The Post Office has spent more than £600 million of taxpayer money to continue operating the deeply flawed Horizon IT system, despite recognising over a decade ago that it needed replacing.
The troubled system, developed by Japanese firm Fujitsu, has been at the centre of one of the UK‘s biggest miscarriages of justice, after more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for financial shortfalls caused by bugs in the software.
Since its original £548 million deal with Fujitsu was signed in 1999, the Post Office has paid out a staggering £2.5 billion in contracts to the company. This includes £600 million in extensions agreed after the organisation began seeking alternative systems in 2012.
In a move to modernise, the Post Office launched efforts to replace Horizon as far back as 2012. However, all attempts so far have failed. In 2015, IBM was commissioned to build a new system, but the project was scrapped just a year later, wasting £40 million. A later plan to transition to a system using Amazon’s cloud services was also abandoned in 2022.
The Post Office has since turned to developing its own platform, known as the New Branch IT (NBIT) system. While initially set to launch this year, it has been plagued by delays and cost overruns, with expenses potentially exceeding £1 billion. Experts now suggest the Post Office may remain tied to Fujitsu until at least 2030.
New revelations reported by the BBC show that the UK government was warned of potential complications with the Horizon deal as early as 1999. At the time, senior Labour government officials, including then prime minister Tony Blair and chancellor Gordon Brown, were alerted to the risk of the Post Office not owning the system’s core source code.
Documents revealed that the Treasury raised concerns that this lack of intellectual property ownership would leave Fujitsu in a powerful position, possibly enabling them to force expensive settlements in future disputes.
A spokesperson for Tony Blair stated that he had taken concerns about the Horizon contract seriously at the time, adding that the final decision was made following an independent review. Blair expressed deep sympathy for the victims affected by Horizon’s flaws, calling the outcomes “tragic and completely unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Gordon Brown clarified that he would not have been directly involved in the decision-making around the Horizon contract and that any correspondence he received would have been procedural.
The Horizon scandal has led to calls for wide-scale reform, with victims continuing to fight for justice and compensation. Despite the scandal, the Post Office ceased using Horizon data for private prosecutions in 2015 and has promised never to resume the practice.
With mounting pressure on the government and the Post Office to resolve the crisis, questions remain about why such a defective system was allowed to operate for so long—and at such an extraordinary public cost.
