Open Editor’s Digest for free
Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Post Office has halted development of a replacement for the scandal-hit Horizon programme, as it struggles to reform its operations in the wake of one of the UK’s biggest judicial miscarriages.
The state-owned postal group is preparing to install computers in its branches. This program was supposed to run on new software starting next year, but it will now continue to use the old Horizon software developed by the Japanese Fujitsu group.
In a long-running scandal that sparked public outrage this year, more than 900 Post Office branch managers were convicted on charges including theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015, in cases based on faulty data from Horizon.
But the Post Office confirmed to the Financial Times that its multi-million pound in-house Horizon replacement programme, referred to as the New Branch IT (NBIT) programme, was now “on pause”.
She added that the group is “looking at all different options,” which “could be something different than NBIT.”
Horizon computer terminal used in post offices © Andrew Fox/FT
The delays highlight the Post Office’s struggle to move beyond controversy and regain workers’ trust. A YouGov survey of 1,483 subpostmasters, published this year, found that nearly 70 per cent had continued to face unexplained financial shortfalls in the Horizon system since 2020.
The Department for Business and Trade has allocated £103 million to fund Horizon’s replacement in late 2023.
Richard Trinder, chair of the Postmaster’s Voice campaign group, said he had been invited to test new equipment with NBIT this year. He added that the program “wasn’t fast enough” and was only able to process domestic mail, despite being “more intuitive than Horizon.”
Recommended
The hardware, including new computer monitors, keyboards and printers, had been sitting in a warehouse awaiting NBIT development but will now be installed without it, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“Just sitting there in a warehouse getting old, it makes sense [to use the hardware]“One person said.
Despite the delay in replacing Horizon, Trinder said the new printers were “a lot faster” and welcomed the decision to roll them out regardless.
They spent all this money on new hardware. He added our money.
“So let’s use it, instead of this crap we have right now. It’s too slow. You say ‘process, process, process’ and you’re thinking: I’ve got a queue going out the door.”
