The faulty system at the heart of the Post Office Horizon scandal could still be in use in Post Office branches up to 2033.
According to a public sector procurement notice, the Post Office will finally replace the controversial Horizon system with an off-the-shelf alternative, but the current system could remain for another seven years.
To this end, it is also looking for a new supplier to tide it over when the current Fujitsu contract expires in March next year.
The Horizon system, from Fujitsu, was rolled out in 2000 in a project to automate branch accounting. But subpostmasters using it immediately began experiencing unexplained accounting shortfalls, which they were blamed and punished for. In what is now known as the Post Office Horizon scandal, hundreds were prosecuted, with many jailed and thousands suffering major financial losses through no fault of their own.
The Post Office will pay nearly half a billion pounds in total for continued Horizon support, potentially up to 2033 (Lot 1), and a 12-year contract with a new system provider (Lot 2).
Lot 1 – Replacement Services Provider – is worth just under £323m. It seeks a supplier to “take over the existing Horizon services” and “the management and execution of activities for all physical and digital infrastructure and all data within the datacentres used for the Horizon service.”
Application support for subpostmasters is also included in the contract, as well as ongoing application development and release management, migration from the on-premise datacentre to the cloud, and the establishment of a cloud-native back-office and channel platform.
The Post Office extended its contract with Fujitsu to March 2026 through a £40m agreement.
In Lot 2 – commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) electronic point of sale (EPOS) software provider – the Post Office wants a supplier to assess and select an off-the-shelf Horizon replacement “tailored for its future needs” and support the implementation, including configuration, testing and roll-out.
The tender states the “supplier must be capable of delivering a modern, scalable, and future-ready solution for a term of 12 years”.
A move to an off-the-shelf alternative to Horizon has been on the cards since October last year, when, during his appearance at the Post Office scandal public inquiry, Post Office chairman Nigel Railton said the company’s decision to build the new system in-house was one of two reasons the project was “set up to fail”.
Railton told the inquiry: “One was the decision ‘to get off Horizon’, which is different to building a system for the future, and the second was the decision to build in-house.” He said there are many “horror stories” of people trying to build systems in-house, adding: “I think, based on my experience, that this was always set up to fail in the first place.”
The cost of the scandal and the Horizon replacement is stacking up. Horizon supplier Fujitsu has not yet agreed how much of the billion-pound-plus cost of the scandal it will cover. After a meeting with Fujitsu in Tokyo last month, business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds said there was an agreement to begin talks on compensation. To date, Fujitsu has said it would wait until the public inquiry’s conclusion before committing to talks.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
