Who is Sarah Munby? The civil servant embroiled in Post Office Horizon row

Sarah Munby, a senior civil servant, has been dragged into a fierce row between the former Post Office boss and the Government over the Horizon scandal.

Henry Staunton claims he was told by the top civil servant to “hobble up to the election” when he raised concerns about a £160 million hole in the business’ finances last year.

So who is Ms Munby, what exactly is she alleged to have said, and what does this mean for the crisis?

Who is Sarah Munby?

With two masters degrees and five years’ experience in Whitehall, Ms Munby is a self-confessed “fangirl” of the Civil Service.

She has previously spoken about the importance of “rolling with the punches” as a leader, and said “communication is everything”, stressing the need for “honest and transparent sharing of information”.

Now the top official in the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Ms Munby landed her first job in the Civil Service back in 2003, working as an economist in the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

She then left Whitehall for 15 years to work for management consultancy firm Mckinsey – where she led on strategy and corporate finance in the UK and Ireland – before returning to serve as a director general in the Department for Business and Trade, then the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.

She was quickly promoted to permanent secretary – the most senior role in the department – in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, where she has “fondly” recalled imagining that “the sense of uncertainty was temporary – Covid-19 would retreat, I would get my feet under the table, and things would get ‘back to normal’”.

But she observed: “The truth is that there never were ‘normal times’, and there probably never will be.”

When her department was split in three in February 2023, Ms Munby took on the top role in DSIT.

In an interview with Civil Service World in June last year, she said she was drawn to Whitehall because of “the impact: the scale and the scope of the problems that we get to work on”.

She said she relished the opportunity to work on “once-in-five-lifetimes things”, including the Government’s net zero strategy, which she described as “world-changing” work. “It feels like you’re holding the future in your hands,” she added.

She also helped support households through the energy crisis in the wake of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine.

“Any one of those would be something you’d look back on and say, ‘Wow, that was the achievement of a career’,” she said.

“To be able to just do a sequence, one after another is just… I’m a fangirl of the whole thing. The privilege, the opportunity is, I think, completely unrivalled.”

In October 2021, Ms Munby said: “Leadership, as much as we all talk about strategy, is also about agility.

“We all need to be able to ‘roll with the punches’, and even to enjoy doing so. Short-term challenge can be exciting (especially if, like me, you actually quite enjoy being a little bit adrenaline-fuelled), but when we face ongoing challenge and unpredictability, it can become wearing and stressful.”

Who is Henry Staunton, the ex-Post Office boss?

Mr Staunton resigned as chairman of the Post Office in January after just over a year in the job, amid ongoing tensions in the wake of the Horizon scandal.

He had been tasked with leading the board of directors as the business reels from the fallout of what has been described as the UK’s biggest miscarriage of justice.

He was appointed to the role in December 2022, following nine years as chairman of WH Smith.

He has also served on the boards of ITN, BSkyB, Ladbrokes and Standard Bank.

What did Sarah Munby do?

Ms Munby is accused of suggesting that Mr Staunton should “hobble” up to the next election instead of facing a crisis with the Post Office’s finances head on because “politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality”.

Mr Staunton has claimed he wrote a note after his first meeting with Ms Munby on Jan 5 last year stating that she told him “now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues”.

He emailed it to himself and then forwarded a copy to Nick Read, the Post Office’s chief executive, the next day, according to The Times.

He is said to have discovered the memo in his personal emails on Tuesday and then shared it with the newspaper.