Fujitsu should make a £300m interim payment to the public purse towards its eventual bill for the costs of the Post Office scandal, says a Labour peer.
Speaking in a debate on the slow progress of financial redress for victims of the scandal, Kevan Jones said Fujitsu had apologised and promised to pay towards the costs of a scandal – for which it was partly to blame – but is yet to pay a penny.
Referencing Computer Weekly, Jones said: “Today, there’s been no money paid to victims from Fujitsu and this company is still making multimillion-pound profits from government contracts.
“It is extending existing contracts, and that is at the same time as the taxpayer is paying out nearly £600m in compensation to victims, with many victims still waiting for compensation.”
Jones, who has campaigned for subpostmasters affected by the scandal for 15 years, said Fujitsu is hiding behind the ongoing public inquiry into the scandal. “There will be no findings from the public inquiry that we don’t know now. I would suggest that it should make an interim payment of at least £300m now,” he told peers.
He said Fujitsu’s self-imposed temporary ban on bidding for new government business does not go far enough, and the government should bar Fujitsu from taking part in any future contract until major changes within the company have taken place. “That would be a tragedy for the 7,000 people who work in the UK for Fujitsu and also not good for UK Japanese relations,” he admitted.
Also speaking in the debate, Conservative peer James Arbuthnot, who has campaigned alongside Jones for 15 years, told peers: “Fujitsu did much more than stand idly by while the subpostmasters were maliciously prosecuted.” He said the company was an active and essential participant “in the whole ghastly fraud”.
“It has accepted its moral obligation [to contribute], but the taxpayer is paying out hundreds of millions of pounds now,” he added.
Arbuthnot agreed with Jones that there needs to be an interim payment from Fujitsu. “[Kevan Jones] has suggested £300m, [but] £700m would be less than half of the costs that the taxpayer is currently estimating they have to pay,” he said. “If they don’t [pay] that, why should the government offer them further extensions of their existing contracts, still less grant them new contracts?”
Fujitsu has continued to win huge government contracts despite a promise to halt bidding for new contracts after the scandal became national news.
According to government figures on spending, which take into account all deals worth over £25,000, HMRC alone spent more than £240m with Fujitsu last year. This year’s spending could be double that. The figures raise accusations that the department has become Fujitsu’s UK “cash cow”.
As revealed by Computer Weekly, despite reports suggesting Fujitsu will be replaced on HMRC’s Traders Support Service, an internal meeting revealed Fujitsu is still bidding for the new £370m contract and is confident of a renewal of its contract, which was worth £240m when the last contract was signed in 2020.
Computer Weekly also revealed a direct deal between HMRC and Fujitsu for hardware and cloud procurement, worth over £200m and known as North Star, where there is no competitive tender.
HMRC is also extending its Computer Environment for Self-Assessment (CESA) contract worth just shy of £60m, where Fujitsu is the incumbent.
For the wider public sector, the figure is substantially bigger. For example, in December 2024, Fujitsu won a one-year extension to its Horizon contract with the government-owned Post Office, worth £40m. According to a source, there could also be up to a dozen more potential HMRC deals in the pipeline, as well as several Home Office contracts and deals with the Ministry of Defence, to name a few.
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).