Post Office Trial: The ballad of Paula Vennells

Paula Vennells this week announced she'll be leaving the Post Office to join Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust as its Chair in April. In January she was awarded a CBE and on 7 Feb she was appointed as a non-executive board member to the Cabinet Office. She leaves her organisation fighting a class action which has the potential to sink it (see timeline here).
Paula Vennells' award and the appointments have outraged dozens of
former Subpostmasters who hold her ultimately responsible for what
happened to them - variously sacked, criminalised and ruined.

Ms Vennells joined the Post Office
in 2006. She was head-hunted after a career working for massive blue
chip companies. She started as a graduate trainee at Unilever, moved to
L’Oreal, then Dixons Retail, Argos and finally Whitbread. On her
decision to join the Post Office she told the Daily Telegraph:

“I felt I’d done the rounds in terms
of big corporate jobs and saw something in the Post Office that was
bigger and deeper, maybe it was something about giving back. If you work
for the Post Office you can’t just focus on the commercial side by
itself, it’s about community too. People care desperately for the Post
Office. Very often it’s the sub-postmaster or mistress that notices that
an elderly customer hasn’t turned up recently and finds out what’s
happened to them.”

This quote suggests there was a
moral and possibly even spiritual motivation behind her decision. She
acknowledges that the public care for the Post Office and recognises
this is largely because of the actions of Subpostmasters who "very
often" act in a socially-responsible community-minded way. She wanted,
in essence, to join the Post Office for the same reasons many
Subpostmasters joined - to make a good living, yes, but also to put
something back into the community.

What would Jesus do?

The Reverend Paula Vennells is an ordained christian minister. She preaches throughout the Bromham Benefice near her home in Bedfordshire. She has spoken about Faith in Business and how Jesus is her guide in what she does, as a review of one of her speeches records:

"Paula has taken biblical
inspiration from the young King Solomon, who showed humility in asking
God for a wise and understanding heart, so that he could rule his people
with justice (1 Kings 3:6-12).... She has sought to celebrate what is
good and deal decisively with what is not. She says communication should
be inspiring, but also well structured, and it should not duck
complexity – over-simple messages can leave people dissatisfied. In all
this she has found inspiration from the person of Jesus."

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