Controversial Put up Workplace Horizon system may keep till 2033

The defective system on the coronary heart of the Put up Workplace Horizon scandal may nonetheless be in use in Put up Workplace branches as much as 2033.

In accordance with a public sector procurement discover, the Put up Workplace will lastly substitute the controversial Horizon system with an off-the-shelf various, however the present system may stay for one more seven years.

To this finish, it is usually on the lookout for a brand new provider to tide it over when the present Fujitsu contract expires in March subsequent 12 months.

The Horizon system, from Fujitsu, was rolled out in 2000 in a undertaking to automate department accounting. However subpostmasters utilizing it instantly started experiencing unexplained accounting shortfalls, which they had been blamed and punished for. In what’s now often known as the Put up Workplace Horizon scandal, tons of had been prosecuted, with many jailed and 1000’s struggling main monetary losses by means of no fault of their very own.

The Put up Workplace can pay practically half a billion kilos in complete for continued Horizon help, probably as much as 2033 (Lot 1), and a 12-year contract with a brand new system supplier (Lot 2).

Lot 1, Alternative Companies Supplier, is value slightly below £323m. It seeks a provider to “take over the prevailing Horizon providers” and “the administration and execution of actions for all bodily and digital infrastructure and all information inside the datacentres used for the Horizon service.”

Utility help for subpostmasters can be included within the contract, in addition to ongoing software growth and launch administration, migration from the on-premise datacentre to the cloud, and the institution of a cloud-native back-office and channel platform.

The Put up Workplace prolonged its contract with Fujitsu to March 2026 by means of a £40m settlement.

In Lot 2, the Put up Workplace needs a provider to evaluate and choose an off-the-shelf Horizon alternative “tailor-made for its future wants” and help the implementation, together with configuration, testing and roll-out.

The tender states the “provider should be able to delivering a contemporary, scalable, and future-ready resolution for a time period of 12 years”.

A transfer to an off-the-shelf various to Horizon has been on the playing cards since October final 12 months, when, throughout his look on the Put up Workplace scandal public inquiry, Put up Workplace chairman Nigel Railton mentioned the corporate’s resolution to construct the brand new system in-house was one among two causes the undertaking was “set as much as fail”.

Railton informed the inquiry: “One was the choice ‘to get off Horizon’, which is totally different to constructing a system for the long run, and the second was the choice to construct in-house.” He mentioned there are a lot of “horror tales” of individuals making an attempt to construct techniques in-house, including: “I feel, based mostly on my expertise, that this was all the time set as much as fail within the first place.”

The price of the scandal and the Horizon alternative is stacking up. Horizon provider Fujitsu has not but agreed how a lot of the billion-pound-plus price of the scandal it’s going to cowl. After a gathering with Fujitsu in Tokyo final month, enterprise and commerce secretary Jonathan Reynolds mentioned there was an settlement to start talks on compensation. So far, Fujitsu has mentioned it could wait till the general public inquiry’s conclusion earlier than committing to talks.

The Put up Workplace scandal was first uncovered by Pc Weekly in 2009, revealing the tales of seven subpostmasters and the issues they suffered resulting from Horizon accounting software program, which led to essentially the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British historical past (see under timeline of Pc Weekly articles concerning the scandal since 2009).