The UK Post Office has said the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is a risk to its £410 million ($552 million) plan to replace its ageing POS and accounting system, and may force changes to awarded contracts.
After deciding to ditch an in-house effort to replace the controversial Horizon system, the government-owned company launched procurement for alternative suppliers.
In May, it said it was looking for a supplier to come in and run the existing applications and infrastructure, currently part of the long-running contract with Fujitsu, in a deal worth up to £269 million ($362 million). It was also seeking a supplier to build a replacement based on off-the-shelf software, under a contract worth up to £141 million ($190 million).
Announcing more details of the procurement this week, the Post Office described risks which could affect the performance of the awarded contracts, but “because of their nature, cannot be addressed in the contracts as awarded.”
Included in the list are the findings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, an independent judge-led investigation into the EPOS and back-end finance system, which was first implemented by ICL, a UK tech company majority owned by Fujitsu, in the 1990s and taken over completely by the Japanese giant in 1998. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted and convicted of fraud, while errors in the system were to blame, resulting in devastating consequences for their lives. A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice was launched in 2021. The first volume of its report – addressing human cost and redress – was published earlier this month.
The Post Office said the Inquiry, or any similar inquiries into the operations of the Post Office or the Horizon system, might mean the current procurement would later “require modification to the awarded contract.”
It also flagged up that policy decisions made by the UK government, “any regulator, or any other public body, whether or not in response to findings by an Inquiry, [might] require modification to the awarded contracts.” The Post Office also warned about any legislation relating to the Post Office requiring changes to the contract.
Earlier this month, the first volume of the report from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry found that 13 branch workers committed suicide, most probably as a result of prosecutions wrongfully launched by the Post Office. Inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams said senior Post Office staff in the UK – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the original Horizon system.
“For all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate,” the report says.
After it was first implemented, the Horizon system received two substantial upgrades. In 2021, the Post Office launched plans to build a new system, now known as New Branch IT (NBIT).
In May, a spokesperson told The Register: “Plans to replace Horizon with NBIT will not proceed as originally envisaged. However, it’s important to remember that significant aspects of what had been developed for NBIT have already or will be repurposed to improve the technology in our branches, bringing benefits to postmasters and strategic partners. We are moving away from the ‘big bang’ launch which was envisaged as part of NBIT so postmasters will begin to see improvements in stages.”
A second volume of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry report – addressing the causes of and establishing accountability for the Horizon scandal – is expected next year. ®