction”.
Another believed the chief executive primarily took his anger out on the HR director at the time, saying: “It was tantrum city all the time.
“He was standing outside her door, stamping his feet and saying ‘I want a pay rise’ … It just contaminated the whole relationship”.
The Post Office said: “Nick Read was rated as exceptional by both [previous Post Office chairman] Tim Parker and Henry Staunton. Post Office uses external consultants to advise and benchmark its pay policies, and the CEO pay ratio is 17:1, compared to the median UK CEO pay ratio of 40:1.”
It added: “Nick Read joined in 2019 and immediately settled the long-running Horizon litigation and made a sincere apology on behalf of Post Office. Under his tenure, Post Office has been actively supportive of efforts to compensate postmasters fairly and quickly, and determined in its wish to help right the wrongs of the past.”
Appendices of the whistleblowing dossier filed last summer by the former HR director, who also made a tribunal claim late last year for which the Post Office has yet to provide a defence, take its total length to more than 100 pages.
It was submitted the same month that Mr Read had to repay £54,400 of his 2021-22 bonus that was wrongly awarded to him for complying with Sir Wyn Williams’s Horizon inquiry.
The whistleblowing case is being investigated by a three-person panel of Amanda Burton, a non-executive director and chair of the Post Office’s remuneration committee, UK Government Investments board representative Lorna Gratton, and barrister Marianne Tutin.
Last month it emerged that Mr Read sent a letter to Justice Minister Alex Chalk on 9 January saying he wanted the Government to be “fully informed” about the Post Office’s intentions to block more than half of all Horizon scandal convictions from being overturned.
Mr Read said that following a review by Post Office lawyers, the company would seek to oppose at least 369 convictions being overturned because they relied on “evidence unrelated to the Horizon computer system”.
The decision to write to Mr Chalk was reportedly backed by Ms Badenoch, who said Mr Read did so “in the spirit of transparency and openness”.
Just 20 per cent of the over £1bn set aside for redress has so far been handed out, with Mr Read describing the situation as “immensely frustrating” in Parliament last week.
“It is stressful and depressing for the victims as well,” he said.
The Post Office said it does not comment on active cases or investigations.
The Department for Business and Trade said: “Last year the Post Office received allegations about the conduct of Nick Read and Henry Staunton. While Mr Read is co-operating with the investigation, the secretary of state was informed that Mr Staunton was blocking the investigation into his conduct. It is right to wait for this investigation to conclude before making any further judgement.”
