FORMER Post Office boss Paula Vennells followed a “grossly improper” suggestion to not review all subpostmaster prosecutions after her communications chief said it would end up “front-page news,” the Horizon IT inquiry has heard.

Today, the inquiry was shown an email exchange between Ms Vennells and then director of communications Mark Davies in July 2013, in which she said she would “take your steer” after he said looking at all past cases would be “in media terms… very high profile.”

Ms Vennells agreed that, had the Post Office decided to review all prosecutions of false accounting, it “may well have” avoided the “lost decade” until miscarriages of justice involving subpostmasters were discovered.