New £16m deal for Post Office scandal firm

THE Post Office has given Fujitsu a £16.5million extension to its contract to run the controversial Horizon IT system, taking its total earnings from it to £2.3billion-plus.

Horizon is the faulty accounting system that led to the Post Office scandalously prosecuting more than 700 innocent branch managers for theft, fraud and false accounting.

Horizon erroneously made it look like money was missing from their sites.

Some of its victims went to jail, many were financially ruined and some committed suicide. Horizon, regarded as one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in British history, is the subject of an ongoing statutory inquiry.

The contract extension will take Fujitsu’s total earnings from Horizon, from its introduction in 1999 to the present day, to £2.34billion. The Post Office says Horizon is a “highly complex system” written in legacy versions of a number of software languages. Horizon handles mail, retail, Government services, banking and financial services transactions.

It also describes Horizon as an “ageing platform constructed on an inflexible monolithic architecture” and wants to upgrade to a system that uses modern cloud or remote servers.

However, the Post Office says it cannot move away from Horizon to a modern system due to the technical difficulties involved, potential disruption to services and cost, at least in the short term. As a result, it extended Fujitsu’s contract.

In its official tender awards notice, the Post Office said: “A change of contractor would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in implementation as well as operation and maintenance.”

Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office accused thousands of theft and wrongdoing based on data from Horizon, which was riddled with bugs. It was not until 2019 and a lawsuit brought by 555 sub-postmasters that it emerged that Fujitsu had failed to inform the Post Office of those bugs or track them.

Last month the Government set up a new scheme to fully compensate the 555 sub-postmasters who helped expose the scandal, as the £43million they received in 2019 was eaten up by their legal costs.

“The trailblazing postmasters who exposed the Horizon scandal were instrumental in securing justice for all of those affected,” said Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake. “It is right they will receive full and fair compensation for the pain caused by this scandal.”