Fujitsu will respond to the Post Office statutory public inquiry’s part 1 report by Friday this week, with details of its financial contribution finally due on the last day of this month.
It has been 20 months since Fujitsu’s European head said the supplier was “morally obligated” to contribute financially, with peer James Arbuthnot demanding Fujitsu pay half the costs of the scandal, with an interim payment of £700m.
Alongside the government and the Post Office, the IT supplier was given a deadline of Friday 10 October to respond to the Post Office scandal public inquiry report, with a deadline of 31 October to outline a programme of restorative justice.
According to the inquiry report, by the end of this month, “the [department for business and trade], Fujitsu and the Post Office shall publish, either separately or together, a report outlining any agreed programme of restorative justice and/or any actions taken by that date to produce such a programme”.
Read more: Fujitsu’s role in the Post Office scandal: Everything you need to know
An internal Fujitsu document told staff: “Building on work we started last year, we are focused on formalising our potential response. You will appreciate we can’t give further details on this until we have officially responded to the inquiry, which we are to do by 10th of October ahead of the 31st of October publication deadline…”
To date, Fujitsu has played the waiting game, holding back any commitments until the statutory public inquiry was complete. It was back in January 2024 when, during a Parliamentary select committee hearing, Fujitsu’s head of Europe, Paul Patterson, said Fujitsu is “morally obligated” to contribute to the costs, but that the extent would be determined by the outcome of the Horizon scandal public inquiry.
Peer Arbuthnot, who has campaigned for subpostmasters for many years, said it’s no surprise that Fujitsu is waiting until the last possible moment before responding. “It should stop kicking the can down the road,” he said. “Fujitsu has caused great harm to thousands of people, and they should pay a great amount to compensate for this. It is true that others were also to blame – the Post Office managers, the legal system, the accountants and the government. But the Horizon system was Fujitsu’s, and it was Fujitsu which was altering the subpostmasters’ accounts behind everyone’s backs and saying that they were not doing so.”
“Fujitsu then colluded with the Post Office in securing miscarriages of justice,” said Arbuthnot. “I believe that they should pay half of the costs of this whole dreadful matter, including half of the redress for the subpostmasters and half of the costs of the inquiry. An interim payment now of £700m might begin to restore its reputation, but that should be a long-term process, not helped by their silence to date. It is in its interests to be proactive about this, if they want to be in good grace with the British people.”
The human cost of the scandal is not measurable, but the financial cost is. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been spent on lawyers and compensation for victims, as well as the public inquiry itself – a nationwide police investigation.
Legal costs for the Post Office and government run into several hundred millions of pounds. Computer Weekly recently revealed that the taxpayer-owned Post Office paid one law firm, Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), £86m just for services related to its representation at the Post Office scandal public inquiry between 2000 and 2025. That was near double the cost of the public inquiry itself, which, according to the public inquiry’s financial statements, cost £48m between 2000 and 2024. Meanwhile, the nationwide police investigation into the Post Office scandal, Operation Olympos, is expected to cost over £50m.
Then, according to the latest government data, it has so far paid nearly £1.2bn in compensation to 8,600 claimants who suffered at the hands of the Horizon system’s errors, the Post Offices response to them and Fujitsu’s complicity.
It was Fujitsu’s software that caused unexplained account shortfalls that subpostmasters were blamed and punished for. It knew the software had bugs, yet its employees gave evidence in court during the prosecutions of subpostmasters claiming it was robust and not to blame for the branch account shortfalls.
But Fujitsu has continued to win lucrative government IT contracts, with £450m raked in in the most recent financial year, according to figures from Tussell.
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).
