The Post Office has delayed the formal signing of a contract to replace Fujitsu’s controversial Horizon software for a third time since agreeing to the deal.
The latest update to the tender notice for the contract, which forms Lot 2 of the Fujitsu Horizon replacement tender, states that while US retail specialist OneView Commerce remains the successful bidder, the standstill period before formal signing has been extended. The earliest time the contract can be signed is 8 July.
The £169.2m deal for an electronic point of sale system (EPOS) is part of the plan to remove Fujitsu and its controversial Horizon system from the Post Office business.
The OneView Commerce deal was announced on May 21 alongside Lot 1, the £322.8m contract awarded to Accenture to run Horizon, but while the Accenture contract was signed off, there was a proposed standstill period before the contract with OneView Commerce could be formally signed.
The contract with OneView Commerce was initially set to be signed on 3 June, but this was extended to June 15 and then again to June 26, before the latest extension taking it into July. The Post Office said it has nothing to add to what appears in the government contract notice.
At the time of announcing the deals in May, the Post Office said: “In parallel, both Accenture and OneView Commerce will be working together to build the replacement systems to deliver a modern solution that meets the needs of postmasters and our internal teams into the future. These contract awards are part of the wider five-year Post Office transformation plan which will deliver a digitally enabled, more sustainable business.”
The Post Office Horizon contract the suppliers will replace is believed to have been Fujitsu’s most lucrative ever contract in the UK, earning the Japanese-owned firm more than £2.5bn over its 25-plus years duration. Nearly 1,000 subpostmasters were wrongly convicted after Horizon erroneously recorded accounting errors caused by bugs in the software, and a further 10,000 are eligible to claim compensation after the Post Office forced them to make good on phantom losses out of their own pockets.
To replace Horizon, OneView Commerce will provide a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application hosted in the cloud, which the Post Office specified must use a modern microservice architecture. The software will provide point-of-sale capabilities and other functionality required for an end-to-end retail platform. The move to standardised, off-the-shelf software represents a change in strategy for the Post Office, which throughout the Horizon era had insisted on using bespoke software designed for its own purposes.
The OneView Commerce deal will run for a minimum of 10 years. The losing bidder was Escher Software, which provided middleware as part of the original version of Horizon, first rolled out in 1999. Both contracts are expected to be signed early next month.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, when it revealed the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
