POLL - Should Paula Vennells return her £2.2m Post Office bonuses. Vote now (2024)

Watch LIVE: Paula Vennells to give evidence at the Post Office Inquiry

Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells has been formally stripped of her CBE following her role in the Horizon scandal, but there are also calls for her to repay her bonuses.

The former chief executive earned more than £4.5 million in pay over the seven years she headed up the Post Office, of which £2.2 million was performance-related pay.

Ms Vennells has begun to give evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiryat Aldwych House in London. She was greeted by protesters when she arrived and issued an apology to the victims during her opening statement.

She told the inquiry: “I would just like to say, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this, how sorry I am for all that subpostmasters and their families and others who suffered as a result of all of the matters that the inquiry has been looking into for so long.

“I followed and listened to all of the human impact statements, and I was very affected by them. I remember listening to one subpostmaster whose name I noted, who said that he would like somebody to go and stand outside his old Post Office with him so he could tell them exactly what he’d been through. I would do that.”

READ MORE: Paula Vennells says 'sorry' at Post Office Inquiry issuing 775-page statement

She continued: “I’m very, very sorry. I would also like to repeat the apology which is in my witness statements to Alan Bates, to Ron Warmington from Second Sight and to Lord Arbuthnot that I and those I worked with made their work so much harder, and I’m very, very sorry for that.”

Ms Vennells ran the Post Office from 2012 to 2019 while it routinely denied there was a problem with its Horizon IT system. The former parish vicar was appointed a CBE in December 2018.

The Post Office scandal, which was been brought to the fore again earlier this year thanks to the ITV dramaMr Bates vs The Post Office, led to the wrongful convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters.

POLL: Should Paula Vennells return her £2.2m Post Office bonuses? (Image: Getty)

Over three days the inquiry aims to establish when Ms Vennells found out about the failures and what she knew about the situation as the Post Office continued to prosecute people for fraud.

Ms Vennells has not been questioned publicly over the Horizon scandal for nearly a decade, last appearing in front of a select committee in 2015.

So what do YOU think? Should Ms Vennells return her £2.2m Post Office bonuses? Vote in our poll and join the debate in the comment section below.