Fujitsu has raked in just under £110m from its IT services contracts with HMRC alone in six months, as the supplier continues to evade punishment for its role in the Post Office Horizon scandal.
Sir Alan Bates, the campaigning former subpostmaster who led the fight against the Post Office, said there appears to be more questions being asked about the “wildly exaggerated” settlement he received, than the huge sums of taxpayer cash going to Fujitsu.
According to government figures, between the beginning of April and end of September this year, Fujitsu received £110m from HMRC in return for IT services.
The figure for six months is more than double the total £48m cost of the Post Office scandal public inquiry between 2000 and 2024; and twice the estimated £50m cost of Operation Olympos, the national police investigation into the scandal. Invoices for desktop services, physical hosting and infrastructure, tablet computers and software licencing are included.
Although around £20m less than the same period last year, when Fujitsu was paid £129m, and a potential sign of HMRC reducing work with the supplier, it demonstrates a reliance on Fujitsu in government. The government department is referred to as Fujitsu’s “UK cash cow”, but the controversial supplier also works with a large number of public sector organisations as well as government departments. For example, it has contracts with government departments such as the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Education. It also works across local government and other public services.
According to public sector market watcher Tussell, Fujitsu made sales worth £453m to the UK public sector between May 2024 and April 2025, which was 1.2% higher than the £447.5m it was handed in the same period from 2023 to 2024.
Fujitsu’s Horizon system is at the centre of the scandal, which saw subpostmasters blamed and punished for account shortfalls caused by computer errors. Hundreds of people were wrongly convicted of crimes based on data from the faulty system, with many sent to prison. Many more had their lives ruined as a result of huge financial costs, with the system linked to 13 suicides and 10 attempted suicides. But just this month, Fujitsu was awarded a contract by the government-owned Post Office worth another £41m and containing an option for another 12 months on top.
Bates questioned why there is not more pressure on Fujitsu, given the taxpayer funds it continues to receive, saying: “It seems strange why so many people seem interested in my settlement, which was wildly exaggerated, but hardly anyone is taking notice of the large amounts being thrown at Fujitsu. Is the government going to continue handing all this money to Fujitsu before they know how much it is going to pay towards the costs of the scandal?”
Read more: Fujitsu’s role in the Post Office scandal: Everything you need to know.
The government figures add more weight to claims within Fujitsu that, despite the negative impact of its link to the Post Office scandal, the company will get its UK government business back to normal within about 12 to 18 months after a period of “flux”.
This was the view of a member of Fujitsu’s top team of executives. In a recording heard by Computer Weekly, a member of the executive team said he expected to see things improve when Fujitsu agrees the amount it will pay towards the costs of the Post Office scandal. The executive’s comment came in July this year, days after the publication of a public inquiry report that linked the scandal, which Fujitsu fuelled, to suicides.
His comments also point to a lack of understanding in Fujitsu about the damage the supplier has done to people’s lives. More evidence of this came in in April 2024, just a few months after Fujitsu had promised not to bid for public sector contracts, Computer Weekly revealed, through a leaked presentation, that Fujitsu sales staff were given a flow diagram instructing them how to bid for government contracts during the IT supplier’s self-imposed ban.
But there are signs that HMRC is ready to break away from Fujitsu amid public pressure in relation to the scandal. The clearest of which came in May, when the department began looking for a supplier for a 10-year Data Centre Exit (DCE) contract, which will begin in April next year. The contract, worth £500m, is designed to exit some Fujitsu’s services.
According to the tender: “The primary objective of the DCE Programme is to exit three Fujitsu-hosted datacentres and migrate associated services to new destination platforms.” Amazon Web Services is only supplier in the running for the contract.
Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal 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).