Lawyer advised Post Office to adopt ‘cold’ approach and

External counsel advised in 2013 that accounting errors in Horizon system should be corrected without risking admission of culpability

An external lawyer advised the Post Office to remove apologies from letters sent to post office operators and “maintain a more cold, procedural approach”, a public inquiry has heard.

The inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal was told that Andrew Parsons, a partner at the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson who advised the Post Office for more than seven years, wrote that apologising to the operators would be “admitting some degree of culpability”.