Afrigather Within the brief few weeks for the reason that Submit Workplace public inquiry adjourned for Christmas, the nationwide temper across the scandal has modified dramatically. When Sir Wyn Williams convenes phase four of the statutory inquiry on 11 January, the deal with the hearings might be higher than ever, because of the incredible impact of the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, broadcast within the first week of the brand new 12 months.
For the primary time since hearings began in early 2022, the eyes of nationwide media might be throughout proceedings. The questions that the method seeks to reply – who was responsible for the scandal, how did it happen, and who knew? – have grow to be matters of nationwide debate like by no means earlier than.
Additionally for the primary time, particularly intense consideration might be paid to Fujitsu, the provider of the controversial Horizon IT system answerable for flaws that induced accounting errors that had been blamed on subpostmasters. On 16 January, witnesses from Fujitsu will take the stand, to face forensic questioning from the inquiry’s barristers.
The UK authorities is now speaking about forcing Fujitsu to contribute to the likely £1bn compensation bill for victims of the scandal. Thus far, the Japanese big has been largely silent on its position within the scandal that started with the roll-out of Horizon to about 19,000 Submit Workplace branches from 1999.
Since Computer Weekly first revealed the scandal in 2009, Fujitsu has principally declined to remark. Extra lately, as nationwide outrage has grown, it sends out a normal assertion to the media, apologising for its position within the scandal, promising to assist the inquiry, however including it should say nothing additional till the inquiry is full. MPs are hoping to alter that by inviting executives to answer questions in Parliament this month.
Two Fujitsu employees have been under investigation by the Metropolitan Police since 2020 over attainable perjury throughout court docket circumstances that convicted harmless Submit Workplace managers – primarily based on proof that arose throughout the 2018/19 High Court case that proved Horizon was responsible for the errors that led to 1000’s being wrongly accused. No expenses have but been introduced.
A lot has been revealed in regards to the culture of the Post Office when Horizon was rolled out – how its auditors presumed subpostmasters experiencing problems were “on the fiddle” or “in a muddle”, and that accounting errors merely served to substantiate the bias and assumptions within the organisation that department managers had been cooking the books for years earlier than their paper-based strategies had been automated.
However what about Fujitsu? If it was an ideal storm of circumstances that led to the Submit Workplace scandal, what was the cultural climate like within the provider on the time Horizon was being developed and applied?
The Pathway to a scandal
Fujitsu’s involvement started in 1996 when ICL, then 80% owned by the Japanese agency, gained a £1bn contract to automate the advantages system. The project, called Pathway, was awarded collectively by the Division for Social Safety (DSS) – a predecessor to at this time’s Division for Work and Pensions – and the Submit Workplace.
Pathway nearly instantly hit issues. In 1996, ICL proposed a smartcard system, however the Submit Workplace and DSS insisted the system needs to be designed to make use of older, extra established magnetic strip know-how as a stepping stone to a full smartcard system. The end result was a collection of missed deadlines, with suppliers and prospects blaming one another for delays.
In December 1997, ICL stated that if the undertaking had been to proceed it might both have to extend costs by 30% or lengthen the contract by 5 years and lift costs by 5%, in keeping with a National Audit Office report in 2000. A Home of Commons committee report into Pathway later stated the undertaking was “blighted from the outset” and labelled it “the largest IT disaster ever for the government“.
In 1999, the federal government scrapped the advantages factor of the undertaking, however as a substitute awarded ICL a £900m fixed-price contract to computerise the Submit Workplace department community – which grew to become referred to as Horizon.
In 2000, the Submit Workplace additionally revealed a £571m cost on its books attributable to scrapping Pathway. Unions representing subpostmasters feared that the cancellation of the undertaking would result in the closure of rural branches.
The Horizon contract was introduced the day earlier than ICL declared its annual outcomes, which included a £180m write-off attributable to its losses on Pathway, and was extensively perceived to have been awarded to assist ICL – a big authorities IT provider – to mitigate these Pathway losses.
By that point, ICL had grow to be a completely owned subsidiary of Fujitsu, however was working in the direction of a really public flotation of the corporate, as a result of happen by the top of 2000, that was anticipated to worth ICL at £5bn.
We’ve since realized, because of proof throughout the Submit Workplace inquiry, that Fujitsu executives in Japan pressured the UK government, beneath prime minister Tony Blair, to agree the Horizon deal to exchange Pathway, following rumours the brand new UK administration was contemplating ending the contract.
In 1998, following a gathering between the British ambassador to Japan and Fujitsu executives, the British embassy in Tokyo wrote to the federal government warning of great financial repercussions, together with UK job losses and reductions in commerce, if Fujitsu/ICL’s software program contract with the Submit Workplace was cancelled.
The Fujitsu govt in control of ICL instructed the ambassador that “failure of the undertaking can have severe repercussions for Fujitsu’s worldwide standing … [leading] to main inside difficulties inside Fujitsu and the collapse of ICL.”
Within the temper
Think about, then, the temper inside ICL within the interval earlier than, throughout and after the roll-out of Horizon started in 1999.
ICL’s homeowners had threatened the UK authorities with closure of the provider – whose know-how was then working your complete nation’s tax and advantages programs.
ICL’s board was massively centered on getting the corporate prepared for a inventory market float that may, inevitably, have been profitable for a lot of senior executives, in addition to guardian Fujitsu.
And proper in the course of all that, the provider was compelled to jot down off £180m for its position within the greatest authorities IT catastrophe the UK had seen – with all of the high-profile antagonistic publicity that goes with it.
When it was rolled out, Horizon was described by Fujitsu because the “largest non-military IT system in Europe”. All eyes had been on the undertaking. Its buyer, the Submit Workplace, was in no temper to be instructed that its most necessary IT system was not match for function.
The tradition all of that helped to create throughout the Horizon improvement staff was revealed by a former Fujitsu insider, who spoke to Computer Weekly in 2021. The senior developer, who labored on the undertaking between 1998 and 2000, stated, “All people within the constructing by the point I received there knew [Horizon] was a bag of shit. It had gone by the take a look at labs God is aware of what number of occasions, and the testers had been elevating bugs by the thousand.”
He stated Horizon ought to “by no means have seen the sunshine of day” and that bosses at provider Fujitsu allowed it to be rolled out into the Submit Workplace community regardless of being instructed it didn’t perform accurately and couldn’t be mounted.
Money account issues
The developer particularly highlighted failures in a function referred to as the money account – the ledger the place all money transactions are recorded. He made his superiors at Fujitsu conscious of the extent of the issues, telling them explicitly that the money account wanted to be scrapped.
“You’ve received to throw the money account away and also you’ve received to rewrite it,” he stated.
As we now know, incorrectly recorded money transactions lay on the coronary heart of the accounting shortfalls that led to subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted by the Submit Workplace.
Nevertheless, no one at or close to the highest of Fujitsu/ICL needed to listen to unhealthy information about its greatest, highest-profile undertaking – one which had already almost damaged the corporate – and particularly not whereas it was briefing the Metropolis in preparation for making £5bn from a inventory market itemizing.
The ICL flotation was ultimately scrapped in August 2000 as tech shares plummeted within the dot com crash.
In November 2000, the writer of this text, writing then for Computing journal, revealed that ICL’s losses had trebled within the first half of the 12 months. New CEO Richard Christou – who took over after the failed flotation led to the resignation of his predecessor, Keith Todd – instructed workers that the corporate wouldn’t be capable of survive with out Fujitsu.
Amid warnings of job cuts, Christou stated on the time, “If we weren’t supported by Fujitsu at this second, the corporate wouldn’t be capable of stick with it its enterprise, and none of our workers would have any jobs in any respect.” This will likely have been information to workers, however the boardroom would have recognized it was coming for a lot of months.
In April 2002, the now-toxic ICL model was scrapped. The corporate was renamed initially as Fujitsu Companies, and later simply Fujitsu. In 2014, the ICL trademark and model was acquired by an IT and electrical device repair firm in Kidsgrove, Stoke-on-Trent.
Inquiries to reply
When Fujitsu representatives face the Submit Workplace inquiry within the coming weeks, there’ll little doubt be questions requested as to why no one in Fujitsu spoke up as soon as subpostmasters began being accused of theft and fraud. Why no one spoke up when Pc Weekly revealed the primary victims in 2009 – the inquiry has heard that Fujitsu employees learn the article in what was then a print journal, extensively circulated amongst IT improvement groups.
And why no one in Fujitsu spoke up because the scandal slowly got here to the eye of nationwide media in subsequent years – with the honourable exception of Richard Roll, the whistleblower who revealed that distant entry to department accounts was widespread observe, regardless of the Submit Workplace’s insistence that it was not attainable.
In response to figures from public procurement analyst Tussell, Fujitsu has gained almost 200 contracts from the UK public sector with a mixed worth of £6.78bn – the Submit Workplace Horizon contract stays its greatest, valued at almost £2.4bn together with a £36m extension to keep the IT system going until 2025.
After all, none of this explains why the Submit Workplace carried out a 20-year marketing campaign of prosecuting individuals for crimes that by no means passed off, after which mendacity and masking up the reality.
Nonetheless, when analyzing Fujitsu’s position within the Submit Workplace scandal, it’s attainable to establish its roots in a multimillion-pound loss arising from an earlier IT undertaking catastrophe. Some campaigners could, due to this fact, get pleasure from a welcome irony within the prospect of Fujitsu having to make a multimillion-pound contribution to the compensation fund for the victims.
• Additionally learn: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •
• Watch: ITV’s Post Office scandal documentary, Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •
