Fujitsu, the IT company at the heart of the Horizon scandal, may have to repay a “fortune” if found culpable in the Post Office saga.
The fallout from the Post Office scandal has gathered pace recently, with former Post Office boss Paula Vennells agreeing to hand back her CBE and politicians vowing to clear the names of postmasters involved.
The spotlight has now been shone on Fujitsu — the Japanese IT company behind the faulty Horizon IT systems that wrongly displayed financial discrepancies in UK post offices.
In the 2000s, the Post Office targeted around 700 sub-postmasters who were wrongly accused of siphoning money from their branches. The scandal left many in financial ruin while others were jailed. At least four people are thought to have died by suicide following the ordeal.
Some sub-postmasters received a payout following a 2019 high-court victory spearheaded by Alan Bates, but Fujistu has faced little scrutiny for their role until now.
Next week, company representatives will appear at a public inquiry into the case. In a statement provided to Reuters, Fujitsu said: “The inquiry has reinforced the devastating impact on postmasters' lives and that of their families, and Fujitsu has apologised for its role in their suffering.”
While ministers say they’re awaiting the results of an inquiry into the scandal, many are looking to Fujistu to foot the bill.
Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, said: “if the scale of the incompetence is as we might imagine, then I simply would want to secure proper recompense on behalf of the taxpayer.”
This is how the events have played out so far.
What is Horizon?
Fujitsu Limited's Horizon IT system was brought in by the Post Office in 1999 as a way of revolutionising payments.
But what was supposed to bring the system into the 21st century turned into a disaster for all involved.
Horizon V1 was intended to be a swipe-card system, designed to enable integrated pensions and benefits from Post Office branches from the Department of Social Security. Begun in 1996, it was eventually scrapped in May 1999, and was rejected by the Department of Social Security. It had cost roughly £700m in taxpayers’ money.
After the failure, however, the Government continued with its procurement, changing its plan regarding the Post Office. It began to use the system as a means of providing electronic accounting, transactions, and stocktaking for all its branches.
Questions remained around Horizon’s effectiveness – as the board of directors wrote in their September minutes, “serious doubts over the reliability of the software remained” – but seemingly were disregarded.
Sub-postmasters were trained on Horizon V2 from 1999 – one of them being Alan Bates, who had joined the service one year previously.
“I’d worked with these types of systems before we’d taken on the business with the Post Office and, although they had been far smaller systems, I had enough experience to suspect the truth at a very early stage, and it didn't matter what they said: they were wrong, and I knew they were wrong,” he said.
The events were dramatised in the ITV series Mr Bates vs. The Post Office.
What was the scandal?
More than 700 Post Office managers were given criminal convictions after faulty Fujitsu accounting software within Horizon made it appear as though money was missing from their branches.
Mr Bates reported issues within the system and had his contract terminated for refusing to accept liability, but others were affected, too.
In 2004, Lee Castleton, from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, was found to have a £25,000 shortfall at his branch. He was made bankrupt after he lost his legal battle with the Post Office. In 2010, pregnant sub-postmaster Seema Misra, who ran a post office in West Byfleet, Surrey, was jailed after being accused of stealing £74,000.
By 2015, amid many more cases, the Post Office halted its prosecution of sub-postmasters.
However, Post Office boss Paula Vennells told the business select committee that there was no evidence of miscarriages of justice – and she was awarded a CBE in 2019.
Legal action then began with a group of 555 sub-postmasters banding together and, last year, the Government announced that every wrongly convicted sub-postmaster would be offered £600,000 in compensation.
The Metropolitan Police has said they are looking at “potential fraud offences arising out of these prosecutions”, for example “monies recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions”.
Former sub-postmaster Suzanne Palmer, 64, went bankrupt fighting to clear her name when faulty Horizon software was to blame for the issues at her branch in Rayleigh, Essex.
Mrs Palmer told the Standard: “The Post Office robbed 19 years of our lives. Emotionally and financially, they ruined us. It felt like being hit by a baseball bat. My children had to live with the shame that everybody called me a thief.”
Does the Post Office still use Horizon?
A vastly different version of the programme is used today but the IT will be modernised with a new cloud system operating soon.
The Post Office said: “There have been several versions of Horizon since its introduction in 1999 and the current version of the system, introduced from 2017, was found in the group litigation to be robust, relative to comparable systems. But we are not complacent about that and are continuing to work, together with our postmasters, to make improvements.”
