Fujitsu’s admission that it has “a moral obligation” to pay redress to victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal has arrived very late in the day. The obligation was surely created on the day in November 2019 that the high court ruled that “bugs, errors and defects” in the company’s Horizon system meant there was a “material risk” that faulty data was used in the prosecution of post office operators.
To state the obvious, it should not have taken ITV’s dramatisation of the scandal, and the appearance in front of MPs of the current head of European operations, Paul Patterson, to produce Tuesday’s corporate acceptance that Fujitsu will have to cough up something. The firm’s previous silence, even as the Post Office and ministers were forced to accept reality, has been deafening.
How much should Fujitsu pay? Or what proportion of a redress bill that Kevin Hollinrake, the postal minister, said is now likely to top £1bn? That was the point at which Patterson, presumably with warnings from the company’s lawyers ringing in his ears, avoided precision.
While his apology was clear on several grounds – “We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors in the system. And we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of the subpostmasters” – Patterson wasn’t going to talk specific sums for redress. “We expect to sit down with the government to determine our contribution,” he said.
One can understand why he thinks it’s best to wait until Sir Wyn Williams’s official inquiry has said where responsibility lies. But we’ve surely heard enough already to say that, if the eventual bill for redress is £1bn-plus, Fujitsu’s contribution should run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Yes, it was the Post Office that pursued the prosecutions, which is why primary blame must sit with it and its management – no question. But Fujitsu was complicit. It designed the dodgy software and its employees appeared as star witnesses in the prosecutions, which is why Patterson’s answer when asked on Tuesday whether staff knew there were bugs and glitches in the system before 2010 was as significant as his apology. “My gut feeling would be yes,” he said. Indeed, emails at the separate public inquiry showed employees discussing glitches in 2008. Prosecutions, remember, continued until 2015.
Information was shared with the Post Office, continued Patterson, arguing that “how the Post Office used that information and used it to help their prosecutions, that is up to them.” Well, yes, but what about the stages in between?
In what terms were the warnings of bugs conveyed, and when? When helplines were flooded with complaints, did Fujitsu’s management ever pause to examine whether its software could be causing discrepancies in post office operators’ accounts? An extraordinary detail that emerged from Tuesday’s session was that prosecutions, pre-Horizon, ran at five a year but soared to an average of 55 after its introduction. And who was the Fujitsu boss, according to Paula Vennells, the disgraced former Post Office chief executive, who gave the assurance that the Horizon system was “like Fort Knox”?
To repeat, the Post Office is the top villain here. Lord Arbuthnot, who campaigned on behalf of Horizon victims, perhaps put his finger on the deep reason why the scandal ran for so long. It was because it involved “people who have been convicted of crime, up against the most trusted brand in the country”. The management of the Post Office, in other words, wholly abused a reputation for trust that was earned by “the relationships that subpostmasters had with communities” rather than any brilliance in the boardroom.
But it is also true that Fujitsu’s role has been understated in the outside world’s understanding of the scandal. A faulty product lies at the heart, which is why it is also staggering that the government has continued to award public sector contracts to Fujitsu as if nothing had happened. If a reckoning has now arrived, the Japanese firm’s “moral obligation”, arising from a contract from which it has been paid £2.4bn since 1999, has to be turned into a meaningful sum for redress. The public purse should not have to pick up the whole sum.
Hollinrake, for the government, referred to “maximising the contribution to the taxpayer”. Inviting Fujitsu to pay half would be a reasonable opening pitch.
